- Benjamin Purcell Morris
© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent
Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo
On this episode, Barry and I head to New Rome to discuss all things Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola's newest film. Topics discussed include egregious casting errors, abysmal acting, incoherent script and subpar craftsmanship. But besides that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 125 - Megalopolis
Thanks for listening!
©2024
On this episode, Barry and I head out to a Lady Raven concert in Philly only to discover we've unknowingly walked into an M. Night Shyamalan Trap, starring Josh Hartnett. Topics discussed on this pod include M. Night Shyamalan's very odd career arc, and the greatness of his early work contrasted with his disappointing later period films - which most definitely includes Trap.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 124 - Trap
Thanks for listening!
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A well-crafted and well-acted film that ultimately condemns itself to hell with an inexcusable plot twist that is so inane as to be infuriating.
Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan (adapted from Robert Harris’ book of the same name), tells the story of Cardinal Lawrence, a man struggling with his faith who must navigate palace intrigue in the Vatican as the College of Cardinals assembles to elect a new pope.
On the surface, Conclave has a lot going for it. For example, it stars a cavalcade of top-notch actors, with Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini, John Lithgow as Cardinal Tremblay and Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes among the cast.
In addition, it is directed by Edward Berger, whose last film, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), was a phenomenal, Academy Award nominated piece of work, my favorite of that year because it was so beautifully shot and masterfully executed.
On a personal note, as a Catholic myself (I’m not a good one…but I definitely am one) who has visited the Vatican on numerous occasions, I find the subject matter of a conclave in the wake of a Pope’s death, and the pomp and circumstance and politicization and jockeying for positioning that takes place, to be extraordinarily compelling.
And speaking of politics, in the wake of the US presidential election, Conclave is perfectly positioned to have something interesting to say about elections and liberals versus conservatives and the power of convictions and possibilities of backlash.
This is all to say that Conclave, which was released in the U.S. on October 25th and is still in theatres, had me in the palm of its hand even before I sat down in the theatre to watch it.
And yet…it failed to capitalize on all of its advantages and, in fact, alienated me in such a profound way with an excruciatingly egregious and inane plot twist, which I found to be a mortal moviemaking sin and entirely unforgivable.
In order to avoid spoilers, I will not reveal the specifics of the plot twist but will only say that it occurs in the final ten minutes or so of the film and is so contrived, bizarre, atrocious and appalling, and is such a grievous dramatic error, and so narratively unsound, that it ruined everything good about the film that led up to it and completely scuttled the good ship Conclave.
But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Truthfully, it was pretty good.
The film is well shot by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine, who uses a soft light and wonderful composition to often times create scenes reminiscent of Caravaggio’s great works.
Fontaine is aided by the spectacular work of the set and costume designers who masterfully recreate the distinct look and feel of the Vatican and the Cardinals’ outfits.
In addition, the entire cast all do tremendous work.
Ralph Fiennes in particular is outstanding. His Cardinal Lawrence is the Dean of the College of Cardinals and must wrangle the Cardinals to come together to vote for a pope and make sure everything is on the up and up…and it is never quite clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.
Fiennes is a supremely gifted technical actor whose skill is as good as anyone working today, and he brings all of those skills to bear as Cardinal Lawrence, a man who is struggling with his faith and his self.
An Oscar nomination, and even a win, could and should be in Fiennes future for his work in Conclave.
The supporting cast are also excellent.
Stanley Tucci is as reliable an actor as there is and he brings a subtle power to portrayal of liberal Cardinal Bellini that is enjoyable to behold. Tucci expertly embodies the illiberal liberal who is enthralled by himself more than humanity.
John Lithgow’s Cardinal Tremblay is a character that in lesser hands would’ve been forgettable, but here, Lithgow never breaks and lets the audience off the hook, so even after the film has ended, you’re still wondering if he’s a mistreated martyr or an exquisite liar.
And Isabella Rossellini has a small role as Sister Agnes, but every time she is on screen she crackles with an incandescent light and life that is undeniable.
But despite all of the magnificent artistry on display in the form of the acting, cinematography and costumes and set, Conclave commits too egregious a sin to ever be forgiven.
That sin, which is not venial sin but a mortal one, is the cheap, absurd and unearned plot twist that turns a compelling Catholic mystery and thriller into a pandering and pathetic cinematic exercise that feels like it deceived and betrayed you and stole two hours of your life.
For Catholics, Conclave will hold some appeal because it is a look behind the curtain of something familiar but still mysterious, namely the inner working of the Vatican and the conclave. In this way the film is compelling for Catholics…until the plot twist…which not just many, but I would say most, Catholics will find at best annoying, and at most infuriating (I’m in the infuriating camp).
Non-Catholics will find the majority of the film impenetrable for its disorienting maze of Catholic-ness. For example, I’m not even sure I can ask my podcast partner Barry, who is not Catholic, to watch this movie because he’s not going to know, or care, about all the Vatican and Catholic stuff that made at least the premise of the film interesting to me.
Regardless of all that, the bottom line is that I simply cannot, and will not, recommend Conclave to readers because the plot twist near the end eviscerates any artistic good the film achieved which led up to it.
If you’re interested in watching a challenging yet entertaining piece of Vatican/Pope artistry, I recommend you go back and watch The Young Pope (2014) series on HBO starring Jude Law. That overlooked, off-beat, exquisitely avant-garde series is very insightful and spiritually invigorating.
And if you’re just looking for a great story of Catholicism and Catholic priests, I highly recommend you check out Xavier Beavois’ 2010 film Of Gods and Men. It is a extraordinarily moving and spiritually insightful piece of work.
Both The Young Pope and Of Gods and Men are everything Conclave should be but ultimately isn’t. Go watch them, and skip Conclave…I certainly wish I had.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. The best show of the year and easily the greatest comic book IP series since Daredevil.
The Penguin, which stars Colin Farrell in the titular role, chronicles the rise of one of Gotham’s most infamous villains. It is the first tv series in filmmaker Matt Reeves’, director of The Batman (2022), DC Cinematic Universe.
The series, which premiered on HBO and the streaming service MAX on September 19th with its eight-episode season ending on November 10th, is set in the immediate aftermath of the events of The Batman (2022), but also serves as an origin story for Oswald Cobb - The Penguin.
For a variety of reasons, one of which is that I’ve had to sit through a cavalcade of terribly disappointing Marvel tv shows over the last bunch of years, I had low expectations when I sat down to watch the first episode of The Penguin.
I assumed the series would just be another watered-down piece of IP nonsense with little meaning or purpose beyond momentarily distracting me from the mundanity and minutia of life.
Then I watched the first episode…and goodness gracious was I proven dead wrong.
The first episode of The Penguin hits like Bat Kick to the chest. It reveals a creative team that is dead serious about the subject matter and an artistic and cinematic sensibility and quality that is exceedingly rare in any television show…never mind a comic book television show. Put simply The Penguin is comic book series as elite prestige tv.
The credit for the show’s success goes first to the series’ creator and showrunner Lauren LeFranc, who expertly brought the cinematic vision of Matt Reeves to life on the small screen.
LeFranc’s fearless approach never allowed for winking at the audience or cutting creative corners. LeFranc set out to make a devastatingly dramatic television series that just so happened to be set in a comic book universe, and she succeeded spectacularly.
LeFranc is loyal to the cinematic style of Reeves, and her ground-level view of Gotham is gloriously gritty, grimy, grungy and gruesome. As a result, The Penguin seems like a slightly lesser version of HBO prestige dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, as it looks cinematic and feels authentic.
For all eight episodes, LeFranc masterfully toys with audience expectations and conditioning. She subverts audience expectations so expertly at every turn that viewers are kept continually off-balance through the course of the narrative. And the finale is as perfect a piece of villain origin story as you’ll ever see.
The second person responsible for the success of The Penguin is the Penguin himself, Colin Farrell.
Farrell’s performance as Oswald Cobb, aka The Penguin, is as great a performance as we’ve seen in television in years. Under mountains of makeup which render him unrecognizable, Farrell is able to imbue his character with a vivid and frantic inner life that pulsates and radiates incessantly.
Farrell’s Penguin is a vulnerable, yet vile, violent and vicious villain. His relentless quest for power and his insatiable hunger for love are inexorably intertwined, and fuel his grinding ascent from lowlife street thug to high level mobster.
It is an absolute joy to watch Farrell in the last decade or so blossom into such a terrific actor. He has always been a naturally magnetic screen presence, but in recent years his skill has matured and made him into one of the best actors we’ve got. If he doesn’t win an Emmy for his work on The Penguin then there is no justice in this crazy world.
The rest of the cast are almost as fantastic as Farrell.
Cristin Milioti is essentially the co-lead in the series as she stars as Sofia Falcone, the troubled adult daughter of mob boss Carmine Falcone. Milioti is an absolute revelation in the role. She radiates an unnerving energy every time she’s on-screen…one that is both fragile and furiously fierce. Milioti too should garner Emmy recognition as she had a lot of heavy lifting to do in the series and does it with aplomb.
Deirdra O’Connell plays Francis Cobb, the Penguin’s mom. O’Connell is spectacular in the role of the scheming mother. In lesser hands this role had the potential to scuttle the whole show, but O’Connell gives a powerhouse performance that elevates the already superb series.
Rhenzy Feliz plays Victor, a homeless teenager who Oswald/The Penguin takes under his wing. Feliz at first seems like the weak link in the show. His performance feels a little thin and a bit shallow and showy…but as the series went on his work got stronger until in the final few episodes, he really came into his own. Ultimately, Feliz shows himself to be a very worthy actor.
The rest of the cast, which includes a few notable actors, like Mark Strong, Clancy Brown and Michael Kelly, all bring a gravitas and professionalism to the festivities that only adds to the quality of the show.
A bunch of years ago one of my friend’s father, the incomparable “Hollywood” Gary, made the astute observation that the reason why the Dark Knight trilogy was so successful and so good was because if Batman really existed in the world, that’s how it would be. I concur. The same exact thing is what makes The Penguin so good.
It is almost irrelevant that The Penguin is set in a comic book universe because it feels like a story about low level and low life mobsters set in the real world. This could be a spin-off from a Scorsese series like Boardwalk Empire for crissakes.
The battle between the cinematic universes of DC and Marvel haven’t been much of a fight for the last fourteen years or so. Marvel has dominated the cultural landscape and DC has stumbled through the failures that was the Snyderverse.
But since 2019, things have begun to slowly change.
That year Marvel capped its incredible run with the two-billion-dollar box office darling, Avengers: Endgame. But that same year DC came out with Joker…which was a prestige comic book movie that garnered a Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor Oscar nominations (and a win for Best Actor and Best Original Score) and made a billion dollars.
Marvel since then has churned out a plethora of movies and tv series, most of which were mediocrities and some of which were considerably less than mediocre.
DC on the other hand, gave us Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and now The Penguin. Both of these pieces of work are vastly superior to anything Marvel has put out since Endgame. And even though Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux are not connected to the Matt Reeves cinematic universe, both of those films (yes, even the near universally panned Folie a Deux – which I actually loved) are undeniably more artistically daring and dynamic than anything Marvel has EVER done.
The best thing about DC at the moment is that cinematically, artistically and thematically, its cinematic universe is much darker than Marvel’s. This has been a complaint by some, but never by me. I like the darker material, and the Marvel material in comparison seems, frankly silly to the point of ridiculousness.
Visually the same is true. DC is making real movies with a distinct and artistically compelling cinematic aesthetic, while Marvel churns out the flattest and most visually bland movies and tv shows imaginable that look, frankly, unconscionably cheap.
The battle for comic book IP supremacy may be irrelevant at this point as the superhero genre seems to be in a recession which may head into a depression. But if we are measuring it in artistic terms, DC is winning right now and it isn’t even close, and that winning may lead to more cultural cache.
One can only hope DC keeps going in this direction…although I must say that James Gunn being in charge at DC and making a Superman movie does not fill me with much confidence that the ship will stay headed in the right direction.
Regardless of all that, The Penguin is undeniably the best TV series I’ve seen this entire year, and tied with Netflix’s Daredevil (2015-2018) as the best comic book series ever made.
If you have a passing interest in comic book IP or in mob movies and tv shows, you have to watch The Penguin because it isn’t just what a great comic book tv series should be, it is what a great tv series should be.
©2024
ELECTION 2024 - POST-MORTEM #1
I’m picking up Bad Vibrations
In case you haven’t heard, former president, nepo-baby real estate mogul, and reality tv star, Donald J. Trump, has won the 2024 presidential election in resounding fashion.
I believed, due to my extensive expert analysis of “vibes”, that Trump would not win…or more accurately…would not be allowed to become president again. I was definitely wrong about the election results – as I thought the establishment would steal it fair and square, but I might still be right about whether Trump actually gets inaugurated.
A lot can happen between now and January 20th, and most of it can be very, very bad.
I had a conversation the other day with a good friend of mine, Red Dragon, who is a therapist. He and I avoid talking about politics for the most part but he called me to ask my Jungian thesis on Trump. I told it to him, which is essentially that Trump is the archetype of Loki, the Norse trickster god, personified.
Red Dragon, who is devoutly anti-Trump, then explained to me that he has a “feeling” and a “sense” that Trump’s astonishing story has one more gigantic twist in it and that twist involves some calamity befalling him. He wasn’t sure what it was…maybe a heart attack or stroke or worse.
What intrigued me about Red Dragon’s “feeling” and “sense” is that I have had the same feeling for some time now, and have even written about it. And to be clear, Red Dragon does not read my writing at all, so it’s not like he’s seen my pieces on the subject.
So my sense of the “vibes” around the election were wrong, but my “sense” of a calamity awaiting Trump persists – and is shared by other distant, yet kindred, spirits.
I fear, and I genuinely mean that I am fearful because I do not want anything bad to happen to the guy or to the country, that he will not make it to the presidency, and if he does, he won’t be there very long (remember the very murky and mysterious assassination attempt on Reagan in March of 1981 was a little over two months after he was inaugurated).
Trump may have a “heart attack” or “stroke” that aren’t really a heart attack or a stroke. Or he may get shot. Or blown up. Or poisoned. Or have an anvil fall on his head. Or may have a lawfare bomb blow up in his lap. Whatever it is, the powers that be, most notably the intelligence community, are out to get him, and when they want to get someone, they usually, but not always, do.
After Trump’s win he put out a series of videos describing his plan for his presidency. In one of the videos, he talks at length about his plan for the intelligence community and how he is going to bring them to heel. It is shocking to watch, and is the equivalent of when JFK said he would “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces”. We all know how well that went for JFK…he got his brains blown out all over his Ivy League suit on a sunny November day in Dallas, Texas.
Trump further antagonized the intel community when he tweeted that he would NOT be inviting former CIA director, and unrepentant neo-con, Mike Pompeo, to join his administration. Pompeo was the one who convinced Trump to not release the JFK assassination files during his first term…something he has sworn to do this time around. Trump’s “no Pompeo“- announcement made me both cheer…and shudder, because Pompeo is a monster but his ouster will only further antagonize the villains in the intelligence community.
The point of all this is that Trump has a big old bullseye on his back, and the people putting it there are notorious for assassinations and coups. So the Trump drama may hold another turn to it that will be Shakespearean in its tragedy.
Again…I hope not…but it’s a distinct possibility.
It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I Feel Fine
I spoke to a high-ranking election official here in Pennsylvania on the morning after the election and they told me that Harris was poised to win Pennsylvania and therefore the White House until a single vote was cast in my small, rural, overwhelmingly conservative township for Jill Stein. According to this official, this single vote somehow miraculously, single-handedly, halted Harris’s momentum and began her precipitous electoral decline.
In case you’re wondering…it was me…I was the one who voted for Jill Stein and thereby destroyed Harris’s electoral bid and, according to establishment liberals and hysteric woke fools, the democratic experiment that is the United States of America.
Sorry about that. Just kidding…I’m not sorry at all.
While every liberal I know is freaking out, or inconsolably depressed and deep within the throes of despair, I feel fine.
The reason for that is simple, yet complicated. The simple part is this…Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to the establishment and the DEI, woke, pussy-hat brigade, identity politics obsessed portion of the democratic party, and I have, for many years, been loudly saying “fuck you” to this intellectually insipid and politically insidious faction.
In this sense, Trump’s victory fills me with a shameful amount of schadenfreude – the German word for pleasure in response to another’s misfortune. Of course, my feeling of schadenfreude is only heightened by the woke cult’s extraordinarily expansive amount of self-righteousness and hubris over the last ten years.
So, in one sense I am giddy at the truly malodorous, mid-wit, machine politician mediocrity that is Kamala Harris and her supremely silly sycophants losing this election.
I fully acknowledge that this response is childish, vindictive and vulgar. I am not proud of it, but I do admit to it.
You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness…like resignation to the End…always the End
There is another part of me though that is deeply concerned about Trump’s victory, and it has nothing to do with his policies or the American polity, and everything to do with my own humanity. Namely, that there are many people that I love dearly who have personalized their politics to the point where they are in a great deal of emotional pain at the moment.
While I am a notoriously vicious son of a bitch, I am only that way to my enemies, and am deeply protective of those that I love.
In the broadest sense, my enemies are those in politics, like the entire democratic party and their shills in the legacy media, who have embraced a self-righteous racial, gender and ethnic identity politics over class politics. I despise these vapid and vainglorious villains because they are the most duplicitous, diabolical and deceptive scoundrels in American life, as they have irreparably destroyed the middle-class and decimated the working-class, and thus given us President Donald Trump…not once, but twice.
But then there are people in my life – most notably women, and everyone knows how much I obviously respect and adore women, like my wife, and my girlfriend, and my other girlfriend, and the prostitute I frequent, and the other prostitute I frequent, and this other women who may or may not be a prostitute who I’m trying to make my girlfriend but she’s kinda being a bitch about it so who knows where that will go…anyway…these women are deeply upset that Trump won, and I don’t like them being in anguish.
In all seriousness, I know a bevy of women who are either furious, or despondent, or inconsolable, or all of the above, regarding Trump’s victory. I totally get it. I do.
Therefore, I will not try and convince them to feel otherwise because how they feel is how they feel and I am not going to mansplain to them how their feelings are wrong no matter how wrong they are.
What I will do is encourage them to, in due time, put aside their feelings and try and analyze not so much their political beliefs but their political strategy and tactics and try and find how we, and they, got us where we are.
I would also try to encourage them to, going forward, not catastrophize and internalize their politics, because, as I have learned through experience – the Bush years were hell on earth for me, that is a terrible waste of time and an egregious waste of a glorious life.
I’m NOT looking at the Man in the Mirror, oh yeah, I’m NOT asking him to change his ways
In my final dispatch from before the election, I wrote that if liberals lose, they should, “look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.”
Thankfully, liberals are taking my sage advice and looking deeply inward in an attempt to learn from failure.
Just kidding…liberals have learned nothing and are once again doubling down on identity politics in order to explain their catastrophic defeat in this year’s election. The top three reasons I’ve heard for why Kamala lost are…you guessed it…racism, sexism and white supremacy. Yawn. I guess liberals think they didn’t screech “racist, fascist and sexist!!” quite loud enough over the decade. Maybe if they yell it louder, they’ll win next time. Addiction to wokeness is a hell of a thing.
A glance at MSNBC, CNN or ABC in the hours and days following Trump’s win and you were treated to intellectual titans like Joy Reid, Eddie Glaude, and Sunny Hostin, declaring that the only reason Trump won is because of racism and sexism….some of that racism and sexism even coming from “people of color” and women.
Glaude, a Princeton professor and one of the griftiest of race grifters, responded to an argument that people voted for Trump due to economic reasons, by saying, “I do not believe that…I CANNOT believe that…”. Exactly. Glaude, like the rest of the identity politics hucksters, CANNOT believe that because his entire career is premised on race being front and center at every moment in America….so if racism goes away...so does his income stream and prestige.
Glaude is, like his fellow race hustlers, Ibram X. Kendi, Joy Reid, Sunny Hostin, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, and their ilk, an intellectual midget and political and cultural snake oil salesman and charlatan.
These mendacious morons are the same ones denying the fact that Kamala Harris was one of the most grotesquely inadequate politicians of the modern era and, in fact, have over and over, along with fellow talking heads and pundits in newspapers, declared that Kamala ran a “flawless” campaign. It’s impossible to take anyone who says that seriously. Kamala’s campaign was a lot of things, but “flawless” was not one of them. Kamala’s campaign was just like her in that it was fearful and entirely forgettable.
Thankfully I haven’t yet heard my favorite term “misogynoir” (hatred of black women), but that may be only because I’ve not watched enough cable news…as it is sure to be thrown around quite a bit in the coming days by the race hustler du jour trying to sound smart.
The reality is that Kamala Harris is not just a not-ready-for-prime-time player, she’s a never-will-be-ready-for-prime-time player. She is a generic, disingenuous, California machine politician who never had to actually convince people of anything in her entire career, just got to show up with the “D” next to her name to get elected. She never got a single vote in the democratic primary and was chosen to be vice-president, and democratic nominee, not despite being a black woman, but simply because she’s a black woman.
The KHive, a collection of rabid Kamala fans in both the media and public at large, loved Kamala but couldn’t name a single policy she believed in…because her identity as a black woman was all they needed, as supporting her was a self-righteous way to signal their virtue. This is why Kamala is the ultimate candidate for DEI-obsessed democrats.
This is also what made her such a disastrous presidential nominee, not to mention a heinous vice-president and senator. This is why she didn’t do the Joe Rogan interview…because she can’t sit for three hours and talk to anyone about anything. The reason for this is because there is no there - there. She is as vacant and vacuous as Trump is venal and vile…which is saying a lot.
But to Trump’s credit…he may be a bullshitter but at least he is dexterous enough to go on Joe Rogan and bullshit for three hours and not crumble and cackle his way into a warm puddle of his own piss.
Thankfully, Kamala Harris will, barring something extraordinary, disappear from public life forever because she will be a stark reminder of the failures of the DEI, woke, identity politics driven hysteria that put her a heart-beat away from the presidency…and put Trump in the Oval Office for a second time.
Alright…that’s enough ranting and rambling for today. Until next time America!!
©2024
Cleaning out my notebook of a few random thoughts before the “most important election of our lifetime”® tomorrow.
Ground and Pound
I’ve read a great deal about the Harris campaign’s money advantage and the power of their “ground game” recently…and have come to see it firsthand.
I currently reside in a ruby red republican county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. I live in a very rural part of this very rural county. In addition, I live way off a main road and my home is only accessible by a half mile dirt lane…and is entirely surrounded by corn crops rendering it not only invisible from any road but also very spooky.
Well, despite my extremely remote location, I’ve had four canvassers come to my home in the last three weeks, all of them from the Harris campaign. I’ve had none from the Trump campaign come around.
One canvasser was a twenty-something woman and she was riding a bicycle and I was legitimately worried for her because the road nearest me is not bike friendly and bears have been known to roam these parts…I know because I’ve come face to face with one.
The point of all this is that the Harris campaign is definitely trying to get out the vote. From the ratio of Trump to Harris signs in this county, which overwhelmingly favors Trump by a margin of 20 to 1, it is an uphill battle to beat Trump here, but as they always tell us, “every vote counts”.
As an aside, I’m always tempted when a canvasser is here to tell them I’m not down with Kamala because genocide isn’t my thing, but I never do because I feel bad for these folks. From what I understand they are getting paid but I still have no interest in arguing with someone or making them feel bad. If they love Kamala Harris – good for them. Same with Trump fans. Me…I’ll pass on both but feel no need to burst anyone else’s bubble.
Two Voters
Here’s a minor sample of a discussion I had with two different voters.
The first voter, a centrist independent man from a swing state. He told me he is voting Trump because “Trump pisses off all the right people”.
I totally understand the sentiment.
The other voter, a woman, from a different swing state. She told me she would vote for Kamala if it meant “that would be the end of it”, meaning all of the victimhood stuff and identity politics being front and center in American culture. She acknowledged that her hope that voting for a black woman would stifle the woke impulses so prevalent in our current culture, is foolish, as she cited that same hope after she voted twice for Obama, and in her words, “things got much worse” in regards to that subject.
Ultimately, this female voter, who felt exhausted and dejected, told me she will either refrain from voting or vote third party.
Once again, I totally understand her situation and the sentiments she expressed.
Media Malpractice
Even to someone like me, who has spent a lifetime monitoring and commenting on the media’s mendacity and propensity for misinformation and disinformation, the last weeks of this campaign have been jaw-dropping.
For example, the media’s complete disregard for facts about Trump’s statement where he eviscerated Liz Cheney for being a war mongering chicken hawk, was disgusting.
Trump made the same point most liberals made back during the Bush administration (I know because I was one of them), namely that the neo-cons wanted everyone else to go fight in their wars but they themselves, and their offspring, would never go to war.
Liz Cheney is a perfect example of this as she and her truly vile father, Dick Cheney, are chicken hawk royalty.
That the media turned it into Trump calling for Liz Cheney to be put in front of a firing squad, is shameless and shameful. As for me personally, I do hope that Liz Cheney and her scumbag father Dick are put in frotn of firing squads, along with the rest of the neo-con cabal…but I’m not running for president.
I get that the establishment media hates Trump, but they’ve insured that they’re already greatly diminished credibility will only further drop.
The reality is that anyone who watches/reads the mainstream media…and believes it…is an irredeemable dupe and unconscionable dope.
On the bright side, if Trump wins then maybe we will get a return to actual journalism from actual journalists….you know the kind where journalists are adversarial to power and yearn to expose the truth.
After four years of the mainstream media playing patty cake with the Biden administration, and the previous four years of manufactured misinformation and disinformation regarding Trump, a return to reasoned and professional journalism would be a miracle…but a man can dream.
FDR, Revisited
You sir, are correct!!
After Trump’s shocking victory in 2016 (it wasn’t shocking to me – but most everyone else), liberals absolutely lost their fucking minds. People went insane…white liberal women most of all. And from their mental and emotional breakdown the egregiously inane identity politics, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), Black Lives Matter and #MeToo all flourished.
The pussy hat brigade drove liberalism into a ditch that is quickly turning into a grave. These fools, who stamped their feet and went on a seek and destroy mission against anyone who dare call them out for their vapid emotionalism and their political and intellectual vacuity in the wake of their loss to Trump, have set back leftist and liberal politics forty years at least. Ultimately, they have accomplished nothing but to align democrats with the malignant forces of big business, Israel, and the intelligence community, all while obliterating any meaningful class politics in their coalition. Well done, dipshits.
The same Clinton clowns who have ruined leftism and liberalism, make up the deplorable Kamala Harris supporters known as the KHive. So, if Kamala Harris loses in this election, expect more of the same from these unhinged hysterics, who in response will only double and triple down on identity politics and taking the corporate side in the class war.
My advice to all liberals is to not believe your own bullshit about this being “the most important election of our lifetime” and about “democracy being on the ballot” and how this might be our “last election”.
Stop with the existential nonsense. This election is just like any other. If Trump wins it will suck for you, there is no doubt, but…this too shall pass.
I had the same feelings you had back when Bush “beat” Gore in 2000…and all my fears were correct as Bush was the worst president of my lifetime (including Trump), and anybody else’s lifetime. But the truth is I survived…and so did the farce/charade of a democracy that I live in.
Liberals need to understand this…Trump is an annoyance, not an existential threat. He is hated by the establishment because he lays bare the hypocrisy, corruption and shamelessness among the ruling elite.
Liberals loathing of him is based almost entirely on style over substance. Trump’s style will no doubt grate, but his substance will be only slightly different from the business-as-usual American politics. Israel and big business will rule.
There’ll be lots of bluster and bullshit…but little else that matters will change in any meaningful way.
Just know this…the truth is that it is liberal’s reaction to Trump that makes him so dangerous. Aligning with the malignant and mendacious intelligence community, big business, Ukraine and Israel, in reaction to Trump is how you not only lose elections, but more importantly, your soul.
Liberals need to understand that the only thing they need to fear, is fear itself. Trump feeds off of fear and loathing, and if you do neither, he withers and dies.
As the saying goes, when you find yourself going through hell…keep going. Well, liberals, four more years of Trump will be hell but you gotta keep going…and maybe, just maybe, look in the mirror and ask yourself some meaningful questions like…what have I done and what policies have I supported, that brought this vile man to power? If the answer you receive makes you question your entire ideology and approach to politics…then you’re on the right track.
My advice…return to class politics and completely disregard identity politics and the cult of woke. I doubt you will (or even are capable of doing so)…but that’s what you should do.
All that said…the only thing worse for liberalism and leftism than Trump winning, is Trump losing, because then liberals will think that mid-wit mediocrities like Kamala Harris, who are slaves to corporations, the intel community and Israel, are the path to power.
They may be the path to electoral victory on occasion, but they aren’t the path to progress, and they sure as hell aren’t the path to lower class and working-class prosperity, and morality and ethics in American governance.
MAGA Mania
I’ve seen a lot of media pontification about how if Trump loses there will be violence from his supporters. Consider me unconvinced.
The MAGA maniacs are not going to start a civil war in defeat. They will bitch and moan and rant and rave, but do it all from their couches. There won’t be riots or violence or marches or meltdowns because MAGA at heart is, for the most part, fat and old…just like its leader.
There will just be impotent anger that never spreads further than their own living room because MAGA is a movement for the isolated, and with Trump no longer politically relevant, it will dissipate and disappear.
Now, if Trump wins…liberals may very well march and riot, and in response to that MAGA in its various forms will come out and there may very well be violence and in the most extreme case, civil unrest/skirmishes in a civil war.
But that will only happen because Trump is still relevant and that’s what gives his movement life. Trump out of power and out of options, saps MAGA of its mojo.
Middle-Fingers
Speaking of MAGA, I was considering the whole MAGA movement the other day and came to the conclusion once again that Trump is little more than a gigantic middle-finger to the establishment and a boorish response to the feminization of America and American culture.
At this point Trump is a caricature and a parody of himself. He is all bluster and bullshit, but his real value is in telling the establishment, which has actively destroyed the foundational working-class of this country and actively despises the majority of Americans it has displaced and dispossessed, to go fuck themselves.
That establishment includes Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama. These guys, along with Biden, are the ones who sold out the manufacturing base of America, and gutted the working and middle class of America.
They bailed out Wall Street and sold-out Main Street. They’ve flooded poor inner-city communities will drugs, and sold Americans, most notably black men, as slaves to the prison industrial complex.
These presidents, of both parties, hate you. They not only want to see you fail they want to see you suffer. They thrive off of your misery.
To MAGA, Trump is the white knight come to slay the establishment dragon and right all the wrongs from decades past, up to the present day.
What MAGA fails to understand is that Trump is just more of the same. He talks a big game but plays a small one. He gives a middle finger to the establishment but then does almost exactly what they want him to do.
Trump is a showman, a shaman and a charlatan. He’s an archetype come to life. A clown in all its manifestations…happy, sad, angry. He’ll put on a show and you’ll either love him or hate him, but you’ll find it impossible to ignore him.
Harris, on the other hand, is not a showman or a shaman, she’s just a charlatan. She will try to pass through her presidency like a ghost through a fog – unseen and unheard. She is a bad actress miscast on a dismal daytime drama. She likes that she was cast in the role but will be entirely forgettable in it. She enjoys the perks and prestige of being on the show but doesn’t want the pressure of any big scenes.
This election at its core is a question of who will haunt our collective consciousness for the next four years…and obviously, no matter who wins, we will all lose.
Right again!
On that bright note…that’s all I got for now folks. I’m sure I’ll have a few thoughts on the election once we know who won, but until then, stay safe and stay cool.
©2024
Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine
The phrase “weird scenes inside the gold mine” is a cryptic lyric from The Doors epic song The End off of their iconic eponymous first album. This seemed like an apropos title for an article about the merciful end of the insane and inane 2024 election, which is now, thank the good Lord, in its final week.
The weird scenes of late have included the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden which the mainstream media and democrats universally claimed was a “Nazi rally” because Nazi’s rallied there in 1939…or something like that. Which has me wondering if the New York Knicks are Nazis too since they attempt to rally there forty-one times a season. I KNOW, without a shadow of a doubt, that the New York Rangers are Nazis…but they’re good kind!!
As for Trump being a modern-day Hitler…let’s get real. Democrats tout the fact that Dick Cheney is endorsing Kamala Harris and they have the nerve to call Trump Hitler? Cheney is the most malignant and malicious force in American politics in at least the last quarter century…this prick was behind the War on Terror, the surveillance state and the torture program and is responsible for the murder of millions…so spare the Trump – Hitler comparisons as Trump has done nothing even remotely close to the evil that Cheney has done.
In addition, a man of style and panache like Hitler wouldn’t be caught dead dancing to The Village People’s YMCA. Would not happen. Wagner maybe. But not The Village People.
At this Trump/Nazi rally over the weekend, which was a who’s who of Trumpian sycophants and miscreants, famed closeted homosexual and roast comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made a joke calling Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage and you’ll never guess what happened…the media freaked out and wept and wailed over “hate speech” and “racism”. Yawn.
I admit I too was offended by Hinchcliffe’s joke not because he called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, which is inaccurate, but because he didn’t call it a floating piece of shit, which is a scientific fact.
Trump also went on the Joe Rogan Experience and talked for three hours. I haven’t listened to the show only because I’m allergic to fucking retards, and that would be a double dose which could potentially be fatal to a delicate genius like me.
In truth, I like that Joe Rogan has a podcast but I only listen to it when there’s a guest on who interests me, which isn’t all that often. That said, I’m glad the option of Rogan is available especially when the mainstream media is so obviously mendacious and manipulated. (Full disclosure – Joe Rogan once talked at length and quite glowingly on his podcast about an article I wrote – which increased the traffic to this website literally by millions.)
Trump going on Rogan is a big deal for no other reason that it proves he can do it…something of which Kamala Harris is simply incapable. The idea of Kamala sitting down and talking with Rogan, or anyone, for three hours is ridiculous. Harris is an intellectual midget devoid of even a smidgeon of charisma, and she couldn’t hide that fact during a three-hour chat with Rogan.
The reality is that Kamala Harris is such a horrendous candidate it is actually stunning to behold. She seems entirely inauthentic and out of her depth every single time she opens her mouth. It is not surprising that in the final weeks of this god forsaken campaign that Harris has gone out of her way to seem as unappealing and incompetent as ever. It almost feels like she doesn’t want to win.
And as for the MAGA morons calling Kamala Harris a socialist or communist…she’s a socialist without the socialism and a communist without the communism. She, like Biden, Obama, Bush, Reagan and the Clintons before her, and just like Trump, is a corporate whore who will voraciously fellate corporate interests and not just ignore the working class, but viciously and violently destroy it with a shameless vim and vigor.
Now don’t get me wrong, my criticism of Kamala Harris is not an endorsement of Donald Trump, or vice versa.
Trump is Trump…a narcissistic carnival barker and con man. But for all his faults, and there are a bazillion of them, the one thing you can’t say about him is that he lacks charisma and confidence – two things Kamala Harris has exactly none of.
The truth is that Kamala Harris is what’s wrong with American Politics, and Donald Trump is what’s wrong with America.
Speaking of Nazis (Ironically Enough)
A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for continued Israeli control over the American government.
A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for more genocide and ethnic cleansing from the apartheid state you’re not allowed to call an apartheid state – Israel.
A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote for corporate America, the oligarchs and the aristocracy.
A vote for Trump or Harris is a vote against the truth.
No thank you. I will vote for neither.
Promises, Promises
The one thing you can count on is that whatever Trump or Harris are promising on the campaign trail won’t become a reality.
Trump says he’ll release the JFK files…he won’t release the JFK files. You know how I know that? Because he didn’t do it the last time he was in office.
Trump says he’ll drain the swamp and has learned from his first administration, and yet he talks openly about putting the swamp dragon himself, Mike Pompeo, into his cabinet. Mike Pompeo, by the way, was the Director of the CIA who convinced Trump not to release the JFK files during Trump’s first term.
Kamala talks about controlling illegal immigration and blah blah blah…she’s not gonna do it. You know how I Know she’s not gonna do it…because she hasn’t done it while in office. In fact, she’s not gonna do a god damn thing in office but maintain the very worst of the status quo. She is the DEI candidate who will further infect the government and this country with the DEI nonsense that diminished everyone and everything it touches.
She will also bend over backwards to stifle free speech by banning hate speech – and making sure the sycophants and psychopaths that love her are the ones who determine what is and isn’t hate speech.
No thanks to all of it and to both of them. Neither of these shitbags will make my life any better and both of them will keep the world at its worst. He was a shitty president the last time around and she is a shitty vice president now…so the choice is between something shitty and something shitty. I’ll pass and vote third party instead.
Oh, and anyone talking about this election being about saving our democracy…just shut the fuck up. Our democracy died a long time ago, the exact moment being maybe when the intelligence community pulled off a coup and killed a sitting president by blowing his brains out all over his nice Ivy league suit in Dallas, Texas.
Speaking of Assassinations
Two days before the assassination attempt on Trump in Pennsylvania back in July, I wrote an article saying that my sense of things was that the establishment was going to do anything and everything to make sure Trump didn’t become president…up to and including having some “lone nut” taking a shot at him.
I still get the sense that Trump will not be allowed to become president. The establishment, by hook or by crook, will keep him out of power.
Here’s the weird thing…this is not based on reading of polling data or anything like that, just on my sense of the moment and of the narrative…but 2024 feels a lot like 2016 except in reverse.
Everybody was talking about Hillary winning in a landslide in the final weeks of the campaign of 2016 (except me who predicted a Trump victory)…democrats were ruthlessly arrogant and cocky and republicans oppressively depressed and horrified.
Fast forward to 2024 and everyone is talking about Trump winning and the MAGA maniacs and morons are arrogant and cocky and democrat dupes and dopes are depressed and horrified.
The polls still say it’s very close but have Kamala slightly ahead overall and in a small majority of the battleground states. The assumption is that the polls are tilted in her favor and under-estimating Trump’s support, so a close race for Harris in the polls is considered a winning race for Trump on election day. I am not so sure assumption is accurate.
Anecdotally, I can tell you here in flyover country in a deep red county in the pivotal swing state of Pennsylvania, Trump seems like a shoe-in.
BUT…the vibes feel to me like 2016 but in reverse. I think Kamala Harris…who is awful, will “win” this election. I still think the establishment, for reasons I cannot quite figure out, simply cannot tolerate Trump in power and therefore are going to pull the rug out from under him on election day or in the days and weeks following.
If the establishment/intelligence community don’t “beat” Trump or “steal” the election fair and square, then Trump is going to face all sorts of obstacles before taking the oath of office. He might have a “heart attack” or “brain aneurysm” or get a deadly case of Covid or have his plane malfunction or another “lone nut” will blow his brains out or some other calamity will befall him and that will be that. And if the establishment/intelligence community don’t remove him from the power equation in the electoral way or the covert action way, then they’ll use false flags, lawfare and the media to once again to neutralize his presidency – maybe even before it starts.
The bottom line is that I still think Trump will not be president come January 2025. Maybe I’m wrong. Who knows? But we’re about to find out.
©2024
Horror Movie Round-Up And Halloween Viewer’s Guide
It is Halloween week so I thought I’d put together a quick movie guide to help you set the tone for the spooky times ahead.
I love Halloween, always have, and have spent the last few weeks gearing up for the festivities by catching up on some of the horror films released this year, and the last few years, that I’ve missed.
Here are the films I watched for the first time in recent weeks (all rated on the “1 to 5 horror movie scale” not the “1 to 5 regular movie scale”).
MaXXXine (2024) - Available on Max: This is the third movie in Ti West’s trilogy – which began with X (2022), then Pearl (2022), and now MaXXine. MaXXXine is hands down the worst of the three films. X was terrific and Pearl was pretty good too, but MaXXXine is just an incoherent mess that never finds its footing or a distinct flavor. It’s a mish mash of 1980s nostalgia stuffed into a dour and dull narrative that doesn’t really know what it wants to be.
Yes, Mia Goth is an intriguing screen presence, but even she can’t overcome the flaccid and foolish script for this seriously sub-par film. Very disappointing and definitely not worth watching. 2 stars out of 5
Late Night with the Devil (2024) - Available on Hulu: An extremely clever and well-executed movie that deftly uses the medium of 1970’s late nite tv to plumb the depths of devilry and the demonic depravity of the ruling elite who sell their souls to the dark lord at Bohemian Grove.
David Dastmalchian gives a fantastic performance as a desperate late night talk show host trying to catch Carson in the ratings. A very effective and captivating film…especially if you lived through the 70s. 4 stars out of 5.
The First Omen (2024) - Available on Hulu: Speaking of the 70s!! The First Omen is a surprisingly well-made and executed prequel to the iconic 1976 film The Omen. The First Omen won’t change your life but it will keep you mildly entertained and reasonably spooked for its two-hour run time. 3 out of 5 stars.
Immaculate (2024) - Available on Hulu: This is a not great movie but serves as a decent enough vehicle for Sydney Sweeney to keep building the foundation to her movie stardom. A rather forgettable film with a tenuous premise but the luminous Sweeney, who still manages to be insanely sexy even in a nun’s habit, makes the most of it…especially in the final scene. 2.5 out of 5 stars
Doctor Sleep – Director’s Cut (2019) - Available on Amazon Prime: A shockingly well-made and completely compelling sequel to The Shining which, like Late Night with the Devil, casts a severely jaundiced eye toward the ruling elite and their demonic ways, which include feeding off of the pain and suffering of regular people, most notably children. It’s impossible to watch this movie and not think about the infamous pedophile rings involving people of power, including the Jeffrey Epstein ring, the P Diddy accusations and the horrific Franklin Affair…not to mention the wholesale sickening and senseless slaughter of children in Gaza by the Israelis.
Doctor Sleep features two great performances, the first by Ewan McGregor, who gives a subtle, layered and impressive performance as the adult Danny trying to navigate life after the horrors he endured in The Shining. The other by the absolutely luminous Rebecca Ferguson. Ferguson is so good, so charismatic, so gorgeous and so sexy in Doctor Sleep it is astonishing.
I completely skipped Doctor Sleep when it came out in 2019 because I thought “a sequel to The Shining? No thanks!”. To me The Shining is one of the greatest horror movies of all time…and to be clear Doctor Sleep is nowhere close to being an equal of The Shining in terms of the filmmaking or storytelling. But…it really is a fantastic horror movie. In some ways I’m glad I missed it in the theatre though because my first watch of it was of the three-hour Director’s Cut which is available on Amazon Prime. I highly recommend you watch the director’s cut and not the theatrical release.
Know this going in though, Doctor Sleep – The Director’s Cut, has one of the most disturbing scenes I’ve seen in a film in a long time. It deeply disturbed and unnerved me – which may say more about me and my life’s circumstances, but still…this scene was tough to watch, but necessary to see. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Smile (2022) - Available on Hulu: Smile came out in 2022 and has a sequel out this month…but I never saw the original so I watched it last week. Smile is a decent enough piece of trauma porn horror movie making. It’s got some clever story lines and keeps you engaged through out. I thought Sosie Bacon did a solid job as the lead, and she had some very heavy lifting to do. In some ways Smile is a typical middle of the road horror movie, but to its credit, it works. 2.5 out of 5 stars.
As for the rest of a Halloween Movie Guide…
My usual go-to horror films are previously mentioned The Shining (1980), The Exorcist (1973) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). They are, to me, the best horror films around and they never fail to scare the living shit out of me.
I also love the Universal Classic Monster movies like Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). Another old movie classic is F.W. Murnau’s masterful Nosferatu (1922), which is creepy as hell and well worth watching.
Other less ancient notables would be most anything by David Cronenberg, his remake of The Fly (1986) is particularly fantastic and his films The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1983) and The Dead Zone (1983) are solid choices as well.
You also can’t go wrong John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982), which are all time horror classics that never fail to frighten no matter how many times you’ve seen them.
More current horror films that are most worthy of a watch are Robert Eggers’ extremely eerie The Witch (2015), and Ari Aster’s formidably frightening and fearsome Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019).
And finally, one movie which is not technically categorized as a horror film but which is as creepy, frightening, disturbing and unnerving as any movie out there, is David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Zodiac is a great film that pulsates with a darkness of such depth that haunts you for days and weeks after after watching.
And thus ends the Halloween viewer’s guide!! I hope everybody has a Happy Halloween and gets a bevy of tricks AND treats!!
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another massive misfire from M Night Shyamalan. Poorly conceived and poorly executed from start to finish.
Trap, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is a psychological thriller starring Josh Hartnett which premiered in theatres back in August. It just became available on the streaming service Max and I got a chance to watch it.
I had coincidentally watched two M. Night Shyamalan movies, The Sixth Sense and Signs, last week, unaware that Trap was being released on Max this past Friday, so when I stumbled across it I was surprised, and in the context of having watched some of Shyamalan’s stellar early films, excited to see Trap.
It is easy to forget what a big deal Shyamalan was at the turn of the century. The Sixth Sense was a smash hit and garnered a bevy of Academy Award nominations and both Unbreakable and Signs were huge hits as well.
Shyamalan’s run of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, is as good a three-movie run for a director as you could ever hope for. All three were original, superbly crafted, gloriously entertaining, top-notch films.
Shyamalan was portrayed back then as the second coming of Hitchcock and he fully embraced the label – most notably by putting himself in all of his movies. In interviews, Shyamalan even about how he doesn’t shoot “coverage” of his scenes because he knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to have nothing to fall back on…which is a level of cinematic arrogance and hubris that was stunning to behold at the time.
As is almost always the case with that level of hubris, Shyamalan’s inflated ego led him to a catastrophic fall from grace. His precipitous creative collapse was interesting because it happened incrementally at first, but then all at once.
Here’s how it played out. 2004’s The Village was much hyped, and did well enough at the box office, but fan’s irritation at Shyamalan’s increasing reliance on “plot twist reveals” became much more pronounced.
This was followed by 2006’s Lady in the Water, which was a decidedly murky misfire that further alienated his audience, and did very little at the box office. After the mess that was Lady in the Water, Shyamalan needed to prove himself as a big-time director and box office behemoth.
The film he made next was 2008’s The Happening starring Mark Wahlberg. The Happening was an absolutely abysmal, excruciatingly awful piece of excrement. Yes, it made some money at the box office, but in its wake the bloom was officially off the rose of Shyamalan the prodigy filmmaker in the eyes of fans and critics alike.
And things went downhill from there as every movie Shyamalan made after that got progressively worse. The Last Airbender? After Earth? Yikes.
It’s hard to imagine a more precipitous fall from cinematic grace or steeper drop in quality of work as Shyamalan has endured. Yes, he had a bit of a comeback in 2016 with Split and in 2019 with Glass, but he has never recaptured the magic of those early movies and after having sat through his newest one, Trap, I can confidently say he never will.
Trap tells the story of Cooper Abbott, a regular guy/dad in Philadelphia, who takes his teenage daughter to a concert to see her favorite artist, Lady Raven.
Like all Shyamalan movies there is a twist…(I will refrain from revealing the twist even though the marketing of the movie explicitly reveals it), but the twist here is given away much too soon and much too easily.
Shyamalan doesn’t draw his viewers in and then turn things on their head, he just rather lazily goes through the motions of revealing this twist without much build up (which maybe explains the poor marketing decision to not maintain the illusion).
After the reveal is made, the movie, which hadn’t built up much dramatic momentum to begin with, feels like a barely inflated balloon being stepped on…it never floats, it never pops, it just squishes from side to side.
As the film goes on it becomes more and more inane until the final half hour of the movie, which is so absurd as to be idiotic. The final act is so bad and so poorly executed it boggles the mind and grates the soul.
The film seems intent on being as vacuous as possible and dedicated to not standing firmly on any dramatic ground whatsoever. There were lots of possibilities on how to resolve this unfailingly incoherent mess of a movie, but Shyamalan, in his now usual custom, paints by numbers and does nothing interesting or unique…or even slightly entertaining.
Josh Hartnett is a decent enough, B or C level movie actor/star, for example he was quite good in Oppenheimer last year, and he could’ve been decent here, but Shyamalan never gives him the chance to cook and to delve into his character with any verve. Ultimately, Hartnett’s portrayal comes across as quite amateurish and vapid.
In true Shyamalan form he casts himself in a small role, and is dreadful…but even worse is he casts his daughter Saleka in the role of Lady Raven. Apparently Saleka is a singer in real life, but her anemic musical performances in Trap are not the showcase her famous father was probably hoping for. In fact, Saleka is so dull and lifeless it feels like her father cast her so that she could play act at being a famous singer because in real life that shit is definitely not gonna happen.
In the final third of the film Saleka is tasked with a lot of heavy lifting in terms of acting, holding audience attention and driving the story. Unfortunately, she is so charisma and talent deficient she isn’t anywhere remotely close to being able to pull it off.
Hayley Mills appears in the film in the role of an FBI profiler, and she is uncomfortably out of place to an alarming degree. Every time Mills appears on-screen it feels like she is a homeless person who has wandered onto set and is looking for the bus station.
As for the filmmaking, Shyamalan tries some stuff in Trap, but none of it works. For example, he uses takes where the actors speak directly into the camera, a technique used by Jonathon Demme in Silence of the Lambs to great success. Here though it just seems trite and a bit ridiculous given the context of the story surrounding it.
The reality is that Shyamalan has gone from being a moviemaker that matters to being one that just churns out odious garbage in order to make some money. Trap is a perfect example, as it is a thoughtless and fruitless film made with a minimum amount of care…something that would have been unimaginable from Shyamalan a quarter century ago.
Even if you are a huge Shyamalan fan, I’d find it hard to imagine you’d love Trap. It is a small and inconsequential piece of nothing cinema, and I recommend you avoid it because it’s so poorly made that watching it will make you angry – or at the very least, should make you angry.
©2024
On this episode, Barry and I don our comic greasepaint, clown nose and big shoes and belt out some American Standards as we debate the merits of Joker: Folie a Deux, the critically and commercially panned follow up to the Oscar nominated 2019 smash hit Joker. Topics discussed include the nearly universal negative response to the film, the blessing of seeing through the fog of it all, and director Todd Phillips as prophet of doom.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 123 - Joker: Folie a Deux
Thank you for listening!!
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A truly terrible piece of television that desecrates its source material.
The Rings of Power, the billion-dollar Jeff Bezos-vanity project television series on Amazon Prime based on the footnotes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, just finished its second season.
The first season of The Rings of Power was a cultural irritant and major disappointment…the second season is…not surprisingly…equally as bad.
I confess am not a Tolkien fan boy. Yes, I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and I’ve seen the Peter Jackson LOTR movies and enjoyed them but I am not obsessed with or protective of Tolkien’s creation even though I greatly admire his craftsmanship and artistry.
Because of my admittedly thin grasp of Tolkien’s lore, I am not the type of viewer who will be deeply offended when lore is subverted or contradicted. I’m usually too uninformed to notice or to uninvested to care.
I say that only to clarify that when The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with Tolkien’s lore, and it does so quite a lot, I am willing to forgive (or forget) if the show were simply a successful dramatic endeavor that was at least minimally entertaining, never mind enlightening.
But The Rings of Power is neither entertaining nor enlightening. All it really is is embarrassing for the creatives involved and infuriating for viewers, like me, foolish enough to tune in.
The second season, which has eight episodes, follows a bevy of storylines with a diverse array of Middle-Earth’s populace. There are storylines involving Elves, Dwarves, Harfoots, Wizards, and even Orcs and Sauron himself.
Not a single one of these narratives is even remotely compelling, intriguing or dramatically potent.
The entire Numenor storyline is nauseatingly vacuous and has all the dramatic depth of a soup commercial. The palace intrigue in the Numenorian court and the family drama surrounding it is astonishingly bland.
The “Gandalf but don’t call him Gandalf!!” wizard/spaceman storyline that is the definition of dull. The Harfoot sub-plot of this storyline is a flavorless gruel.
Arondir the Elf is back and no one gives a flying fuck because that character is repulsively stupid and inane, and his travails as interesting as watching soup chill.
The entire Dwarf storyline is so gut-wrenchingly terrible that anytime those annoying little bastards were on screen I wanted to light myself on fire and jump off the roof.
The Celebrimbor and Sauron storyline is a tedious and tiresome slog that has all the gravity of a telenovela.
The acting in this show is just obscenely atrocious, no doubt accentuated by the truly amateurish and abysmal writing.
Morfyyd Clark plays famed Elf Galadriel…and this poor women has no business being on screen anywhere. Her performance is nauseatingly trite and vapid. Her snarling, girl-power take on Galadriel is, frankly, as ridiculous as it is uninspired. To be fair she isn’t aided by the egregious writing, but still, she does herself, and the character no favors with her flaccid performance.
Charles Edwards is an utterly appalling as Celebrimbor. Edwards looks like a lesbian gym teacher helping special needs kids put on a school production of As the World Turns.
Sophie Nomvete plays Disa the Dwarf and she is so bad it literally made my stomach hurt watching her. It is beyond belief that this character exists and this actress was tasked to play her.
Not a single cast member on this series has even a glimmer of magnetism, dynamism or charisma. The entire cast is not only devoid of gravitas, but is deathly allergic to it.
For a series that cost a billion dollars the question I kept asking myself was, why does everything, from the sets to the costumes to the props to the dearth of background actors, look so unconscionably cheap?
The sets look like they come from stage play put on at a public junior high school in a middle-class suburb. But it’s the paucity of background actors that gives the game away, as scenes are sparsely populated and feel amateurish because of it.
Unlike say, HBO’s Game of Thrones or The House of the Dragon, The Ring of Power looks and feels, and is written and acted like, a fantasy-themed soap opera.
Game of Thrones and The House of the Dragon were both able to find fabulous actors, mostly British, and mostly from the stage, and give them top notch scripts to work with. The results were and still are fantastic. That The Rings of Power has been unable to find the same level of acting talent at all (there’s not a single noteworthy performance in the show – not one), and write even remotely average quality scripts, has been the albatross around the neck of the series from the get go, stopping it from even being good, never mind great.
The reality is that The Rings of Power is an abomination, and a disrespectful degradation and desecration of Tolkien’s glorious work. It is so suffocatingly trite and amateurish it feels as if it were actually designed to both fail and infuriate.
The creatives behind the series, most notably showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and to a lesser extent the cast, the directors, the writers and producers, should all be ashamed of themselves and deeply embarrassed at what they’ve produced.
If you’re a Tolkien fan you will hate this series…and rightfully so. If you aren’t a Tolkien fan but are considering checking out The Rings of Power…don’t…it is a waste of time and a deeply frustrating and grating viewing experience.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. But be forewarned, this is an aggressively arthouse movie that will be very unappealing to those seeking comic book entertainment.
Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Philips’ sequel to his controversial, billion-dollar blockbuster Joker (2019), and features Joaquin Phoenix reprising his iconic, Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck aka Joker, but this time he’s joined by Lady Gaga as his love interest Harley Quinn.
Joker was, and still is, an extraordinarily polarizing film. Back in the hyper-politicized year of 2019, Joker was instantly reviled by weak-kneed critics who labeled Phoenix’s Fleck/Joker as the “patron saint of incels”, and the film vile and potentially violence inducing because it captured the anger and resentment boiling just under the surface of America.
Despite the cavalcade of establishment media fear and loathing of Joker, the film still managed to make gobs of money and garner eleven Academy Award nominations and two wins (Best Actor and Best Original Score).
Unfortunately, no one need fear Joker: Folie a Deux becoming a blockbuster or hording trophies at the Academy Awards. Joker: Folie a Deux is going to be a certified box office bomb and is despised by critics and fans alike.
I try to quarantine myself from reviews and criticisms of a film before seeing it, but with Joker Folie a Deux it was impossible to avoid the overwhelming hate the film was receiving. Some of the most animated vitriol toward the film was coming from people who, like me, loved the original movie.
So when I strolled into an empty Sunday afternoon screening of Joker: Folie a Deux, I was mentally sharpening my knives in order to be able to properly and precisely eviscerate the shitshow I was about to watch.
But then I watched it…and maybe it was because I went in with such low expectations, but not only did I like Joker: Folie a Deux, I thought it was, in a way, much like the first film, bleak but utterly and absolutely brilliant.
The film opens with a Looney Tunes style cartoon which features Arthur Fleck and his literal and figurative shadow, Joker. This opening gives the perfect psychological backdrop for Fleck/Joker and buttresses my Jungian shadow thesis regarding Joker where Arthur Fleck is a Christ-figure and Joker is the anti-Christ/Satan figure.
The film then goes to live action and the story begins where Joker left off, with the now famous Arthur Fleck sitting in Arkham Asylum awaiting his trial for murder.
Over time the film descends into the madness of Arthur Fleck…and uses the genre of a jukebox musical as a manifestation of that madness. So as reality and fantasy blend together in Arthur’s mind, he and his friend Lee Quinzel – aka Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, sing a bevy of American Standards…it’s sort of like a grotesque fever dream/nightmare version of La La Land.
But make absolutely no mistake, Joker: Folie a Deux is not, and is not meant to be, “entertaining”, not in the traditional sense, but it is most certainly enlightening and insightful, something which is exceedingly rare in cinema nowadays, most especially in Hollywood films in general, and franchise movies in particular.
Joker: Folie a Deux is a work of art, which is a jarring and frustrating thing for viewers to experience when they head into the cinema expecting a franchise film piece of pop entertainment. This subverting of expectation, signified in the film with the recurring theme of “That’s Entertainment!”, is no doubt responsible for the film’s very poor reception among audiences and critics that have been conditioned by Marvel’s mindless money-making machine movies over the last 16 years…and to a lesser extent DC’s too, to expect a certain kind of pre-teen drivel as comic book cinema.
Joker: Folie a Deux is not that, instead it is a relentlessly bleak and brutal film. It is grungy, gruesome and glorious. It may make you angry, it may make you anxious, it may make you bored. But whatever your reaction to it is, that says infinitely more about you than about it, because this movie is a mirror held up to our insane, inane, indecent cancer of a culture and the vicious and vacuous world we all inhabit. Your reaction to Joker: Folkie a Deux, is your reaction to the madness of our broken and fallen world.
It seems obvious to me that Joker: Folie a Deux is director Todd Phillips’ giant middle-finger to the people who hated the first movie…and to those that loved it too. I never would’ve guessed that Todd Phillips of all people – the guy who made the Hangover trilogy, would be the auteur with balls the size of Hindenbergs who morphs into his main character, lights the match and watches the whole shithouse go up in flames. But here we are…and I’m glad to be here.
The animating characteristic of Joker: Folie a Deux is despair. Phillips’ Gotham is a hellscape…literally. For not only is it filled with vile, venal and loathsome creatures, but it is entirely devoid of any love. In a world devoid of love, despair rules the day because hope is replaced by delusion.
Arthur Fleck is, as a Christ figure, an open wound, a raw nerve, and it isn’t the hate of this world that affects him so greatly, but rather the complete absence of love.
Joker, on the other hand, as the devil, thrives in this hell for the exact reason that it cripples Arthur.
Many critics and hipsters hated the first Joker movie because Arthur Fleck was a white guy. This sort of shallow, identity driven thinking is all too common in our current age, and it reduces otherwise smart people into myopic fools unable to see the forest for the trees.
Arthur Fleck isn’t a symbol of white disenfrachisement…he is a symbol of the forgotten, the downtrodden, the outcast, and the loser of all colors, creeds and genders.
Arthur Fleck is the shaking, orphaned child in Gaza surviving in the rubble. He is the Palestinian prisoner gang-raped by his Israeli guards. He is the gay man thrown from a roof in Saudi Arabia. He is the teenage girl in Kabul beaten for showing her face. He is the black boy abused and neglected by an overwhelmed foster care system. He is Kelly Thomas, the mentally ill homeless man beaten to death by police in California. He is Ethan Saylor, the young man with Down’s Syndrome who died when Maryland cops kneeled on his neck in a movie theatre. Arthur Fleck is the helpless and the hopeless, the weak, the sick and the old…and critics and audiences who see him as a threat or a symbol of the oppressor simply due to the color of his skin and his gender are the ones who make this world the cruel, inhumane and uninhabitable shithole that it is.
Joker is Arthur’s shadow…he is his vengeance and justice. Joker is the Hamas member slaughtering Israeli men, women and children at a desert rave. Joker is the Israeli soldier executing Palestinian men, women and children in cold blood. Joker is the cop killing pets in front of children. Joker is the school-shooter settling scores for social slights. Joker is the mayhem, murder and madness unleashed by those who feel fueled by righteousness.
Joker is the king of this fallen world…and Arthur Fleck is its victim.
Joaquin Phoenix is once again fantastic as Arthur and the Joker. Phoenix is a fragile yet forceful screen presence. His transformations throughout Joker: Folie a Deux are subtle and simply spectacular. I doubt Phoenix will be considered for any awards since Joker: Folie a Deux is so hated, but he is more than worthy of accolades.
Lady Gaga is an actress I have never been able to tolerate. I despised the trite and treacly A Star is Born and found her distractingly bad in House of Gucci. But here in Joker: Folie a Deux I finally got to understand her appeal. There really is just something about her that is magnetic and undeniable, at least in this movie. I found her character arc to be somewhat poorly executed, but I thought her performance was quite good.
Brendan Gleeson plays a prison guard and is an ominous presence whenever he graces the screen, most particularly when he isn’t being menacing. Gleeson is, like Phoenix, one of the best actors on the planet, and he never fails to elevate any scene he inhabits.
And finally, Leigh Gill, who plays Gary Puddles, is fantastic in his lone scene. This scene, which features Puddles being questioned on the stand in court, is extraordinarily moving, and exquisitely captures the deeper meaning and purpose of the film.
Cinematographer Lawrence Sher, who was nominated for an Oscar for his work on Joker, once again does phenomenal work on Joker: Folie a Deux. Sher shoots the film with a distinct 1970’s grittiness and grime. He turns multiple musical numbers into uncomfortable flashbacks to Sonny and Cher episodes or other seventies type showcases and does so with a cinematic aplomb.
Hildur Guonadottir, who won an Oscar for her original score on Joker, is back on this film and once again sets the scene with an uncomfortably menacing and ominous score that drives the emotional narrative.
As for Todd Phillips, as I previously said, it’s astonishing the balls on this guy. He is basically saying “fuck you” to critics and fans alike. It’s tough to imagine him bouncing back and being allowed to do a worthwhile film after having a critical and commercial flop like this. That’s a shame though because he has proven his worth as an artist with Joker and Joker: Folie a Deux.
Phillips is a lot of things, some of them good and some of them bad, but one thing that he has been in recent years…is right.
It’s always struck me that no one (except me) seemed to notice that Joker accurately diagnosed the incandescent anger and fury that was boiling just beneath the surface of America back in 2019. I wrote about this profoundly disturbing anger prior to Joker, but Joker showed it to mainstream audiences, and elite coastal critics were so horrified by it that they blamed the film rather than the country and culture it revealed.
Joker was proven right though as less than nine months after its release that volcano of anger erupted in Joker-esque fashion with the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing riots and chaotic violence in the streets of American cities…just like in Joker.
The Joker was every BLM rioter, and every opportunistic looter and arsonist in America’s summer of rage in 2020…just like he was every flag-waving MAGA moron on January 7th, 2021, who stormed the Capitol looking to “Save Democracy”.
That Joker was correct has never been admitted by the coastal elites who hated the movie. That Joker: Folie a Deux is also correct in diagnosing the unremitting cruelty, malignant madness and incessant insanity of our culture and country will also go unnoticed by those who are too offended, or bored or angry or inhumane to care or notice.
Joker: Folie a Deux is not a polarizing film like Joker. The consensus is that it is awful to the point of being an abomination. But I am here to tell you that Joker: Folie a Deux is a brutal, ballsy and brilliant film. It is, like Oliver Stone’s manic and maniacal 1994 masterpiece Natural Born Killers, well ahead of the curve, and will only get its due when the history of this era is written and the ugly truth of our current time fully revealed.
If you have the fortitude for it, and the philosophical, political and psychological mind for it, and the ability to tolerate the arthouse in your comic book cinema, then Joker: Folie a Deux is not the steaming pile of shit that critics and audiences claim it to be, but rather a startling revelation. And like most revelations it is reviled in its own time because it tells the unvarnished and unabashedly ugly truth that no one wants to see or hear because it’s too painful to ever acknowledge.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but emotionally potent film that is deeply moving for parents and children alike. Just be aware of the movie’s less than ideal sub-text.
The Wild Robot is an animated science fiction film that follows the travails of Roz, a utilitarian robot marooned on an island inhabited by a variety of animals.
The film, written and directed by Chris Sanders and based on the wildly popular book series of the same name by Peter Brown, features Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy and Catherine O’Hara among its voice acting cast.
The Wild Robot has a lot going for it. For example, the book series it is based on is enjoyable for both children and adults, and the animation on display in the film is as good as it gets in the genre.
While the film does enough with what it has to be an enjoyable and emotionally moving experience, deep down I couldn’t help but feel that it could have been better. That’s not to say that it’s bad, because it isn’t, in fact I assume this movie will be a front runner for a Best Animated Feature Academy Award, but I still think that it could have been better than it is.
Let’s start with the positive.
The film, which I’ll do my best not to spoil for the uninitiated, centers on the love between a robot and an orphaned gosling. The relationship between Roz (the robot) and Brightbill (the gosling), is sweet and funny and ultimately realistically heartbreaking as Brightbill matures into goose adolescence.
To writer/director Chris Sanders’ credit, The Wild Robot hits all of the proper emotional beats and does so extremely effectively. Both parents and children will be emotionally moved by the film in untroubling and at times exquisite ways.
Any parents in the audience will recognize themselves in Roz and easily relate to Roz’s heartbreak – which is the natural state for any parent. And children will recognize, at a minimum sub-consciously, the yearning Brightbill has to break free of parental control and go make his way in the world, but also the sadness and sense of loss that comes with embarking on that exciting adventure.
The biggest issue I had with The Wild Robot was not the perfection or potency of its emotional journey, but rather with the rhythm and rhyme of the narrative and the morality and ethics of its sub-text.
The story of The Wild Robot works best when it is simple – namely when Roz is trying to raise, protect and teach Brightbill. But when the story expands it loses its dramatic power and becomes, dare I say it, meandering and, at times, tedious.
In addition to losing narrative momentum when the story expands, the film also loses its emotional power amidst a bevy of action sequences that feel flat and derivative.
Another minor issue I had with the film was that the voice cast was just ok. For example, Pedro Pascal, who voices the character Fink, a mischievous fox, lacked a vocal crispness and dexterity that the character required. His vocals were a bit mushy for my taste and felt off for the character.
That said, I thought Lupita Nyong’o was very good as Roz.
I saw the film with my young son and when it ended, I asked him if he liked it, which he did (as did I despite my criticism). I then asked him which he liked better, the movie or the book. Much to my shock, since he had just seen the movie and had read the book many, many months ago – and reading is not his favorite thing to do, he said he liked the book better than the movie.
The movie does change things from the book. For instance, the pivotal character from the book, Chitchat – a motormouthed squirrel, is all but disappeared from the movie and replaced in the narrative by Pinktail, a mother possum (voiced by Catherine O’Hara).
The ending of the movie is different from the book as well, and is another reason why the emotional power of the film gets diminished in its final third.
Other book to movie changes are more subtle but no doubt book readers will notice and be either mildly or majorly disappointed by them.
Ultimately, The Wild Robot tells a story of love between a parent and a child, and that is moving and meaningful no matter how that parent/child relationship begins.
But there’s also a more subtle, and some might say nefarious or malignant sub-text that fuels the final fourth of the film, and that is about acquiescing to fascistic power. The sub-text of this film is the polar opposite of the old adage that “it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees”. The Wild Robot sub-textually endorses the notion of living on one’s knees, which is a total subversion of the hero’s journey – which has historically been a masculine tale, replacing it with the feminine instinct to placate and survive rather than to fight and die.
So instead of teaching children to fight tyranny and authoritarianism, The Wild Robot in its cinematic form teaches them to bend the knee and keep their head down in order to scrape out a meek existence where freedom and love are momentary gifts to be stolen under an ever-watchful tyrannical eye instead of God-given rights worth fighting and dying for.
No doubt most people would roll their eyes at this interpretation of the film and claim I am reading way too much into it…but they’d be wrong. Movies (and tv and all other entertainment) are powerful propaganda tools and are used to manipulate and condition people in general, and children in particular, as to how to see their world and what to find acceptable.
The story of The Wild Robot is a benign and beautiful one…until it turns into a malignant and malicious one. That turn occurs late in the film and effectively uses the overwhelming emotion of the first three quarters as a way to bore into the collective unconscious of audiences and then drops the seed of acquiescence and impotence in the face of power.
Interestingly enough, the book is not structured in the same way as the film and it’s hero’s journey is therefore different, more traditional and therefore mythologically and archetypally more satisfying.
With all of that said, the truth is I “enjoyed” The Wild Robot because it effectively made me feel, and that’s what we want from cinema, even if it involved animated animals and robots living out the drama of life.
That the emotional strings plucked by The Wild Robot are used to promote a nefarious sub-text, is, if you are able to watch it consciously, still dismaying but somewhat less relevant.
The bottom line is that The Wild Robot is an emotionally profound movie that suffers a bit from a narrative that gets a tad meandering, but overall, I think it is still worth seeing.
Just watch it with an open heart and a watchful mind – and teach your kids to do the same thing.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here at all.
Wolfs, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, is the new movie on Apple TV + that tells the tale of two New York City based lone-wolf “fixers” who are forced to work together on a complicated job.
The film, written and directed by Jon Watts – who is best known for directing the recent Spider-Man movies, describes itself as an action comedy, which is a bit of an inaccurate moniker since Wolfs is neither action-packed nor funny.
The film follows the travails of Jack (Clooney) and Nick (Pitt) as they are called to the hotel room of Margaret (Amy Ryan), who is running for District Attorney. Unfortunately for Margaret, the young man she brought back to her hotel room for a tryst has died and so she calls a secret number and a fixer is sent. Then there’s a twist and another fixer is sent and these two lone wolf fixers do not want to form a pack and work together. Comedy is supposed to ensue…but never does.
Writer/director Watts uses a lot of filmmaking techniques, like numerous quick edits on mundane events like a car backing out of a parking space, and languid camera movements, to give the impression of cinematic sophistication, but he fails at even the most rudimentary elements of storytelling.
With a convoluted story and middling direction, the movie is forced to rely upon the star power of Brad Pitt and George Clooney.
Pitt and Clooney have, to varying degrees of success, previously worked together in the Ocean’s Eleven movies, and their reunion on Wolfs is meant to cash in on their status and stardom. In other words, Wolfs is our chance to hang out with two handsome, cool, movie stars for two hours – lucky us.
Unfortunately, Wolfs features zero chemistry, zero comedy and zero coherence. It is one of those movies where as you’re watching it you feel like you’re waiting for the story to actually start and it never really does.
The plot of Wolfs has all the clarity of a drunk toddler’s storytelling while playing with action figures. The rules of the world in Wolfs are random, arbitrary, confusing and ultimately annoying. Nothing makes much sense and it seems as though none of it was really meant to.
In this way Wolfs is a perfect companion piece to the previous movie Apple Films released, The Instigators, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. Both movies are so vehemently vapid, vacant and venal as to be apocalyptic. If some poor soul were to watch these bro-fueled bombs back to back they’d be tempted to light themselves on fire in order to feel something, anything at all, and to kill the malignant stupidity that was just implanted in their brains.
The final scene of Wolfs is the one that helped me to understand how Clooney and Pitt see themselves, or at least see their pairing, and it is astonishingly delusional. I won’t give anything away except to say that this scene is meant to demonstrate that Clooney and Pitt are the modern-day Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
Let me be as clear as I can about this…Clooney and Pitt are not Newman and Redford. Not even close. They never have been and they never will be.
To be fair, Pitt has matured into a much better actor than his pretty boy beginnings would’ve hinted, and he’s become a very astute and successful producer as well. His choice in projects and his taste are admirable, but let’s not kid ourselves, he’s no Robert Redford.
Clooney is, obviously, not Paul Newman, who was one of the greatest actors and movie stars in Hollywood history. Clooney is now, and frankly always has been, a bad actor, a bad movie star and a truly terrible director.
For the last twenty-five years or so Clooney has been one of those people who populate our culture who are only famous for being famous. He’s the male equivalent of Jessica Simpson, and equally as vacuous.
It has been reported that Clooney and Pitt were paid $35 million each to star in Wolfs, which if true, is pretty amusing. Apple’s desperation to be a player in the movie business has forced them to pay exorbitant prices to talent in exchange for truly abysmal movies. Considering that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is the best Apple movie ever made, and is one of Scorsese’s lesser films, is an indictment of Apple, the movie business and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Wolfs spent a week in theatres before hitting Apple TV+ on Friday September 28th. It will, rightfully, languish on that atrocious, backwater of a streaming service, mercifully hidden from wider audiences. Those without Apple TV+, and those unable to navigate the incomprehensible maze that is Apple TV+ to find Wolfs, are blissfully unaware of how truly lucky they are.
In conclusion, Wolfs is a poorly conceived and poorly executed movie that is so small and inconsequential as to be instantaneously forgettable. It means nothing. It has nothing. It is nothing.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!! THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
This year we’ve had a few notable box office bombs, the most intriguing of which are The Fall Guy and Furiosa.
Like the vast majority of people, I did not see those movies in the theatre, hence their under-performance at the box office. But now both films are available to stream and I recently checked them out to see what, if anything, I missed, and if they deserved to be ignored in the theatre.
Let’s start with The Fall Guy, which is currently available to stream on Peacock.
The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, was set up to be the big office blockbuster to open the summer movie season when it hit theatres on May 3rd. The film, which stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, had a huge marketing push pre-release, which included a witty bit of banter at the Oscars between the two stars. The film sold itself in a plethora of television ads as an old-fashioned, 1980’s style Hollywood action movie with likeable movie stars (Gosling and Blunt).
But upon release the film fell flat as nobody came out to see it. It was number one at the box office on its opening week, but with a severely subdued haul of $35 million. Not great. It went downhill from there.
It dropped to number two in its second week of release and then fell off a cliff. It ended up making a paltry $180 million in total off of its $120 million budget. In Hollywood accounting, that means it lost a ton of money. (Hollywood accounting means you roughly double the budget to account for marketing and for the theatre’s haul – and the rest goes to the studio – so The Fall Guy is about $240 million underwater)
So why did The Fall Guy fail?
The Fall Guy does have two very charming and beautiful movie stars as its leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who are, you guessed it, very charming and very beautiful. But on the downside, The Fall Guy is a movie no one wanted…and so no one went to see it. Myself included.
The movie is sort of attached to the rather forgettable B-tv series from the 80’s, The Fall Guy, which is second rate Lee Majors material, as Majors is remembered for the Six Million Dollar Man, not The Fall Guy. But The Fall Guy brand doesn’t have a built-in fan base as Gen Xers may remember the show from their childhood but don’t really give a shit about it because it wasn’t beloved, and younger audiences will have absolutely never heard of it.
Another major issue is that The Fall Guy is, frankly, a really bad movie. It features an abysmally incoherent and relentlessly stupid script, as well as stunts that are rather tepid and cinematically mundane.
As charming as Gosling and Blunt are…and they are incredibly charming…they’re not charming enough to tolerate the excruciatingly boring and stupid nonsense going on around them for the duration of this idiotic movie.
In some ways The Fall Guy is meant to be a love letter to stunt men, which I suppose is a nice thought. Stunt men are a different breed (and deserve an Oscar category)…but if you’ve ever met one you know that while their work is often interesting, they often are not.
On the bright side stunt men will always be happy to have you break a chair over their head, which is very cathartic. Truth is I’d rather break a real chair over my head than watch The Fall Guy again.
The Fall Guy’s failure is a stark reminder that wishful thinking from the C Suite of Hollywood studios doesn’t translate into audience interest. The Fall Guy had seemingly everything going for it except for the two things it actually needed, audience interest and good storytelling. Oops.
In conclusion, The Fall Guy most definitely deserved to fail, and it certainly did just that.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on the other hand…
Furiosa is the fifth film in the Mad Max franchise and is a prequel to 2015’s fantastic Fury Road, which received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won six Oscars.
Fury Road didn’t break box office records but it did break more than even making $380 million on a $160 million budget.
In all honesty I am not a Mad Max fanatic. The first movies came out when I was a kid and I didn’t see them in the theatre. I did see them all as a teen on VHS though, and liked most of them (I wasn’t a real fan of Beyond Thunderdome), some a great deal…but it’s not a franchise with which I ever strongly identified despite my respect for it.
When Fury Road came out in 2015 after a thirty-year absence of Mad Max material, I didn’t see in the theatre but caught it on cable…and was absolutely blown away. Fury Road is an astonishing movie and is a monument to director George Miller’s brilliance.
Despite having missed the boat on Fury Road in the theatre, when Furiosa came along I, being the moron that I am, once again didn’t venture out to theatres to see it. In my defense, my time is much more limited now than it was back in 2015 (having kids will do that), so I sort of have an excuse – but not a very good one.
Unfortunately, I was not alone in not seeing Furiosa when it hit theatres on May 24th, as the movie made a measly $172 million during its run against a $168 million budget. The film performed so poorly that it seems likely that the Mad Max franchise may have breathed its last breath. Considering that the franchise’s director, George Miller, is 79, one can assume at the very least that Miller is done making Mad Max movies…which is a shame because he is extraordinarily good at it.
But now Furiosa is streaming on Max and I’ve seen it.
I can report that missing Furiosa in the theatre was a grievous mistake.
Furiosa isn’t perfect by any means. For instance, it isn’t nearly as good as Fury Road. But…it does feature some truly imaginative and original stunt sequences that are breathtakingly spectacular.
The film also features a stoic but solid performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, who lives up to the name of Furiosa with a fire in her eyes that is undeniable.
All of the magic that make George Miller such a dynamic moviemaker are evident in Furiosa, as he shoots his action sequences with a verve and aplomb that are unequalled in our CGI addicted world. (to be fair there is some CGI in Furiosa, but nothing compared to most movies).
As for why a film as good as Furiosa failed, it is difficult to say.
The marketing for Furiosa wasn’t particularly strong, I mean it didn’t move me to go see it, so that could be a reason.
I do recall the marketing being “female driven”, and some have speculated that having a female lead, Anya Taylor-Joy, could have turned off male audiences, so that could be it. People are certainly tired of culture war bullshit in their movies – myself included, and the impression could’ve been given by Furiosa’s marketing that this was a girl power movie…which is kryptonite nowadays for male audiences. But counter to that, that certainly wasn’t the case with Fury Road, which starred Charlize Theron, so it seems to be a thin argument. Although counter to that counter, Tom hardy had a starring role in Fury Road as well, so who knows.
Another reason could be that Furiosa is a prequel and people are tired of prequels and of having to “do the homework” of having to see all the other movies just to understand what is going on in the new movie. I think Marvel definitely suffers from this and maybe Mad Max does now too.
The truth is that Furiosa’s failure is both a mystery and frustrating to me. It’s a mystery because I can’t quite pinpoint what caused it, and it’s frustrating because Mad Max is a perfect action franchise for our times and would be a great franchise for Warner Brothers to mine for film and tv projects going forward. But now with Furiosa’s failure, that won’t happen.
After having seen Furiosa, and having found it to be a very well made, extremely solid piece of action entertainment and a noteworthy bit of Mad Max franchise filmmaking, I really don’t know why people didn’t go see it and why word of mouth wasn’t better and more useful.
To end this discussion, here’s my ranking of Mad Max movies.
5. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – Not an awful movie but easily the worst of the Mad Max movies.
4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – This movie is world’s better than Beyond Thunderdome, and is very close in the running with Mad Max and Road Warrior.
3. Mad Max – The original is a down and dirty and disturbing movie that is undeniable.
2. Mad Max: The Road Warrior – The franchise makes the leap into the big time with a gritty and explosive action extravaganza.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road – The best of the best. Truly extraordinary piece of action filmmaking.
And finally…my ratings for The Fall Guy and Furiosa.
THE FALL GUY
Streaming: Peacock
Rating: 1 out of 5 Stars
Recommendation: SKIP IT
FURIOSA
Streaming: Max
Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars
Recommendation: SEE IT!!
Thus concludes today’s autopsy of a bomb…or bombs as the case may be.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW !! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An action thriller with little action and no thrills.
Rebel Ridge, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is a Netflix original action thriller that tells the story of Terry Richmond, a former Marine who is wronged by a small-town police force in the deep south, and seeks justice.
At first glance Rebel Ridge looks like a First Blood rip-off/homage with Aaron Pierre’s Terry the stand-in for Sly Stallone’s John Rambo. But that impression is the wrong one.
Rebel Ridge is not First Blood, not by a long shot. The movie is an action thriller that is short on action and devoid of thrills. Its biggest problem is that it simply refuses to satiate the audience’s bloodlust, which ultimately makes the film deeply unsatisfying.
The premise is simple enough - a guy gets mistreated by police in a small southern town and fights back (sounds just like First Blood). In this case the cops use civil asset forfeiture laws to confiscate Terry’s life savings which he planned to use to start a new life with his troubled cousin. The local cops are, of course, both corrupt and racist, and their criminality leads to deeply dire consequences for the people Terry cares about.
But as simple as this premise is, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier makes the unfortunate choice to make the plot a long and winding tale that is much more complicated and convoluted than it needs to be, and ultimately less gripping than it should be.
The issue of civil asset forfeiture is a compelling one to spotlight, but Rebel Ridge fails to stay focused on that issue and instead gets lost with sidetracks into other topics, among them structural racism, the confederacy, the patriarchy, and the opioid epidemic, not to mention the budget crises of rural governments in America. All of these side issues end up burying the lede, which is the innate injustice of civil asset forfeiture laws, and that is disappointing.
Adding to the problems is the fact that for an alleged action movie there is a paucity of action, and what action there is, is quite mundane and poorly executed.
Rebel Ridge is no First Blood mostly because there is so little blood on display. The actual first blood in the film isn’t spilled until very late in the festivities and even then, it’s pretty tepid.
The reason for this is that the most distinct character trait of Terry, a martial arts expert, is that he refuses to use a weapon or kill anyone, which neuters Rebel Ridge from the get go, and this impotence only makes the film more flaccid as time goes by.
This lack of a killer instinct from Terry is not only boring to watch, it is taken to such extremes that it removes any sense of reality from the movie, thus making it all seem silly. I mean, I get not wanting to kill anyone, but when you are surrounded by bloodthirsty racist cops who are all shooting at you and you disarm every gun you touch and refuse to actually shoot back, then the suspension of disbelief goes right out the window along with Terry’s instinct for self-preservation.
The fact of the matter is that violence should’ve been the centerpiece of the film, but Rebel Ridge uses only the threat of violence as its centerpiece, which isn’t exactly cinematically compelling.
On the bright side, Aaron Pierre, who stars as Terry Richmond, proves himself a very worthy lead. Pierre’s performance is minimalist and isn’t so much dynamic as it is magnetic.
Pierre has a fine mastery of stillness – a skill lacking in so many of our current crop of actors, and exudes an undeniable power through minimal movement. Pierre never reverts to histrionics or hysteria, but instead is a picture of control while maintaining a vivid and vibrant inner life.
Action stars are hard to come by and Hollywood is desperate for them, so I hope Pierre gets more opportunities based upon his intriguing and often impressive performance in Rebel Ridge.
The rest of the cast, for the most part, fall short of Pierre’s work.
Don Johnson plays the local police chief Sandy Burnne, and he restrains himself from going full caricature but only barely. Johnson gives a paint by numbers performance that underwhelms.
AnnaSophia Robb plays Summer, a court clerk sympathetic to Terry’s plight. Robb acquits herself well in the poorly written role by bringing a nervous energy and palpable fragility to the character.
Emory Cohen’s Steve, a local bad guy cop, is a mindless caricature and dull as doornails, as is James Cromwell’s local judge character.
To top it all off the film lacks a distinct visual style that is most notable in the poorly choreographed and executed fight scenes. The whole movie looks like a second-rate television show…which is not a compliment.
Rebel Ridge has gotten good reviews and is doing robust streaming numbers, so it seems I am in the minority with my mostly negative feelings about the movie. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be exhilarated by this film. I understand the excitement over Pierre, who seems like a good find, but the rest of the film really flounders.
The bottom line is that Rebel Ridge feels like an action movie for people who don’t like action movies and but who want to say they like action movies. Therefore, I cannot recommend Rebel Ridge, but I’m hoping that Aaron Pierre’s next movie is a better one, since he shows great promise as a lead actor.
©2024
RANDOM THOUGHTS
From the ‘random thoughts’ bin in my Dispatches from the Shitshow notebook.
A few people asked me if I was going to watch the big presidential debate on Tuesday night. The answer of course is…HELL NO!
I didn’t watch the Trump-Biden debate back when Biden tripped over his own dementia addled dick and I ain’t gonna watch this idiotic horseshit either. Why would anyone in their right mind watch these two raging sub-mediocrities and dim-to-mid-wits babble their inane bullshit back and forth?
I felt the same way about the conventions. How could anyone watch that shit by choice? It’s like tuning in to television just to watch a three-hour block of infomercials. You can’t help but be dumber for having watched.
**********
If you needed another reason to not vote – both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are endorsing Kamala Harris.
Cheney and Bush are war criminals who stole the 2000 election, were either responsible due to negligence for, or complicit in, the 9-11 attacks, lied to start two illegal wars that killed millions, started a torture and massive surveillance program, ran the U.S. economy into the ground, and decimated working families while bailing out Wall Street bankers.
These two men are, frankly, evil to the point of being demonic. To be clear, they should not be in prison for their crimes, they should be at the end of a fucking rope.
That their endorsement of the Democratic nominee is not seen as a giant red flag to the vast majority of liberals in the U.S., is disconcerting, disheartening and should be disqualifying.
Liberals tell me that Trump is Hitler…but they fail to remember that Cheney and Bush actually were as Hitlerian as any president in history.
If you are one of those delusional folks who think Kamala Harris is the one to right the good ship U.S. of A…consider the utterly contemptible and loathsome swamp creatures that are backing her.
I’m not saying you should vote for Trump…I’m just saying that voting for Kamala isn’t the lesser of two evils, it is, at the barest of minimums, the equal of evils.
********
True story - I know a guy who got crabs on his birthday.
*********
I know it is en vogue to think that RFK Jr. is a clown…and I get it…he talks like Katherine Hepburn with a head cold and hiccups. But even with the liability of his addled speech, he still speaks more sense than both Trump and Harris combined.
The fact that he is out there brazenly berating and beating the righteous drum against big pharma and big agriculture, says a lot about him and his integrity, and even more about Trump and Harris’ lack thereof.
Liberals, of course, loathe RFK Jr. for speaking out against the Covid vaccine…as well as many other vaccines…but the reality is that RFK Jr. was right – about the Covid vaccine and much else, and the vast majority of liberals were dead wrong, especially regarding Covid, even though they are loathe to admit it.
I certainly don’t agree with RFK Jr. on everything…most particularly his nauseating subservience to Israel – but both Trump and Harris are equally spineless and mindless when it comes to Israel too (gee…I wonder why?).
That said, the fact that Trump is now surrounding himself with the likes of RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, and saying he will put them in his administration, is a very big deal considering the villainous scum who populated the first swamp creature-infested Trump term. John Fucking Bolton was his National Security Advisor for crissakes!
When I look at Bush and Cheney endorsing Kamala, and RFK Jr. and Gabbard endorsing Trump, it seems very obvious to me that Trump wins the endorsement battle by a landslide.
Having RFK Jr. fighting big pharma and big agriculture in the public eye for the next four years would be good for the country. Of course, the question becomes could Trump tolerate someone stealing the spotlight from him for four years? My guess is no…and that the relationship would sour pretty quick.
*******
I know I am an old man yelling for the kids to get off of my lawn, but I really, really hate the proliferation of sports gambling in our culture, and think it is insidious, diabolical and dangerous.
I am not a gambler. I don’t even play fantasy sports – another endeavor that I find to be idiotic and detrimental to sport and sports fandom.
The bottom line is that I think that gambling is so toxic and such a cancer that it will eventually aggressively degrade not only individuals, families, communities and the country, but sports itself, as everything that touches gambling is tainted by it and ultimately greatly diminished.
Nowadays it’s simply impossible to watch television without seeing some stupid DraftKings or FanDuel commercial, and all of the networks covering sports have fully embraced gambling as THE focal point of their coverage of sport. ESPN has entire shows dedicated to gambling and has started their own sportsbook, and during actual games they spotlight bets to make.
Kids growing up today will have no idea about sports without gambling being such an integral part of it. Sports and gambling will be inextricably linked for this generation, and it will have dire consequences for those kids when they become adults, and for sports in the future.
The proliferation of sports betting comes nearly forty years after the Reagan administration took the guard rails off of Wall Street, and twenty-five years after Clinton essentially allowed Wall Street to become a massive casino.
We’ve all seen how well those changes to Wall Street have worked out for regular, working-class Americans…it’s been one calamity after another. We’ve had Savings and Loan scandals, Tech bubbles, accounting scandals (Enron), the housing bubble, the housing crash and on and on and on. No matter who was responsible for those crimes and calamities, it was always regular people who were left holding the bag and footing the bill.
In 2008 the entire façade of Wall Street was exposed as being fraudulent and entirely felonious. The banks, the ratings agencies, the insurance companies, the mortgage companies, the federal oversight agencies, the local, city, state and federal law enforcement and attorney’s general, all of them were exposed for the world to see…and yet…nothing changed. In fact, Wall Street only got bigger and more corrupt and now is even more untouchable, and regular people were robbed blind and left poorer and more vulnerable than ever.
The same thing will happen over time with gambling in regards to professional sports leagues, college sports, television networks, tech companies and credit card companies/banks – as they will all make gobs of money…until they don’t, and then they’ll simply use their massive money machine to pay off corrupt politicians and get bailed out with tax payers dollars. And once again it will be regular people who will be fucked over.
You can bet on it.
********
Speaking of getting fucked over….I know people are freaking out about the election. The MAGA maniacs thinks Kamala is a commie and the K-Hive Clowns think Trump is Hitler…but know this…no matter who wins the U.S. will get heinous neo-liberal domestic policies and hellacious neo-con foreign policy.
Trump or Harris…it don’t matter…we are fucked four ways to Sunday. The U.S. empire is in steep decline and will be lashing out at enemies foreign and domestic…and if you think you’re safe because you’re on the “right side of history” or are a “patriot”…guess again.
The bullseye will eventually be on all of our backs because the corrupt oligarchs and aristocrats running this country don’t just hate regular Americans, they actually want to see us suffer because they delight and live off of our misery. These ghouls will do absolutely anything to maintain their power, up to and including putting a bullet in the back of your head after having forced you to buy your own shovel and dig your own grave.
On that joyous note…I’ll sign off.
©2024
On this episode, Barry and I don our superhero tights and talk all things Deadpool and Wolverine. Topics discussed include the value of Ryan Reynold's shtick and a multitude of multi-verse cameos, as well as the tenuous future of the MCU.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 122: Deadpool and Wolverine
Thanks for listening!!
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A lifeless and laugh-less Boston-based heist comedy that is not the least bit interesting or entertaining.
The Instigators, starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, tells the tale of Rory and Cobby, two mismatched, down on their luck, sad sack Bostonians who get hired to pull off a heist.
The film, which is directed by Doug Liman and was co-written by Casey Affleck, is currently streaming on Apple TV+ - which is maybe the worst designed streaming service in the history of mankind…a fact that no doubt leaves Steve Jobs twisting and turning in his grave.
Speaking of twisting, turning and graves, The Instigators is best described as a comedy-heist movie, although it isn’t the least bit funny and the heist isn’t remotely compelling.
The Instigators is as middling as middling can be as it is a lifeless, mostly charmless, gratingly predictable exercise.
The failure of this film is somewhat baffling as it is chock full of acting talent. Besides Damon and Affleck there’s Paul Walter Hauser (one of the best and one of my favorite actors), Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlberg, Ron Perlman, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames and Toby Jones.
Despite this solid cast the acting is, frankly, mostly dreadful. Perlman, in particular, seems to be in another movie entirely as his performance is unconscionably cartoonish.
Everyone else seems to be just going through the motions as there isn’t a real person to be found on-screen for the duration.
Casey Affleck and Damon too seem to be painting by numbers as they play an emotionally distant wise cracking, Boston smart ass with a heart of gold who teams with emotionally traumatized and distant Boston dad with a heart of gold. Yawn.
This is well-trod ground for both of these guys and it definitely feels that way watching this movie as neither of them seem to be the least bit engaged and are only cashing in on their tired, well-worn Boston personas.
One final note regarding the cast, and that is regarding Jack Harlow. Harlow plays a criminal named Scalvo and I just don’t get it with this guy. I genuinely don’t understand who this Harlow guy is, where he comes from or why they are trying to make him into an actor or a movie star. I saw him in the remake of White Men Can’t Jump and had the same feeling. I just don’t get it at all. Can we please just remove Jack Harlow from public life? Please.
As for the directing, Doug Liman seems to be just as disengaged as the cast. The film is listless and flat and never gains any momentum - dramatic, comedic, or otherwise.
There’s a big Limen-esque car chase while Petula Clark’s hit song “Downtown” plays and you know it’s supposed to be the action comedy centerpiece of the film and a major highlight but it is decidedly lackluster, underwhelming and cinematically flaccid…as is the entirety of the movie.
That car chase is Liman play-acting at being Doug Liman – whose famous car chase in The Bourne Identity is a cinema classic, just like Damon and Affleck are play-acting at being deviations of their more famous and successful Boston characters from Good Will Hunting and Manchester-by-the-Sea.
Ultimately, The Instigators is an empty and fruitless cinematic endeavor that lacks both comedy and cool. Nothing matters in this movie because nothing is even remotely real. The stakes are never heightened because the characters are never clearly defined beyond stereotype and caricature.
The Instigators is a product of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is a bad sign for that endeavor going forward. The company’s first film, Air, which starred Damon and was directed by Ben Affleck, showed some promise, but The Instigators is a major step back.
If Damon and Affleck want to be real producers who bring meaningful change to the film industry, they have to make films that matter. And the only films that matter are films that are very good, or very successful, or both. The instantly forgettable The Instigators is none of the above.
This is the type of film that you should be able to mindlessly watch and get a few chuckles from…unfortunately The Instigators can’t even muster the energy to be mindless, yet fun, entertainment. It’s a dull, poorly designed and constructed vanity project that no one, not even the people in it or who made it, really gives a shit about. And neither should you.
©2024
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars
My Rating: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you like Ryan Reynolds’ shtick, you’ll like this movie. If you don’t, you definitely won’t.
Deadpool and Wolverine, the third film in the Deadpool franchise and the…God help us…34th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, hit theatres on July 26th, and I just got a chance to see it.
The film, which stars Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool and Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, has made over $800 million dollars in just two weeks of release, and seems poised to cross the billion-dollar threshold. That is an impressive haul even considering the film’s $200 million budget.
One of the more intriguing things about Deadpool and Wolverine is that Deadpool is the first of the 20th Century Fox cinematic comic book characters to have his own movie since Disney purchased Fox back in 2019. The first two Deadpool movies, as well as all of the X-Men and X-Men adjacent movies like Wolverine and Logan, and the Fantastic Four movies, were all Fox properties. Now Disney owns those characters and has to figure out a way to use them to save their floundering Cinematic Universe, which has fallen off a cliff in terms of box office and cultural relevance in since the high point of Endgame in 2019.
Deadpool is an interesting character to debut the Fox and friends comic book heroes in Disney’s family friendly realm because he is a self-aware, cynical and sarcastic symbol of Generation X and believes in absolutely nothing but snark and raunch.
In Deadpool and Wolverine Ryan Reynold’s signature snark is certainly turned up to 11, but the raunch is reduced to a Disney-friendly 4, with Deadpool’s usual sexual antics, like getting pegged, being only spoken about but never shown. Walt Disney is no doubt looking up from hell quite pleased.
The Deadpool franchise has always relied entirely upon the comedic stylings of its star Ryan Reynolds, and thus far has done so to great success. But at the moment it’s not just Deadpool but the entirety of the MCU that is relying on the Reynold’s singular self-aware superhero snark…and while I am a fan of Reynolds as Deadpool, his shtick is definitely starting to wear thin…frankly bit too thin to sustain any dreams of carrying the MCU on his back.
The first Deadpool movie was an exhilarating breath of fresh air, and Reynolds was perfectly suited and situated to pull it off. Deadpool lampooned the superhero genre at the height of its success, while also being a top-notch superhero movie in its own right, no easy task.
The second Deadpool film was less successful mostly because the first film had been so successful, and so expectations were high. Deadpool 2 was still very funny, but it got caught up adoring itself a little bit too much to work as well as the original.
Deadpool and Wolverine, which is Deadpool 3, is the least successful film in the franchise, at least in terms of comedy, drama and action, but looks like it will be the most financially successful as it hurtles toward the billion-dollar mark heading into its third week of release. And so it goes here in Hollywood.
Deadpool and Wolverine is essentially an odd couple-comedy-road movie, with Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine playing a short-tempered, violent Bing Crosby (not unlike Bing Crosby in real-life) to Ryan Reynold’s foul-mouthed, violent Bob Hope.
The movie definitely made me laugh out loud a couple times, and I noticed about midway through that I had a stupid smirk stuck on my face the entire time I watched. These accomplishments are not to be taken lightly as I am notorious difficult to please when it comes to comedy.
Yes, there is a plot in the film, sort of, but it’s not worth getting into at all because it is not only moronic but basically inconsequential, which is not a great thing in terms of storytelling…but it is what it is.
Yes, there’s a cornucopia of cameos, none of which really work beyond a momentary nod of recognition, but superhero fans will adore them.
Yes, there’s a villain, Cassandra Nova, who is almost instantly forgettable and is played with a rather remarkable lack of verve and panache by Emma Corin.
Yes, there are action sequences, some of which are fun and some of which are bland and derivative.
The cinematography is often painfully dull and devoid of the vibrant colors of the first two Deadpool movies. The film looks flat and uninspired. Not a shock that it is directed by Shawn Levy, whose signature style is flat and uninspired.
The best things about Deadpool and Wolverine though are, not surprisingly, Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman.
I’ve never been a huge Hugh Jackman fan, and thought his being cast as Wolverine – one of the greatest comic book characters of all-time, back in 2000 was a let-down, especially when Russell Crowe was allegedly the first choice. But I readily admit after having watched all of the X-Men and Wolverine movies, the fantastic Logan in particular, that Jackman is a terrific Wolverine.
Logan was a great way to end his run as the iconic character, and Deadpool and Wolverine feels a little disappointing in that regard as it diminishes the impact and accomplishment of Logan, one of the best comic book films ever made, but in Hollywood in general, and Disney in particular, money talks and artistic bullshit walks…so here we are.
Deadpool has always worked because it is essentially a self-aware parody of not just superhero movies but the superhero movie industry. It spotlights and skewers all of that genre’s flaws, most notably its absurdities, inanities and insanities.
But the real reason the Deadpool movies work is because of Ryan Reynolds and his singular comedic style which is a magnetic mix of manic, foul-mouthed and insecure fandom in character form.
The reality is that if you like Ryan Reynolds you’ll love all of the Deadpool movies, Deadpool and Wolverine included. Reynold’s humor is only heightened when matched with Jackman’s brooding Wolverine, which is a shockingly powerful piece of acting considering the silliness that surrounds it.
If you like Ryan Reynold’s and his usual shtick, you’ll like Deadpool and Wolverine. I like Ryan Reynold’s shtick and that’s why I liked Deadpool and Wolverine. Is it a good movie? No, not really. Is it a well-made movie? No, not really. Is it a fun and ultimately instantly forgettable summer movie you can mindlessly chuckle at and never really consider ever again? Yes…yes it is.
©2024
