- Benjamin Purcell Morris
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On this episode, Barry and I don our war paint and go toe-to-toe with Prey, the newest installment in the Predator franchise now streaming on Hulu. Topics discussed include the benefit of low expectations, the disadvantage of dismal directing, and the potential future of all things Predator.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 77: Prey
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©2022
On this episode, Barry and I check into the Heartbreak Hotel and chat about the Baz Luhrmann film Elvis, starring Tom Hanks. Topics discussed include the pitfalls of biopics, Luhrmann's aggressive cinematic style, and the staggering magnetism and undeniable power of the real Elvis.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 76: Elvis
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©2022
On this episode, Barry and I wish upon a star in the hopes of becoming real boys as we discuss the new Disney +, Bob Zemeckis movie Pinocchio, starring Tom Hanks. Topics touched upon are...what the hell happened to Bob Zemeckis? What the hell happened to Tom Hanks? And how the hell did a cricket from the American South make the journey all the way over to a tiny Italian village?
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 75 - Pinocchio (2022)
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©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Thus far the series is decidedly sub-par, so best to wait and see how the first season plays out in its entirety before committing to watch it.
The first two episodes of Amazon’s highly-anticipated Lord of the Rings tv series, The Rings of Power, premiered on Amazon Prime Video this past Thursday, September 1st.
The series chronicles the trials and tribulations of various Elven, human, Dwarf and Harfoot characters in the Second Age of Middle-Earth as briefly described in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings. The time period for the show is a couple of thousand years before the Third Age events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
The main characters in the series are Galadriel, an Elven princess warrior (you might remember her in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy portrayed by Cate Blanchett), and her half-Elven friend Elrond. Human woman Bronwyn, and her Elven maybe-love-interest Arondir. And Nori, a young Harfoot woman with an adventurous spirit.
The first two episodes of the series are shockingly pedestrian considering the source material and the price tag. The nicest way to put it is that The Rings of Power has given itself a considerable amount of room to grow.
One of the more curious aspects of the production is that Amazon, after having spent $250 million alone on the rights to the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, and essentially committed to over a billion dollars for the entire five season run of the show, has put in place two unknowns-to-the-point-of-being-amateurs, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, as showrunners.
Payne and McKay’s background is with J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot (or as it’s known in some circles – Bad Reboot) and their only listed credit is a less-than-inspiring partial writing credit on Star Trek: Beyond. That Amazon gave these two nobodies a billion dollars with which to play in the Middle-Earth sandbox shows a staggering level of executive incompetence…if not hubris considering how underwhelming the first two episodes are.
Not surprisingly considering their unimpressive background, Payne and McKay have managed to do little more than paste together a structurally unsound narrative populated with fundamentally flawed characters out of the Tolkien treasure chest purchased for them by Lord Bezos.
In some ways it’s impressive how Payne and McKay have managed to strip Tolkien’s work of all its intrigue, interest and insight into humanity, and serve the public up just another middling fantasy series indistinguishable from the rest except for the fact that it has the Tolkien name attached to it.
There has been much ballyhoo about the casting of “actors of color” in The Rings of Power which would seem to go against Tolkien’s canon, which was built as a myth for English and Northern Europeans. There’s certainly a debate to be had about that topic, but my biggest question isn’t about casting actors of color but why cast such bad actors of any color?
Across the board the acting in this series is just dreadful, most notably Morfydd Clark, who plays Elven warrior-princess Galadriel. Clark is so devoid of charisma as to be a thespianic blackhole. And yes, I know it’s fantasy, but Clark’s unathleticism and unbelievability as an action hero are staggering to behold.
She also seems incapable of actually opening her mouth when she speaks, so much so that as the episodes wore-on I became more and more concerned that she might be so physically slight as a result of her being unable to put solid foods through her forever-frozen-shut piehole.
Equally awful on the acting front is Ismael Cruz Cordova as Arondir, an Elven warrior in love with a human woman, Bronwyn. Cordova looks like he’s moving his bowels as he strains to give his Arondir an inner life and yet none appears. Cordova’s creative constipation as Elondir manifests in a vast vacuity in his lifeless eyes, which reveal a vacant soul where gravitas dare not tread.
Markella Kavanaugh plays Nori Brandyfoot, a Harfoot with a “yearning for adventure”. Kavanaugh’s big, blue eyes are nice to look at but don’t shimmer with any semblance of sentient life. In fact, all of the Harfoots are like talking Ewoks from Return of the Jedi, except they are, as impossible as this seems, even more annoying than their cutesy Star Wars dopplegangers.
To be fair to the cast, it’s extremely difficult to act when given such staggeringly cringe-worthy dialogue. And to be clear, as much as I found the acting lacking, the writing is by far the worst thing about the show. The dialogue is god-awful and the narrative flaccid and uncompelling.
Almost as awful as the writing and acting is the editing. The editing is so visually disjointed that it thwarts all emotional connection and coherence. Viewers are deprived of any sense of space and time or intimacy as they are shuttled back and forth between expansive wide shots and suffocating close-ups, with nary any middle-ground to be found, it’s all quite bizarre.
Not surprisingly, the pacing of The Rings of Power is thus far lethargic and laborious. Only two shows in and the hour-long episodes feel like a Bataan death march to Mount Doom.
While watching the show my bored eyes were like Sauron’s, darting back and forth looking for anything of the slightest interest, and usually settling off-screen and out the window at a fuzzy caterpillar making its rhythmic journey across my window sill, which was significantly more captivating than the snoozefest unfolding on-screen.
Maybe the most troubling aspect of The Rings of Power is its overall aesthetic. Except for some truly spectacular CGI shots of various Middle-Earth locales, the show looks and feels shockingly shoddy and cheap, like some second-rate series on the deservedly-maligned CW network.
To be fair, there are six more episodes to go in season one and the show most definitely can, and Eru Ilúvatar willing, will, get better.
My advice as of right now is to wait until the first season is complete before you commit to watching The Rings of Power. The first two episodes on their own are simply not worth your time, and if you let fools like me watch the rest of the series and report back whether it improved, then you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.
The bottom line is I’m definitely not optimistic for The Rings of Power after seeing the first two sub-par episodes…but who knows? Maybe the show will surprise me and be worth the effort after all. I’ll let you know what I think as the show progresses.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I get our hairy Hobbit feet moving and head to Middle-Earth to talk about the first two episodes of the new Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Questions discussed in this episode include, is this what a billion dollars buys you? Why is the acting so bad? And, why is this adaptation of Tolkien so terrible so far?
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. Batshit, bizarre and brilliant.
“ONE TIME A THING OCCURRED TO ME, WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S FOR SALE?” – Vasoline by Stone Temple Pilots
It is very difficult to describe The Rehearsal, a new six-episode series written, directed and starring Nathan Fielder, now streaming on HBO Max.
At first glance, the series is a ‘reality tv’ show about Fielder helping regular people navigate their anxiety by directing elaborate rehearsals of difficult situations they will encounter in the future.
For example, in episode one Fielder assists a man who has been lying to a friend about his level of education and wants to come clean but is worried about how the friend will react. This is pretty standard reality tv stuff…nothing to see here. Except Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths to recreate the setting and the individuals involved in the encounter. He builds an exact replica of the bar where the conversation will take place, and hires actors to play everyone involved except for the man who wants to confess, and then rehearses the hell out of it trying to build a roadmap to follow for any contingency that may arise.
Episode one is amusing for how ridiculous Fielder is in his quest for “authenticity” regarding setting and cast…but it’s child’s play compared to what comes in episodes 2-6. That’s where the show turns the lunacy up to eleven and the absurdity up to infinity.
The first episode actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. I won’t spoil anything vital from episodes 2-6 only because it simply has to be seen to be believed…and even seeing isn’t believing as I assume all of it is as phony as a smile on a two-dollar whore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating and insightful.
I’ve never seen any of Nathan Fielder’s earlier work, but from what I understand he’s a comedian/actor and comedic provocateur, so The Rehearsal is, I guess, best described as a docu-comedy…or maybe a mocku-comedy, or maybe an off-the-rails, reality tv social experiment.
I’m a notoriously difficult audience for comedy and am incapable of giving pity laughs. The Rehearsal made me guffaw numerous times, and not with traditional build-ups and payoffs but with subtle, understated, insanely weird moments of glorious absurdity.
Nathan Fielder is the ethically and morally corrupt ringmaster and clown of this straight-faced, three-ring circus, and he’s a passive-aggressive, raging narcissist suffering from supreme self-absorption and cluelessness…and it’s hysterical to behold, even when, or maybe especially when, he acts so superior to the rubes he’s supposedly silently judging, despite being just as ignorant, oblivious and self-delusional as they are.
I have no idea if this Fielder persona is genuine or an act, and I don’t much care. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Fielder’s persona is able to tell a complex story without ever needing to utter a word.
Fielder’s ‘act’ is, in some ways, sort of a more subdued version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat work, where he bonds with the audience because he’s in on the joke and uses ‘normal’ people as the punchline. But unlike Borat, Fielder’s insecurities and arrogance keeps slipping out from behind the mask.
The Rehearsal reminded me of a documentary/mockumentary from 1999 titled American Movie, which chronicled some passionate but unfortunate Midwestern filmmakers trying to make a movie that is destined to be terrible. American Movie was all the rage amongst a certain sect of hipster cinephiles back in the day. I even worked on a similar project as a cinematographer/actor in the same time frame. Similar to The Rehearsal, debates raged about whether American Movie was a real documentary or a mockumentary, and the answer is still elusive. I’m less in doubt about the dubious voracity of The Rehearsal.
The Rehearsal is also somewhat reminiscent of the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY, which blurs reality and manufactured reality in a post-modern cauldron of existentialism.
And the last thing that The Rehearsal reminded me of was Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside. Although The Rehearsal is nothing like Bo Burnham’s Inside in content and character, it’s similar in the sense that it is undoubtedly a singular work of genius.
Many moons ago while studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my class did a sort of Meisner-esque exercise where an actor sits on a chair and looks straight ahead. The actor is supposed to be still and just listen to the words other classmates say to them from across the room and see if they generate a genuine, spontaneous emotional or physical reaction.
It's an interesting exercise in that it is meant to remove the impulse of the actor to “show” or indicate and instead just open themselves up, to be and to react organically and naturally.
I had already gone to film school prior to the Royal Academy so I realized during this exercise that it was very similar to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage. In layman’s terms Eisenstein’s theory claims that the context surrounding an image is what assists the audience in projecting onto it meaning and emotion. For example, the shot of a stoic face is given meaning if it is preceded or followed by different images. The audience projects upon the stoic face a pleasant demeanor if it is preceded by a baby laughing, and the audience projects a darker meaning if the stoic face is preceded by a shot of war or carnage.
All of this came to mind watching Nathan Fielder, as his usually expressionless face and monotonous voice is a blank canvass upon which the audience can project their own meaning, including their own bias and prejudice.
For example, for much of episodes 2-6, Christianity is often positioned to be the butt of the joke by Fielder, who is Jewish. So much so, that at one point that prejudiced sub-text bubbles to the surface as someone openly declares without any opposition, that being a Christian is itself an irredeemable act of anti-Semitism. But afterwards another discussion takes place regarding Judaism, and the previously espoused anti-Christian sentiment is then given more context and its meaning changes radically. This is an instance of Fielder finding insight because of his lack of self-awareness, not in spite of it.
In that class at the Royal Academy there was a student, I’ll call him “Tushy”, who was a recent Ivy league grad, came from a very wealthy family, and seemingly had everything going for him, and yet he still felt the need to tell everyone fantastical stories about the famous women he had dated. Everyone knew these stories were obviously untrue for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that Tushy was very gay, but he and his stories were harmless so nobody really cared.
In the Meisner-esque exercise though, Tushy’s inability to just “be”, which is a form of being honest with yourself and thus your audience, proved a liability. Tushy was incapable of just “being” and had to push and indicate all of the feelings he thought he was supposed to have during the exercise. As an audience member and participant this was uncomfortable to watch because it was so painful, obvious and painfully obvious. The teacher, who was one of the best in the world, gently tried to remind him of the purpose of the exercise and re-direct him to stillness but Tushy would have none of it. He kept pushing and urging himself to have a profound reaction (in this case crying) because he wanted everyone to think he was a profound person having a profound reaction.
There’s a pivotal sequence in The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder turns into Tushy, and is betrayed by his desperate yearning for profundity and therefore creates a manufactured profundity. Except in this case, Fielder’s forced profundity is actually profound in its own right as it exposes the deeper ‘reality’ about him, his series, and his audience, which is that our culture, marinated in malignant narcissism and saturated with social media, has devolved humanity to the point where we are no longer capable of ever feeling genuine empathy.
On its surface The Rehearsal is a simple bit of reality tv comedy, but beneath that façade is an astoundingly complex piece of work that speaks volumes about the diminished and depraved state of humanity.
The bottom line is that Nathan Fielder is a modern-American holy fool, and his series The Rehearsal is batshit, bizarre and absolutely brilliant.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful and thoughtful examination of two Hollywood icons and their long marriage.
The Last Movie Stars is a six-episode documentary mini-series which examines the lives, careers and marriage of acting icons Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. The series was directed by actor Ethan Hawke and is currently streaming on HBO Max.
Since well before I was ever born, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were the standard for the perfect marriage. Newman was the impossibly handsome, gracious, generous and grounded movie star, and Woodward was his down-to-earth, doting wife, mother to his kids and a powerful, Academy Award winning actress in her own right.
I once had the surreal experience of sitting directly behind them at a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about twenty years ago, and was struck by two things…how ridiculously beautiful they both were and how unnervingly normal they were as a couple. If it weren’t for their impeccable bone structure and piercing eyes, they could have been any other old couple out for a night at the theatre.
The Last Movie Stars attempts to go beyond the sterling façade of Newman and Woodward’s marriage and reveal their personal complexities and their deeply complicated relationship to one-another, their kids and their art.
Hawke obviously respects, admires and adores his subjects, and the series is much closer to hagiography than hit piece, but to his credit, he doesn’t dismiss or ignore the messier aspects of both Woodward and Newman’s lives. For instance, though it is done with a loving touch and no sense of animosity, Newman and Woodward’s children speak frankly and freely about their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s somewhat indifference to raising children. The rather uncomfortable topic of how the two met and started dating is also thoroughly explored and it isn’t the least bit flattering to Newman…or Woodward.
Hawke bases his documentary on a discarded memoir that Newman had intended to write with the help of a co-writer. Newman gave that writer permission to interview everyone in Paul’s life, which the writer did. But the tapes of those interviews were burned when Newman decided against the book…but thankfully the transcripts of those recordings have now been found and are the roadmap for The Last Movie Stars.
To bring those transcripts to life Hawke enlists a bunch of famous actor friends to voice the people from the transcripts. For example, George Clooney voices Paul Newman, Laura Linney is Joanne Woodward, Zoe Kazan is Paul’s first wife Jackie, Bobby Cannavale is Elia Kazan and so on and so forth.
It is somewhat ironic that George Clooney voices Paul Newman as his casting proves the title’s point. Newman was a mega-movie star with an Actor’s Studio background who dominated movies for forty years. Clooney was supposed to be as big of a star but he lacked, first and foremost, the craft and skill of Newman, but also his charisma and his artistic prowess.
There’s a very strong argument that Newman really was the last movie star because he was a “method actor” raised in the studio system who transitioned through the artistic/business revolution of the 60’s and 70’s without losing any of his star power.
George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and all the rest of the recent era wannabes have certainly had success, but their cinematic, cultural and artistic power is minuscule compared to Paul Newman.
Much to my surprise, Hawke’s decision to voice cast the film with well-known actors works astonishingly well. In addition, Hawke’s rapport with his cast in side discussions is endearing and brings a familial feel to the festivities.
As for Newman and Woodward, their individual journeys and their journey together, are simply remarkable.
Newman came up during the Method Acting revolution of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He attended the Actor’s Studio in New York with luminaries such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.
Newman was born ten months after Brando, but he was no Brando. He wasn’t James Dean, either. But thanks to an undying work ethic and an astonishingly persistent relationship with luck he carved out a career path that outlasted (but not outshone) them both.
As an actor Newman was different than Brando and Dean in that he wasn’t about emoting but withholding. Everything happening in a Newman character is happening beneath the surface, in a cauldron boiling deep in his famous blue eyes. That somewhat reserved approach at first left him overshadowed by his supernova contemporaries, Brando and Dean.
But then luck intervened and James Dean’s untimely death opened the door to Newman’s ascension and directly led to his being cast in Somebody Up There Likes Me.
Brando’s erraticism and combustibility eventually led him to burn out and self-destruct, while Newman’s tightly contained personality kept his career from ever falling apart. And so, Paul Newman, by sheer force of will, perseverance and luck, became the actor of his generation.
Joanne Woodward was a great actress in her own right. She was the bigger star when the two met, and early in their relationship she won a Best Actress Oscar (Three Faces of Eve). But patriarchal demands forced parenthood to replace career ambitions for her just as Paul’s career went meteoric. That would be a thorn in her side for the rest of their time together.
Woodward’s filmography is often overlooked, and even Zoe Kazan, a terrific young actress who’s a talking head in the documentary – and who happens to be Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, shockingly admits she has never seen a Joanne Woodward film. That’s a shame as in her heyday she was as good as anyone on screen. Her work in Three Faces of Eve and Rachel, Rachel is impressive and worth a watch to get a taste of her talent.
Newman’s filmography needs no introduction, and his work in The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict and The Color of Money is must-see for any aspiring actor.
Watching The Last Move Stars is enjoyable because it gives Woodward and Newman’s work a new perspective that reveals even deeper meaning to their artistry. And that’s the thing about this supposed Hollywood glamour couple that is so compelling and impressive, and that is their commitment to two things, their art and each other.
Through thick and thin they stuck it out. They didn’t bail when things got tough, and things often got very tough. They endured, and that is a lesson for every couple out there, even the ones who aren’t glamourous movie stars.
Yes, Woodward and Newman stumbled a lot, both artistically and as people. For instance, Newman was a terribly flawed man and a failed father, but he was ever on the search for forgiveness and/or redemption. His staggeringly impressive charitable work, including his camp for seriously ill children and his Newman’s Own food lines, speak to that yearning.
Despite the slings and arrows of life, or maybe because of them, Woodward and Newman never lost their humanity. It’s their flaws and failings and their steadfast refusal to give up in the face of them that make them relatable and even more captivating as a couple.
The Last Movie Stars is as insightful a documentary about movie stars as you’ll find because it focuses less on the myth and more on the humans embodying the myth. Ultimately, this documentary is, like the stars it attempts to explore, most notable for its humanity, and that’s a credit not only to the extraordinary Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but to Ethan Hawke.
©2022
****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!****
It’s surprising that Game of Thrones came to its rather ignominious end just three years ago, as those chaotic three years have felt like decades if not centuries. The way the once-glorious, must-see series badly stumbled at its conclusion seemed to make it disappear from the collective consciousness almost overnight. With stunning speed and alacrity viewers went from vociferously declaring “Winter is coming!”, to petulantly asking, “what’s next?”
Such is the nature of our current culture, where there’s a plethora of entertainment choices (notice I didn’t say “entertaining choices”) and virtually every movie or series ends up in the trash heap of forgettable fiction the moment it stops playing before our eyes.
2019 was a year of major endings, and not just for Game of Thrones. That same year Marvel’s miraculous narrative run from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) came to a smashing conclusion. So, the biggest tv series and the biggest movie franchise, both of which dominated popular culture for a decade, came to an end in 2019 and ever since, pop culture has been struggling and staggering to find a center, be it cinematic or on television, around which to orient itself.
Marvel has tried to keep its brand at the forefront of the culture by expanding to tv as well as extending its cinematic universe, and for the most part the results have been dismal. Marvel movies and TV series are no longer cultural landmarks but instead, little but fodder for tedious culture wars.
Which brings us to House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones series which premiered on HBO on Sunday, August 21st. The series is a prequel set 172 years before the events of Game of Thrones that tells the story of the rule of the dragon-blooded Targaryens.
The series is undoubtedly attempting to re-create the culturally dominating experience of its predecessor. After watching the first episode of House of the Dragon, which broke viewing records at HBO and overloaded the servers at HBO Max, I’m still reticent to declare that “Westeros is back, baby!”
Game of Thrones‘ fatally flawed ending left a putrid taste in a great deal of viewer’s mouths, my own included, so it’s just about impossible that House of the Dragon will be a similar smash hit. Audiences may well be wary of giving it the time it needs to grow, and after the calamity that was Game of Thrones’ final season, with good reason.
It’s too soon to tell whether House of the Dragon will find the magic that Game of Thrones did, but it’s early yet. The first episode was fine. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful. It just was. Some of the CGI was terrific, some of it wasn’t. Some of the characters were compelling, some of them weren’t.
I remember watching season one of GOT and liking it but not really thinking it was anything remarkable until episode nine (out of ten) of season one.
In that episode, Ned Stark is set to be executed and I kept wondering how they were going to save him. I mean, you can’t execute Ned Stark as he’s played by Sean Bean, the biggest star on the show. But then in episode nine…they cut Ned’s goddamn head off. I remember yelling out from my couch when it happened because it was so viscerally shocking to see a tv show completely upend the conventions of its medium.
House of the Dragon will not be able to do such a thing because it’s already been done. Audiences are harder to shock a second and third time around…and considering that Game of Thrones continued to shock throughout its run (think the Red Wedding – holy shit!), House of the Dragon has an uphill climb.
I don’t know if it’s a help or hindrance that I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I haven’t. On the plus side in terms of Game of Thrones, I had no idea what was coming, on the downside in terms of House of the Dragon, I don’t really know who anybody is or really care about them at the start.
In a real sense, I had almost no clue what was going on in Game of Thrones most of the time but enjoyed it because the acting was superb, the writing crisp, the production (sets, costumes, cinematography, sound) glorious and the world building brilliant. It also helped a great deal that there were a plethora of my three favorite things…nudity, strong sexual content and violence. You basically can never go too wrong with that combination.
With House of the Dragon, that same formula may be watered down in order to appease the social media Savanorolas who simply cannot tolerate anyone enjoying anything. Episode one of House of the Dragon had some violence and some sexual content and nudity, but not nearly enough for my voracious appetite, and certainly nothing up to the standards of Game of Thrones in its debauched heyday.
House of the Dragon does boast some fine performances thus far, most notably Matt Smith as rogue prince Daemon. Smith was last seen in The Crown playing a young Prince Philip (talk about a rogue prince – he’s the father of pedo prince Andrew…the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), and he’s a terrific actor. As Daemon he believably transforms into a villainous and oddly charming brute.
Daemon’s brother, King Viserys, is played by the wondrous Paddy Considine, who brings to the role a palpable sense of fragility that augers trouble for the king.
Also excellent is Rhys Ifans as Ser Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King. Ifans, like so many of the actors from the original series and now its prequel, is just a damn good British actor who brings a formidable amount of craft and skill to his role and elevates the series in the process.
That said, there’s a much smaller cast in House of the Dragon as compared to Game of Thrones, there’s also fewer interesting characters. Daemon, King Viserys and Hightower are decent characters, but nothing spectacular. If they were in Game of Thrones they’d be C or D level, fringe characters, not the main attraction.
Speaking of main attractions, Viserys’ daughter Rhaenyra, played as a teen in the first episode by Milly Alcock – and played by Emma D’Arcy in later episodes as a grown woman, thus far isn’t the least bit interesting. Like Arya Stark, she shuns the lady-life and bristles at the restrictions of the patriarchy, but she is also a deluxe dullard of the highest order. Maybe that will change going forward…hopefully it will change going forward.
Equally dull is Alicent Hightower, Otto Hightower’s daughter and Rhaenyra’s best friend, played by Emily Carey as a young woman and later in the series by Olivia Cooke as an adult. Alicent is paper thin as a character in episode one, and given that she had a potentially blockbuster scene with the King at one crucial point, that is disappointing if not devastating.
Again, the series just started and has the potential to grow into greatness, but it must be said that episode one is a bit middling. Part of the reason for that is that the production lacks the crispness and visual lushness of Game of Thrones, including in the CGI department.
Not surprisingly, dragons play a big role in the story of House of the Dragon, and the dragons themselves look as good as ever, but when placed into settings the scenes look uncomfortably cheap…like a quick cut and paste job.
The sets and costumes also look to be downgraded in terms of quality on House of the Dragon, as do the costumes, both of which may be a result of some cost cutting in the wake of Game of Thrones ever expanding budget.
Also notably sub-par was the sound design, which left much of the dialogue muddled under ambient noise or music.
House of the Dragon, which is NOT produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, is apparently the first in a collection of Game of Thrones I.P. that HBO will be sending our way. The recent financial struggles at Discovery, which took on a massive amount of debt to purchase WarnerMedia (which includes HBO) could spell trouble for such pricey projects going forward though.
If belt tightening at Discovery/Warner leads to lesser quality in the Game of Thrones spin-offs, then they’d be better off not doing them at all. Of course, I’m only saying that from an artistic/fan perspective, as quality is my number one concern.
Speaking of fan perspective, House of the Dragon is chock full of fan service and Game of Thrones Easter eggs. No doubt fans of the original series will love that, but if House of the Dragon doesn’t improve in quality and catch dramatic fire sooner rather than later, fans will turn on it and HBO will be left with a bloody mess on their hands. Only time will tell.
I’ll check back in midway through season one of House of the Dragon with another review to see if things in Westeros are headed in the right direction.
©2022
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the new Marvel series that premiered on Disney + on Thursday, August 18th. The comedy series, which will drop a new episode every Thursday for the next 8 weeks (9 episodes in total) until its finale on October 13th, follows the trials and tribulations of Jennifer Walters, a not-so-mild mannered lawyer who becomes a hulk just like her cousin Bruce Banner.
The opening scene of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law basically tells you all you need to know about Marvel’s latest series.
In that scene, Jennifer (Tatiana Maslany) is in her law office and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead that says, “I’m not arguing, I’m explaining why I’m right” is prominently displayed next to her. So apparently just like her hero RBG, Jen/She-Hulk is going to be an attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing feminist lawyer who’s unfettered narcissism assists in aborting Roe v Wade! Just kidding.
What I meant to say was…Yay! Marvel is still committing mass entertainment malpractice with its relentlessly trite woke posing and pandering!
In case the RBG bobblehead was too subtle for the Neanderthals out there, the first episode also gives viewers one of the most ham-handed, gag-inducing, girl power garbage monologues in MCU history. In the rant Jen/She-Hulk womansplains to Bruce Banner/Hulk,
"Well, here's the thing, Bruce, I'm great at controlling my anger, I do it all the time. When I'm catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day, because if I don't, I'll get called 'emotional' or 'difficult', or might just literally get murdered. So I'm an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you!"
Hysterical. “Literally”. As in Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, like so many privileged women today, is suffering from hysteria, a mental illness causing ungovernable emotional excess, in this case mixed with self-serving, decadent delusions of grandeur and persecution.
While I find this shameless brand of vapid virtue signaling in a series or film to be at its very best tedious (regardless of whether it’s from the left with its wokeness or the right with its vacuous flag waving and militarism), the reality is that in this day and age one must simply accept insipid cultural politics as part of art and entertainment and try to ignore it as best you can and judge the work on its other potential merits.
In other words, the question becomes, if you put aside the obvious malevolent misandry, neo-feminist foolishness and girl power garbage, is She-Hulk: Attorney at Law any good?
It’s difficult to decisively declare after watching just one episode, but I will say this…it doesn’t look promising…at all.
The first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of being a truly terrible bit of television and portends yet another miserable Marvel monstrosity in a string of miserable Marvel monstrosities.
Since Avengers: Endgame Marvel has churned out one piece of detritus after another. Just this year alone the Marvel machine has shat out the muddled mess of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the insidiously silly Thor: Love and Thunder. On the tv side, Marvel has cranked the crap up to eleven with an array of fecal matter in the form of Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel, whose pungent stench is spectacularly repellent.
To be fair to the geniuses over at Marvel, I didn’t think they could do any worse than the recent Ms. Marvel series, but to their credit they really pushed themselves and it sure as hell seems that She-Hulk is even worse than that moronic shit show.
A huge issue with She-Hulk is that it’s supposed to be a comedy and yet seems deathly allergic to being funny. The show certainly loves itself and thinks it’s hilarious as it’s chock full of lame Marvel inside jokes (how clever!) and breaking of the fourth wall (how original and clever!) and a bevy of nonsense that is altogether too cute and faux clever for its own good. Never mind laugh, I didn’t even crack a scintilla of smile for the entire episode.
She-Hulk bills itself as a legal-comedy in the mold of Ally McBeal with a strong female superhero in the lead, an idea that would’ve made me throw up in my mouth at the pitch meeting…reason #2,467,942 why I’m not working as a suit at Disney.
Whatever creative genius thought, “hmmm…you know that Marvel needs to do? They need to make a…(checks notes)…legal comedy with a third-rate Marvel character and load it with divisive cultural politics!” should be found guilty of egregious bad taste, disbarred and ejected from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild and all of Hollywood.
Of course, the oblivious Marvel marketing machine was in full swing leading up to the premiere with countless commissioned articles declaring She-Hulk to be the “best Marvel show!”
The other narrative around She-Hulk is that it’s vitally important for studios to support female-led superhero projects, especially in the wake of the Batgirl movie being thrown in the dumpster by Warner Brothers…or at least that’s what an absurd article at Yahoo news told me. Sigh.
How about we just support good shows and movies and abort this addiction to diversity, equity, inclusion horseshit now before it destroys cinema and television completely? And yes, I know I’m pissing in the wind with that exhortation but good lord Marvel is quickly circling down the drain and can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to this stuff.
Speaking of which, given that the politically correct cultural politics of the show make it nearly impossible for critics to give it the savaging it so rightly deserves, it’s still astonishing that it’s only getting very mild praise from a cornucopia of critics, many of whom delicately say it’s “good” but “could’ve been better”. In our current cultural climate of critical cowardice, that benign critique registers as a scathing review.
One of the biggest problems with She-Hulk, besides the fact that the character is a joke of a superhero that no one gives a rat’s ass about, is that the CGI in the first episode is God-awful to the point of being embarrassing.
There has been a lot of press about how over-worked and mistreated CGI artists are right now, so the show’s piss poor CGI is understandable in a certain respect, but it’s so egregious as to be unprofessional, and that’s a major problem.
I remember when I went to see Batman v Superman and Superman’s face looked really bizarre in a bunch of scenes…just grotesque, and then I read later that actor Henry Cavill had grown a mustache for another movie (a Mission Impossible movie if I recall correctly) and couldn’t shave it so when they did re-shoots for BvS they had to CGI out his mustache. That terrible BvS mustache removing CGI is a million times better than the junk in She-Hulk.
Speaking of technical misfires, the action sequences in She-Hulk, of which there are a scant few in the opening episode, are uncomfortably amateurish too, and feel like they were choregraphed and shot by a toddler.
Also abysmally atrocious is the editing and the overall cinematography. The first episode is poorly shot and the editing seems chopped together by a band of blind monkeys let loose in an editing room.
The biggest problem though is that the script…my God the script. The remarkable thing about the She-Hulk script is that it’s both too slow and too fast at the same time. The first episode, which runs forty minutes or so, feels like it takes 3 hours to watch. In that forty-minutes the story is completely rushed as there is no character development, no relationships fleshed out and no worthy story arc introduced.
For example, Jennifer Walters becomes a She-Hulk because she gets some of Bruce Banner/Hulk’s blood in her system. This sequence is so bland, forgettable and throwaway as to be astonishing. A kid playing with action figures would’ve given it more gravitas knowing that it’s the cornerstone of the entire series. In the show the event happens and is never commented on again…it’s just something that happened and is forgotten.
As for the cast…well…they don’t fare well at all but you can’t blame them as the dialogue they have to regurgitate is asinine.
Tatiana Maslany was great in Orphan Black but here she seems…off. Maslany is forced, unfunny and aggressively anti-charismatic. Maslany’s inelegant recitation of the odious dialogue is wooden and lifeless.
Speaking of wooden and lifeless, Mark Ruffalo utters every line of dialogue like he’s locked in a coffin suffocating on his own farts.
She-Hulk has eight more episodes to go and things could improve over those episodes, but considering the startlingly low quality of episode one, and of Marvel’s recent cinematic and tv output, I’m extremely doubtful.
The bottom line is that She-Hulk episode one is bad, but I’ll check back in midway through the series and again at the end of the series to let you dear readers know my ultimate ruling and whether She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of egregious storytelling malpractice in the first degree and deserving of the death penalty.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever twist on the Predator sci-fi action formula that results in the movie being the second best in the franchise.
Prey, the fifth film in the Predator franchise and a prequel to the previous films, made its exclusive premiere this past weekend on the streaming service Hulu.
The original Predator (1987), directed by the criminally (pun intended) under-rated, populist master craftsman John McTiernan (Hunt for Red October, Die Hard) which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his powers, and boasted a phenomenal supporting cast of hall-of-fame badasses, including Bill Duke, Carl Weathers and the scene-stealing future governor of Minnesota, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, with his classic line “I aint got time to bleed!”, was a supremely entertaining sci-fi spin on the ‘man is the most dangerous game’ premise.
The subsequent Predator films, Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) were without Arnold and McTiernan, and were incoherent, cringe-worthy embarrassments.
Which brings us to Prey, which is written by Patrick Aison and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, and stars Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers.
Prey is, if nothing else, very clever. It’s premise, setting the challenge-seeking hunter Predator alien in the early 1700’s in a region where the Comanche live, is simple yet original enough to revive this moribund franchise.
The plot revolves around Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman and accomplished healer and tracker who yearns to become a hunter/warrior like her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers).
There is no doubt that Prey got greenlit because the film espouses the ‘proper’ cultural politics of the current age, and checks all the right gender and ethnic diversity boxes. For instance, Naru’s navigating of the “patriarchal” Comanche culture in which she lives and rising above the limits imposed on her gender was a storyline that must’ve sent thrills into the loins of the suits at Hulu/Disney. No doubt the movie’s majority Native American cast did as well.
And while the film does signal its cultural/political virtue much too often for my tastes, and those scenes of vapid feminist defiance are by far the worst in the movie, it still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining piece of movie-making despite all the incessant, eye-rolling, girl-power garbage.
The film also works because Amber Midthunder as Naru is a compelling and charismatic lead. The luminous Midthunder’s naturalistic style is never too much or too little as she effortlessly carries the movie from start to finish.
Dakota Beavers as Taabe is also excellent, as he brings tremendous nuance to a role that in lesser hands would’ve been caricature filled with empty posturing.
While some might feel that a flaw of the film is that Naru and Taabe are the only truly fleshed-out characters, which they are. I actually felt that minimalist approach to character development helped the film stay lean, focused and on point.
The best part of the movie though is that director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison stick to the basics (protagonist gender swapping aside - which i admit is a major caveat) and make a Predator movie that would make Joseph Campbell proud due to its proper use of myth as its narrative foundation.
For example, like many coming of age stories or myths, Naru must cross geographical barriers, in this case rivers and ridges, to seek out the dragon that she must kill in order to ascend from childhood to adulthood.
Taabe, ever the dutiful big brother, has already made his own journey, and tries to mentor Naru, but there’s only so much he can do for her, as Naru must make the perilous journey herself.
Taabe’s pivotal role in propelling Naru on her journey and towards her destiny is right out of the Campbell playbook and will make fellow Jungians/Campbell enthusiasts knowingly nod in agreement.
Trachtenberg and Aison’s commitment to Campbell’s mythic storytelling fundamentals is what makes Prey such a psychologically satisfying film. It isn’t a great film but it is an entertaining one because it’s so satisfying to the audience’s unconscious mythic yearnings.
As for the movie-making itself, director Trachtenberg does solid work by once again staying true to storytelling fundamentals. He plants small seeds throughout the story and lets them grow to be useful later on in the story, and never deceives his audience or ignores the internal logic of the film. He also does a good enough job in visually telling the story, and despite some ups and downs he gives enough cinematic flair to the film for it to be worthwhile.
I also think that Disney’s decision to release Prey on Hulu is a wise one. The Predator franchise is on life-support, and it seems difficult to imagine a star-less Prey generating a great deal of box office at the moment. By releasing straight to Hulu, the film can build an audience slowly by word of mouth without the pressure of being labelled a box office bust. This approach will help future Predator films be viable for theatrical release.
Speaking of which, I couldn’t help but think about the potential future settings of the Predator franchise now that history is its playpen. Predator in Shogun era Japan, or in Mayan era South America, or Qing Dynasty China, or Aboriginal Australia, or early Zulu Kingdom Africa, or Ancient Egypt, Sparta or Rome. The possibilities are endless, and one can only hope that the Predator franchise stays the course and keeps making clever and interesting movies like Prey.
The bottom line is that Prey is the second-best Predator movie, a distant second to the original. If you like sci-fi action movies, and can tolerate a dose of vacuous, vapid and venal virtue signaling stuffed into a cool Comanche/Predator movie, then give Prey a shot, you might like it…I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I try not to put a bullet through our gray matter as we suffer through The Grey Man, the new Russo Brothers directed Netflix action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Topics discussed include awful acting, awful directing, awful writing, awful establishing shots, awful action sequences, awful Chris Evans and Netflix's awful future. On the bright side, listeners will get to hear Barry's spirit break when he learns some shocking news about the Grey Man movie universe.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 73 - The Grey Man
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW HAS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ho-Lee-Shit this $200 million movie is atrocious.
The Grey Man is the new action film directed by Marvel billion-dollar blockbuster makers the Russo Brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame) and produced by Netflix, which premiered on the streaming service on July 22nd.
The movie, which stars Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and tells the story of an off-the-books CIA hitman gone rogue, is most notable because its production budget is $200 million, which makes it the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. And you thought gas was expensive?
Inflation must be very real because $200 million just doesn’t buy you what it used to. The reality is that it would have been a much better decision, and infinitely more entertaining, to just use an intern’s iPhone to record Netflix executives lighting a $200 million pile of cash on fire than to make the disaster area that is The Grey Man.
The plot of the film exists but I’m not sure I can bring myself to actually write it as it’s so derivative and inane. Just know that a sort of Bourne-type CIA assassin (Gosling) goes off the reservation and now the CIA, most notably bitchy bureaucrat Denny Carmichael, played by a truly awful Rege-Jean Page whose acting style consists of nothing but occasionally yelling, are out to get him.
The Grey Man is one of those movies that’s so bad that it’s astonishing, as it seems impossible for so many professionals to be so incompetent at their jobs all at once.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Joe also co-wrote the script) are the most to blame for the shitshow that is The Grey Man. I cannot recall a film that was so poorly directed, as everything from the story to the dialogue to the visuals to the staging to the action sequences to the acting is abominable. In addition, the film is all over the map in terms of tone and feels like ten different movies, all bad, smashed together into one.
The action sequences, which no doubt account for the majority of the bloated budget, are so amateurish and poorly shot as to be criminal. One scene, which must have busted the bank, involves an inner-city European trolley chase and gun fight that looks like it was conceived and shot by a one-eyed man with cataracts who lives in a dumpster behind the School for the Artistically Impaired.
On top of that, the performances are so excruciatingly poor they would make Michael Bay blush.
Ryan Gosling is the star of the movie and plays Sierra 6, so named because “007 was taken”. How clever. Gosling is a charming actor and makes the most of the uneven snarki-ness, but he is not even remotely menacing as a bad-ass CIA assassin, and, thanks to the inadequacies of the Russo Brothers his action sequences are a blurred and obstructed mess.
The luminous Ana De Armas plays a laughably-not-believable tough-as-nails CIA agent working with Gosling’s 6 and then against 6 and then with 6 again. Her character makes no sense and her performance is as throwaway as the rest of the movie.
Chris Evans plays a mustachioed villain named Lloyd Hansen who looks like he just stumbled out of a low-end Provincetown hot spot named “Harvard Hunk Hole” on a steamy summer afternoon. Evans isn’t exactly Laurence Olivier…or Tommy Wiseau for that matter, and the most egregious thing about his performance in The Grey Man is that you can see that he actually thinks it’s amazing. It’s like the wind whistling through his empty skull is playing the Academy Award theme song in every scene and he gets hypnotized by it and actually believes it.
Watching Evans pout and sashay around the movie like a psychopathic Richard Simmons at a sold out Miami Beach Liza Minelli concert was the equivalent of watching the art and craft of acting get hit by an apocalyptic meteor….speaking of which, watching The Grey Man made me envious of the dinosaurs and their extinction.
Speaking of the apocalypse, poor Billy Bob Thornton is in the movie and plays some CIA type dude, and he gets the honor of speaking such sterling dialogue as “hey, she’s got a pacemaker, you asshole!” Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
To give you an indication of how little thought and time went into making this $200 million monstrosity, consider this, not once, not twice, but three times, the Russo Brothers use the same action movie trope involving a grenade to propel the story. As each instance of this idiocy occurred, I kept wondering if I was having a stroke and was suffering from fast-onset dementia. But trust me, despite wishing I was having a stroke so I could lose consciousness and escape The Grey Man, I wasn’t…it was all just the Russo Brothers not giving a shit or even trying when they made this anti-cinematic abomination.
The bottom line is, if someone told me that The Grey Man was actually a science experiment where a band of syphilitic monkeys were locked in a room and given a typewriter, a movie camera and an editing machine, as well as copious amounts of Jack Daniels and meth amphetamine, and then came out three weeks later with this movie in the can, I would’ve believed it but still thought they under-performed.
If you want tangible evidence of how poorly run Netflix is and why it is going into a nosedive, look no further than the atrocity that is The Grey Man.
I urge you to avoid this movie at all costs. You’ll hate yourself even if you just hate watch it…it’s that bad.
©2022
THE OLD MAN - FX/HULU
SEASON ONE - 7 EPISODES
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Starts great but loses momentum and reveals itself to be a mediocrity.
The seven-episode first season of The OId Man, the FX series starring Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, started out strong but came to a close last Thursday with a whimper.
The series, which originally aired on FX and is now available on Hulu, follows the exploits of Dan Chase (Bridges), a former CIA bad-ass now in retirement and hiding.
Chase’s hiding is unsuccessful though as the widower, who lives alone with his two dogs, discovers when an intruder breaks into his house, and this is no burglary, it’s a hit.
Apparently, Chase is wanted by just about everybody, from law enforcement to the intelligence community to terrorists and Afghan warlords, so he goes on the run.
Chase’s former intel handler, Harry Harper (John Lithgow), and his protégé Angela Adams (Alia Shawkat), are the ones who have to hunt down the aptly named Chase using a variety of black ops tough guys.
The first two episodes of The Old Man are, frankly, fantastic. The series sets itself up to be an action-thriller with Bridges as the aging but still brutally effective hero. There are some fight scenes in these early episodes that are brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed, and are as good as anything we’ve seen on screen, big or small, in recent years.
It seemed with the first two episodes that The Old Man was going to be a rip-roaring, grisly and grounded action series, like a tv version of those Liam Neeson Taken movies or John Wick or something. But then everything comes to a stand-still as the series shifts away from action and toward a bevy of spy thriller twists and turns that aren’t particularly thrilling.
Some of these twists and turns are surprising but some, including the big one revealed in the finale, are painfully obvious from early on and fall rather flat dramatically.
Besides the action sequences, the other thing that made The Old Man so promising early on were the performances.
Jeff Bridges is, and always has been, a phenomenal actor despite having decided for some inexplicable reason to talk like his mouth was full of Snickers bars some years back. And Bridges’ work in The Old Man is as stellar as you’d expect it to be.
Despite being on in years, Bridges is still very lithe and makes for a truly believable bad-ass. He also brings a bevy of gravitas to his role and his character’s vibrant inner life is readily apparent as his eyes glisten with the intensity of a tiger on the prowl.
Also good is John Lithgow, an actor for which I’ve never had much use. Lithgow’s Harper is a battle-hardened bureaucrat who is skilled at political knife-fighting, but he’s also a family man reeling from the death of his son and grandson. Harper’s fragility is masked by his cold, calculating exterior, and Lithgow makes him into a captivating character.
Also very good is Ali Shawkat as Angela Adams, Harper’s protégé and de facto adopted daughter. Adams has all of Harper’s instincts for political maneuvering seemingly without the soft-under belly of familial sentimentality. Shawkat imbues Angela with a steely determination and a sly sense of superiority and the result is magnetic.
The problem with The Old Man though is that it sets itself up spectacularly in those first two episodes but then it loses focus as the story unwinds. As exposition and flash-backs replace action, the series loses momentum and drama, and my interest.
Side stories involving Amy Brenneman’s Zoe, a women Chase meets on the run, and flashbacks involving a young Chase in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in the 1980’s, drain the series of any power and immediacy because they simply don’t work well.
The expanding of the story from a lone man’s struggle to survive into an expansive journey about the past and all sorts of side characters that lack worth, is like releasing all the air out of a balloon, and by the season finale, you’re left with a rather flaccid and forgettable series that wasted all it had going for it.
It was announced this week that The Old Man will be back for a second season next year. I doubt anyone much cares. Considering how precipitously it declined in its first season, it seems very likely that this series will be just another in a cavalcade of uninspired and underwhelming shows available on various streaming services.
The Old Man could have been appointment viewing and one of the more notable tv ventures available nowadays, but the wheels came off the wagon and viewers were left stranded in a storytelling sandpit that seems uncomfortably like all the other sandpits they’ve been led into over the last few years of tv viewing.
In conclusion, The Old Man could’ve been great television, but it blew its opportunity, and now it’s just another piece of forgettable storytelling detritus adrift in an endless sea of tv mediocrity.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.
Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.
What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.
Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.
Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.
I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.
Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.
Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.
Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).
Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.
I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.
Is it coherent? Nope.
Is it well-written? Nope.
Is it well directed? Nope.
Is it well-acted? Nope.
Is it a good movie? Nope.
The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.
Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.
It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.
I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.
As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.
Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.
Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.
The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.
Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.
Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.
Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.
Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.
And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.
Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.
Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.
It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.
In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.
As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.
©2022
MS. MARVEL
Season One - 6 Episodes - Disney +
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series is embarrassingly bad and embodies everything that is wrong with the current Marvel machine. Under no circumstances should you watch it.
I just finished watching the season finale of Ms. Marvel, the latest Marvel superhero series on Disney +, and my question is this…what in the hell are we doing? Seriously, like, what the fuck are we doing as a country, as a culture, as a species?
The six-episode series, which tells the origin story of Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel – a superhero obsessed teenage Pakistani-American girl living in Jersey City who discovers she has super powers, is the most embarrassing, most egregious and most-cringe-worthy piece of garbage Marvel has released on the small screen, which considering it came out right after the steaming pile of feces that was Moon Knight, is quite an achievement.
A brief rundown of the plot is that Kamala loves Marvel superheroes (Captain Marvel most of all) and wants to be one. Then through some family history and Pakistani lore, she ends up discovering she has powers but has to hide them from her loving but conservative immigrant parents and her friends. A journey from Jersey City to Karachi and back again ensues and there are some poorly written and poorly delivered expositional monologues and some hysterically bad action sequences and then it comes to the most-inane anti-climax imaginable.
Ms. Marvel sucks…it really, truly does suck, the reason for that is because Ms. Marvel as a character is extraordinarily dull, her origin story (at least the one presented in this series) is even duller and her superpowers are absurdly bland. The series itself looks unconscionably cheap, most notably its laughably amateurish special effects, not to mention the inept acting, insipid writing, incompetent directing and its mind-numbingly pedestrian action sequences.
The reality is that Ms. Marvel is, at best, a third-rate show for kids…and by ‘kids’ I mean really, really stupid, little kids. It’s like a superhero version of Hannah Montana or Lizzie McGuire or That’s So Raven, because it doesn’t show what life is really like for teenagers, but what adults think little kids think life is like for teenagers. The series would be better suited for Disney Kids or Disney Junior or whatever the fuck the money-hungry monsters at Mickey Mouse now call their mind-destroying, child indoctrinating channel.
Speaking of which, the star of Ms. Marvel, Iman Vellani, is, to her credit, a somewhat appealing presence – sort of like Hillary Duff as Lizzie McGuire or something like that, but she is also…just like Hillary Duff, a truly atrocious actress, and watching her try to vacuously mug, pose and preen her way through scenes is like watching a toddler repeatedly soil their Underoos.
To be clear though, Ms. Marvel’s awfulness is not Iman Vellani’s fault by any stretch, hell, you could cast Meryl Streep in this thing and still want to gouge your eyes out rather than keep watching it.
There has been a lot of hype around the series with critics fawning all over it, so much so that it is “officially the highest critically-rated Marvel series in history”, with a 98% critical score at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
Of course, this is just more proof of critic’s desperate virtue signaling and pandering than anything else. Critics are falling over themselves to adore Ms. Marvel simply because of the show’s ‘representation’ in the form of a South Asian centered storyline and diverse cast.
The critical praise of Ms. Marvel highlights the trouble with film/tv criticism in these hyper-politicized and polarized times. Namely, film/tv critics have placed representation, diversity and inclusion atop their hierarchy when evaluating a movie or show, with quality, creativity and artistry barely registering as something of value. These critics could never give an honest assessment of Ms. Marvel and excoriate it for its obvious failings because that would give comfort and aid to the bad people…or something like that. It would also open them up to attacks from the swarms of Savanarolas on Twitter who bring down the hammer on anyone who dare question the woke inquisition.
While Disney/Marvel may revel in the praise of the sycophantic simpletons who make up the Rotten Tomatoes roster of critics, they’re not faring nearly as well with audiences, as Ms. Marvel is officially the least watched of all the Marvel tv series.
Disney/Marvel and many intellectually impotent critics are blaming Ms. Marvel’s poor viewership numbers on…you guessed it, “racism!” This is par for the course and is standard operating procedure at the Disney distillery of dismal drama. The masterminds at the Mickey Mouse mansion make a shitty show or movie and then call people “racist” for pointing out how poorly conceived and executed the stupid, shitty show/movie really is. This happens all the time with the god-awful Star Wars shows and movies, and with the Marvel products as well.
Unlike most critics, but like most fans, I truly do not give a flying fuck about representation, diversity and inclusion, all I care about is quality, creativity and artistry…of which most of what Marvel and Disney vomit out onto the public nowadays, Ms. Marvel included, has none.
Am I supposed to pretend Ms. Marvel doesn’t suck just because the main character is a Pakistani-American and a Muslim? That seems absolutely absurd to me, and frankly, feels mightily paternalistic, condescending and cowardly.
The idea of a Muslim superhero is pretty intriguing, and if it that part of a character and story could be explored in a well-executed, serious and profound way, say, like the terrific Netflix series (which is now streaming on Disney +) Daredevil and how it used its main character’s Catholicism as a crucial part of his inner life and mythos, then I’d be all in. But the Muslim aspect of Ms. Marvel is the most offensively vapid and vacant bit of window dressing meant to do little more than check a box.
As for the claim that ‘racism’ is the motivating factor in audience’s dislike and distaste for Ms. Marvel, it is equally condescending and frankly, aggressively moronic.
It seems much more likely that audiences have stayed away from Ms. Marvel in droves because the character is a forgettable, fourth rate superhero that’s painfully new to the Marvel canon (she was created in 2014), so no one has ever even heard of her or cares about her.
Another factor is that Marvel fatigue post-Endgame is a real thing and is only growing stronger everyday as Marvel/Disney spew out one more piece of junk tv show or movie after another.
And on top of all that there are no “stars” in the show…I mean even the dreadful Moon Knight had Oscar Isaac in it.
Of course, if viewers did tune in to Ms. Marvel, they would’ve been met with such an incorrigibly incoherent story that they would’ve been wise to bail early…I wish I did. But lucky for you, dear reader, I watched this piece of shit so you don’t have to….and you really don’t have to.
The bottom line is that Ms. Marvel is just another buoy guiding Disney on their collision course with the deadly iceberg of wokeness, which worships representation, diversity and inclusion and ignores quality, creativity and artistry, a formula which will ultimately sink the previously-believed-to-be-unsinkable cash cow known as the good ship Marvel.
If you are one of the myopic mental defectives working at Marvel or Disney, grab a life-jacket and hop into a life-boat now, because by the looks of things your corporate caretaker is steaming full speed towards its own oblivion and is completely blind to its impending doom.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
THE BOYS
SEASON FOUR - 8 EPISODES - AMAZON PRIME
My Rating: 4.5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A batshit and brilliant evisceration of the monolithic Marvel superhero myth and America’s corrupt culture and politics
When the alternative superhero series The Boys first premiered on Amazon Prime Video back in July of 2019, it was a sublime, and well-deserved, kick in the nuts to the mega-Marvel monolith that had grown to dominate American culture like no other corporate IP before it.
The Boys, which is based on a comic book series of the same name, tore back the curtain of the superhero craze and exposed these superbeings for what they really are…narcissistic, megalomaniacal monsters used by the ruling elite to propagandize the masses into mindlessly worshiping corporatism, militarism and fascism.
The series was jarring for its savage, realistic violence and for its daring, cutting-edge politics. For example, in season one it more than implied, but nearly shouted from the rooftops, that 9-11 really was an inside job. Pretty ballsy for a piece of pop entertainment streaming on Amazon.
Well, The Boys are now back with their third season (8 episodes), which premiered its first episode on June 3rd and its season finale on Friday July 8, and despite some minor flaws, it’s as gory, gloriously gonzo, batshit, brilliant and beautiful as ever.
I will avoid spoilers but will just say that on the menu this season is penis spelunking, a superhero orgy, octopus fucking and hospital bed handjobs and many other obscenities and absurdities, and all of which are manic, mad and magnificent.
The machinations of the plot for season three are somewhat complex but remarkably easy to follow. The Boys, which consist of Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), M.M. (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fuluhara), are still on their seemingly Quixotic quest to destroy the “Supes” (superheroes) who have harmed them or their loved ones in one way or another.
Meanwhile, the Supes and their corporate overlords at Vought International are just as diabolical as ever and are intent on controlling the masses and expanding their power and profits by any means necessary. Sound frighteningly familiar? If you have half a brain in your head and eyes to see the world around you, it should.
Unlike the relentlessly politically-correct, anti-septic, cash-grab Marvel movies, The Boys boasts insightful and cutting social and political commentary that is more even-handed (maybe unintentionally so) in extending its middle-finger than it might appear on the surface. The series isn’t just some left-wing screed or right-wing rant as it eviscerates and devastates both sides of the universally vacuous and villainous corporatist, oligarchical, aristocratic, kleptocratc ruling party that currently enslaves America. The Boys is brilliant pop entertainment because it uses the cloak of a snarky superhero story to get out its not-so-secret, subversive sub-text about the vampiric power of American corptocracy, media mendacity and government duplicity, to a mainstream audience.
In addition to its penetrating and perceptive social and political commentary, it also features top-notch acting across the board.
Karl Urban is brutishly charismatic and charming as the foul-mouthed Butcher. Equally good is Jack Quaid as the doe-eyed Hughie, who is a complex character just beneath his goofy, scared-rabbit exterior.
Both Tomer Capone and Laz Alonso as Frenchie and M.M. respectively, have stand out seasons as their characters are given more depth and their backstories more fleshed out.
My favorite performance among ‘the boys’ is actually by the female, Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko. Kimiko is mute and Fukuhara fills her with such a visceral inner life and longing that she lights up the screen.
As for the Supes, there are a plethora of great performances to acknowledge there too.
Antony Starr’s Homelander – who is sort of a cross between Captain America and Superman, is one of the best/worst villains on television and boasts one of the most punchable faces imaginable. Starr’s performance is mesmerizing as Homelander barely conceals the hatred and insecurity boiling beneath his all-American surface.
Jessie T. Usher as the knock-off Flash, A-Train, is given more to do this season and certainly makes the most of it as the writers explore his race and his place in society.
Chace Crawford is spectacular as The Deep (basically a perverted Aquaman), and his storyline, which guts the self-help/celebrity industrial complex, is deliriously good.
Equally terrific is Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, a sort of Reagan-esque wet dream Captain America 1.0. Ackles gives complexity and depth to the character that in lesser hands would’ve been just an empty bad guy.
As for Nathan Mitchell who plays the masked Black Noir, his performance is difficult to judge, but the Black Noir storyline is spectacularly written and executed. I won’t give any of it away but that story brings an invigorating perspective shift and visual flair that I found greatly appealing, and ultimately extremely moving.
Other solid performances from the likes of Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve, Erin Moriarty as Starlight, Claudia Doumit as Victoria Neuman, and most especially a brilliant Colby Minifie as whipping post, errand girl and babysitter for supes Ashley, fill out a superb cast that raises The Boys to sublime creative heights.
In a time of rampant government and corporate corruption, media mendacity and artistic/entertainment conformity, watching The Boys brash and brazen approach, which features supreme writing, acting and directing, along with its decidedly unorthodox, anti-establishment ideology, is like walking under a crisp, cool waterfall on a stifling Summer day.
If you aren’t faint of heart, don’t mind blood, guts and bizarre superhero sexual situations, and like your superhero stories with an edge, then The Boys may very well be for you. It certainly is for me, and I highly recommend it as I believe it to be one of the very best shows currently streaming.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manic misfire of a Marvel movie. If you are a Marvel completist then save your money and wait for it to stream on Disney +.
In order to set the context for my review of Thor: Love and Thunder, which premiered in theatres Friday July 8th and is the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and the Marvel behemoth’s 29th movie overall, it’s important to note that I am an enormous fan of the film’s writer/director Taika Waititi.
Waititi directed my favorite Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnarok – of which Love and Thunder is a direct sequel, and also adapted his 2014 vampire comedy movie What We Do in the Shadows into my current favorite television show of the same name, which is set to premiere its fourth season on FX this coming Tuesday.
The reality is that Waititi’s distinctive comedic style is an acquired taste, and, like the new strain of Super Gonorrhea going around, I most certainly have acquired it.
Which brings us to Thor: Love and Thunder. As exhilarating as Thor: Ragnarok was, Thor: Love and Thunder is disappointing. Yes, it has its moments, but those moments are very few and very far between.
The film’s plot is relentlessly convoluted, and revolves around Gor the God Butcher, a surprisingly subdued Christian Bale, who seeks revenge on the gods for the death of his daughter. Gor kidnaps the kids of New Asgard, who are the perfect dream children for Disney’s human resources department because of their remarkable ethnic diversity, and uses them as bait to draw in Thor and his goofy companions.
The plot twists and turns make just about no sense at all, and the tonal shifts of the film are jarring to the extreme. Make no mistake about it, the film is a comedy, but it opens with a little girl dying and then puts other little kids in frightening peril as a key plot point. The comedic tone and the kids in peril plot mix together like birthday cake at a beheading.
Needless to say, this PG-13 movie is much too scary/dark to be suitable for kids under 13…and frankly, much too shabby to be worthwhile to adults with half a brain in their head.
There are some bright spots though, among them the brief appearance of the Asgard Players acting troupe, which features Matt Damon and Melissa McCarthy dramatizing great moments in Asgardian history on stage. As well as Korg, Thor’s sidekick (voiced by Waititi himself) repeatedly mis-stating Jane Foster’s name…a gag that made me laugh every time. There’s also an absolutely absurd appearance by a hammiest of hams Russell Crowe as Zeus. Crowe’s Zeus is a gonzo piece of bloated bizarreness but I found it amusing as hell.
Another very bright spot is Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is so good as Thor it’s simply miraculous. Hemsworth is, of course, buff beyond belief and impossibly handsome, but he’s also effortlessly charming and astoundingly funny.
Unfortunately, Natalie Portman is the exact opposite. Portman returns to the Thor franchise as Dr. Jane Foster, Thor’s ex-love interest, except this time, through some not very clear plot machinations, Dr. Foster is somehow turned into a Thor…and takes the title of The Mighty Thor.
Portman as Jane Foster/Mighty Thor is more wooden than a log cabin and makes a cigar store Indian seem lively in comparison. Portman pushes so hard to be frolicky and fun but she’s so stiff and unnatural that when she attempts to smile, she seems like a cadaver getting a colonoscopy.
Portman may very well be a talented actress, or she may not be, but what she definitely isn’t is a gifted comedic actress and that is glaringly obvious in Thor: Love and Thunder.
Other issues with the film abound. For example, Gor’s villainous minions are these shadow creatures that are so generic and bland as to be ridiculous.
These shadow creatures highlight the film’s other big problems, namely its lack of visual clarity and cinematic crispness, as well as its pedestrian fight sequences…in other words the movie features third-rate action sequences and looks like shit, which is criminal for a movie with a $250 million budget.
And last but not least, the movie, like seemingly all Marvel movies and tv shows nowadays, of course, features some heavy-handed human resources inspired social engineering and woke pandering and preaching. The previously mentioned rainbow of Asgardian kids being a perfect example. As is the cringiest of cringe scenes where Gor calls Portman’s Thor, “Lady Thor”, and she angrily responds “my name is The Mighty Thor! Or you can call me…DOCTOR! JANE! FOSTER!” My only wish was The Mighty Thor aka Dr. Jane Foster had been wearing a pink pussy hat in that scene for affect. That cringilicous scene along with the “female Avengers unite” scene from Avengers: Endgame, should only be legally permitted to be played in voluminous vomitoriums because they’re such gag-worthy, girl-power garbage.
On top of all that, the final act of the film is entirely rushed and completely devoid of any dramatic impact while being detached from narrative coherence.
Due to my love of Thor: Ragnarok and my Waititi fandom, I was looking forward to Thor: Love and Thunder. I was also curious to see if, after the cinematic and creative debacles (and for the most part, box office misfires) of the recent spate of Marvel movies, from Black Widow to Shang-Chi to The Eternals (God help us!) to Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, with the brilliant Waititi at the helm and the equally brilliant Chris Hemsworth in the lead, could stop the bleeding over at the Marvel money factory that pays for Mickey Mouse’s mansions. I am here to report that it doesn’t.
Thor: Love and Thunder will do fine at the box office, but it won’t signal a return to Marvel magnificence. The reality is that Marvel is in deep shit, and if they don’t realize that then they’re delusional. Their new movies are sub-par, their tv shows are cratering in quality (I’ll have a review of Ms. Marvel out late this coming week – here’s a preview…”YIKES!”) and it is now very clear that the Marvel monstrosity has lost the plot and has their head’s so far up their asses they’re incapable of finding it.
Marvel has dominated cineplexes and our culture for nearly fifteen years, but Thor: Love and Thunder is just one more piece of proof that the bloom is off the Marvel rose and I’m here to tell you that it ain’t coming back.
The bottom line is that Thor: Love and Thunder is nothing but a major disappointment. If you are a Marvel completist, then wait for Thor: Love and Thunder to stream on Disney + in a few weeks or months, and watch it then, because it simply isn’t worth your time and hard-earned money to see in the theatres.
©2022
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a piece of empty pop culture calories and shameless nostalgia delivery system but to its credit it is exceedingly well made.
When I sat down to watch the newly released season four of Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit sci-fi horror series, a ‘strange’ thing occurred.
Episode one began with a recap of what happened in season three as a reminder of what’s going on in the story…and I didn’t remember any of it…not a goddamn thing. I know I watched all of season three when it came out back in 2019, but for some reason I couldn’t recall a lick of it. So, I went back and actually watched all of season three again before diving into season four, and while it was vaguely familiar, it didn’t really ring any bells. I would’ve gone back and watched season one and two to jog my memory too but I just couldn’t commit that kind of time to something I’d completely forget anyway.
My Stranger Things amnesia could be a result of season three having premiered three long years ago, and goodness knows a lot has happened in those three years, in fact my failing memory could be a result of numerous head traumas inflicted over those three years as I banged my skull against the wall in a fruitless attempt to make the madness and moronity of our times disappear. Who knows?
Or maybe the reality is that I didn’t remember the details of Stranger Things because the details of Stranger Things are not worth remembering.
Which brings me to the one of the stranger things about Stranger Things, which is that while I have no idea what is going on in the convoluted plot, and while the four lead male actors, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp and Caleb McLaughlin, are among the very worst and most annoying actors currently working in entertainment, I still find myself thoroughly enjoying the show.
The reason for that is because it’s exceedingly well made by creator/writer/directors the Duffer brothers. While “the Upside Down” and various monsters and nefarious government agencies and all of that are all a blur, what isn’t a blur is the show’s commitment to its aesthetic and how beautifully designed, structured and photographed this whole series is.
The Duffer brothers are a couple of gloriously old school storytellers paying homage to their directorial forefathers through their skilled use of shadow and light, color, sound and music to convey an entire mood, and that is what makes Stranger Things so enjoyable an experience and so seductive, if not addictive, a series.
The brilliance of the Duffer brothers is also obvious in the basic premise of the Stranger Things pitch, namely that it’s a glorious nostalgia delivery system for Gen Xers filled with a Gen Z cast in order to interest younger viewers that skillfully exploits the archetypes and storytelling tropes of both the sci-fi and horror genres in familiar but original ways.
To its credit, Stranger Things was one of the first series in the recent wave to use 80’s music as a siren song to attract Gen Xers to a show geared toward Millennial and Gen Z viewers. The success of that approach is seen in season four’s use of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill” as a plot point, which has led to a rousing resurgence of Ms. Bush back into the spotlight and her introduction to a whole new generation.
Another plus for the show is that despite the truly atrocious performances from the four lead male actors (who it seems get worse with every passing day), as well as poor Winona Ryder – who is just awful and is an astonishingly hollowed out shell of her former self, the cast are actually very good.
Millie Bobby Brown is sort of the break out star of the show because of her impeccable bone structure, and while she is certainly a beauty and is decent as Eleven, the psychic warrior/screwed up kid, it’s Sadie Sink that is the major talent on the show. Sink’s Max is a complex and conflicted character and her portrayal is never anything but utterly compelling. One can’t help but hope that Sink stays the course and we get to see what she can do as she gets older.
David Harbour is also great as the charmingly rough and tumble sheriff, as are Joe Keery, Maya Hawke and Natalia Dyer as Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley, and Nancy Wheeler respectively. Keery in particular is outstanding as a comical leading man, and his repartee with Hawke is a poor man’s version of a 1980’s Indiana-set, vacuous teenage Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.
Season four was split into two parts, with the first seven episodes premiering on May 27th and the final two episodes premiering on July 1st. What was odd about this structure is that while the first part of season four was “normal” in that the episodes were roughly an hour long, the two episodes (episodes 8 and 9) of part two were an hour and a half and two and a half hours respectively. So, basically part two of season four is two feature films….which is kind of weird especially considering that it isn’t the series’ finale as season five is coming down the pike.
All that said, I had no problem with the length of those two episodes, and found them to be enjoyable enough that I kept watching them, so that says something. And the same is true of the entire series….it isn’t great or life changingly good, it is just an extremely well-made piece of pop entertainment.
If you like 80’s nostalgia, good music, horror and sci-fi movies and can tolerate a very uneven cast that is both brilliant and boorish, then Stranger Things is a very pleasant distraction from our often times infinitely stranger and more frightening reality.
©2022
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great acting, writing and directing make Barry one of the b est shows on TV.
I’ve been a huge fan of the black comedy series Barry ever since it premiered on HBO in March of 2018. The show, which is created by and stars Bill Hader, tells the story of Barry Berkman, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who becomes a hitman and then unsuccessfully tries to transition out of a life of violence by attempting to become an actor in Hollywood.
I loved Barry because of its gloriously dark humor, its insightful and incisive take on the inanity of acting classes and the pursuit of success in Hollywood, and its exquisite writing, directing and acting.
Season three of the series, which runs for eight episodes, finally premiered on HBO in late April and finished in mid-June, and I just completed watching it last night.
Season three gets off to a not-so-great start, in fact it was so not-so-great that I thought it had jumped the shark and lost its mojo entirely. But after a shaky first three episodes, Barry once again finds its rhythm and gets into an irresistible groove, so much so that the final three episodes are as good as it gets on television.
In order to avoid spoilers, I will only say that the mantra for season three of Barry is that ‘the bill has come due’. Barry spent the first two seasons being a reluctant but very good hitman (and very bad actor), but now the hunter has become the hunted as the families of his victims are out for revenge.
As Barry slips deeper and deeper into a tangled web of his own making, he simultaneously dives deeper and deeper into an existential ocean searching for answers, or meaning, or purpose.
Bill Hader is outstanding as he perfectly captures Barry’s increasing agitation with life in an ever-increasing pressure cooker. The fear in his eyes is palpable as he desperately tries to maintain his cool and his cover as his world crumbles around him.
Supporting characters go through their own tumultuous and tortuous journeys as well, with Barry’s girlfriend Sally (a fragile and combustible Sarah Goldberg) riding the nauseating roller coaster of the Hollywood machine for her profoundly unsatisfying 15 minutes of fame. Barry’s acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (a gloriously inimitable Henry Winkler), is stuck on the same narcissistic, self-immolating, humiliating Hollywood ride, but for the last 50 years.
Naïve dimwit Chechen gangster NoHo Hank, a truly terrific Anthony Carrigan, is navigating his own fantastically preposterous maze as well, which includes his closeted homosexuality, deadly Chechen gang politics and a love affair with Cristobal (Michael Irby), a leader in a rival Bolivian gang.
Both Carrigan and Winkler are so great in their roles that it makes me giddy. These aren’t the usual sitcom caricatures, these are well-written, multi-dimensional characters brought to life by gifted, committed actors of great skill, and the results are glorious.
The rest of the cast, from big roles to small, are top notch as well, from D’Arcy Carden as Natalie Greer, Sally’s assistant, to Elizabeth Perkins as Diane Villa the head of BanShe the network for women, to Tom Allen as Mitch the philosopher baker.
The writing is equally as good, and in the final half of season three is just fantastic. But what is most appealing about Barry, this season in particular, is the direction. Each sequence is so well designed, both cinematically and dramatically, that it feels like a master filmmaker is behind the camera.
Bill Hader and his co-creator Alec Berg directed all the episodes in season three, and their work is jaw-droppingly impressive. From the viscerally unnerving motorcycle sequence to the podcast sound-room sequence to the FaceTime to Chechnya/police raid/Bolivian hit sequence, all of the action sequences are unique in design and execution, and it makes Barry a glory to behold. Most television directors, even the good ones, have limited visual and creative imagination, usually because their ambition is stunted by the limitations of the medium and the business of television. But Hader and Berg are not infected by any such afflictions, and their vision is so clear and their direction so crisp, that Barry feels like cinema rather than tv.
As for the comedy, season three is less aggressively funny than its predecessors, but the humor that is there works because it is so deliciously dark. For example, there’s an action sequence, the aforementioned “sound-room” scene, that is incredibly disturbing, but which made me laugh out loud at a particularly bizarre moment amongst the depravity. This is what is so great about Barry, it isn’t forcing the laughs, it just lets you marinate in the madness of its premise and then jolts you with dark absurdities that are undeniably funny even if they are barbaric, or maybe even because they are barbaric.
Due to Covid and all the rest, we had to wait three years between season two and season three of Barry. Thankfully, HBO has greenlit season four of the series, and hopefully the wait between season three and four will be considerably shorter because Barry is undeniably one of the very best things on tv, and I’d like to think we deserve good things.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I run for our lives from the dino-disaster that is Jurassic World: Dominion. Topics discussed include Jaws/Jurassic Park and the primordial fear of moving down the food chain, the mystery of awful writer/director Colin Trevorrow's career, and the sizzling sexual chemistry between Chris Pratt and Blue the Raptor.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion
Thanks for listening!
©2022
Acting Coach & Teacher Westside Los Angeles
FILM
Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve
The Zone of Interest directed by Jonathan Glazer
Poor Things directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
The Holdovers directed by Alexander Payne
Anatomy of a Fall directed by Justine Trier
Ferrari directed by Michael Mann
The Boy and the Heron directed by Hiyao Miyazaki
Godzilla Minus One directed by Takashi Yamazaki
TV
Succession (HBO)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (TV)
Barbie (pod)
Killers of the Flower Moon (pod)
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (pod)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (pod)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (pod)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Mandalorian Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up - White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian
History of the World Part II (tv)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (pod)
The Banshees of Inisherin (pod)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoilers)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler free)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio(pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (pod)
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Moment of Contact - Documentary
House of the Dragon - Current Fantasy TV Champion of the World
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (pod)
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU(pod)
Obi-Wan Kenobi(TV)(first 3 eps)(final 3 eps)
Jurassic World: Dominion(review)/(Pod)
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Lost Daughter(pod)
Pam and Tommy(TV)
Peacemaker (Ep.1-3)/Peacemaker(finale)(TV)
Nightmare Alley(pod)
Everything’s Gonna Be All White(TV)
Ozark(TV)
Finch(pod)
Hawkeye(TV)
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
Succession(TV)
Dopesick(TV)
Ted Lasso Season Two(TV-pod)
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
Y: The Last Man(TV)
Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace(TV)
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union(TV)
The Prince(TV)
What If?(TV)
CODA(pod)
WandaVision/Winter Soldier/Loki(TV-pod)
No Sudden Move(pod)
We the People(TV)
Bo Burnham: Inside(pod)
Tenet(pod)
Exterminate All the Brutes (TV)
Coded Bias (TV)
Coming 2 America(pod)
Ted Lasso(TV-pod)
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
Recipe for Seduction(pod)
The Queen’s Gambit(TV-pod)
The Crown(TV)
Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice
Spitting Image(TV)
Cursed(TV)
Monty Python’s The Life of Brian
Lance(TV)
The Last Samurai(pod)
The Social Network(pod)
Inception(pod)
John McTiernan Films(pod)
There Will Be Blood(pod)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy(pod)
Hell or High Water(pod)
Zodiac(pod)
Ex Machina(pod)
Contagion(pod)
Space Force(TV)
The Last Dance(TV)
Fleabag(TV)
The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
Once Upon a Time…in. Hollywood
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
War for the Planet of the Apes
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
Batman v. Superman : Dawn of Justice
A Very Pleasant Awakening : Thoughts on a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Derek & Orange is the New Black
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: Lee Daniel's The Butler
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: August: Osage County
LIVE MUSIC REVIEWS
La La Land : An Analysis - Political Subtext
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
The Big Short : A Review, a Diagnosis and a Warning
Sicario: A Review and Reports From Down the Rabbit Hole of the Drug War
Citizenfour : A Review and Random Thoughts
Knight of Cups : A Review and Dispatches From the Great Malick Civil War
The Birth of a Nation : A Review and Commentary
ACTING TECHNIQUE AND THEORY
Marlon Brando, The Big Bang and the Birth of Modern Acting
Stillness: Lessons from Redford, DeNiro and Penn
Al Pacino : Top 5 performances
Requiem for a Heavyweight: James Gandolfini
On Grief and Acting: Revelations from Hamlet in the April of my Discontent
Ethan Saylor and a Lack of Empathy Part One
St. Patrick's Day : The Five Best Irish Films
AWARDS NONSENSE
1st Annual Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Annual Mickey Awards (2015)
3rd Annual Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Annual Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Annual Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Annual Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Annual Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Annual Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Annual Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Annual Mickey Awards (2023)
1st Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards(2015)
3rd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2023)
Must-See Documentaries
Can’t Get You Out of My Head directed by Adam Curtis
HyperNormalisation directed by Adam Curtis
Century of the Self directed by Adam Curtis
The Power of Nightmares directed by Adam Curtis
LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA PODCAST
Season 1 - 2020
Ep. 2 - Marriage Story
Ep. 8 - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Ep. 9 - Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Ep. 11 - Coronavirus and Contagion
Ep. 14 - Hell or High Water
Ep. 15 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Season 2 - 2021
Ep. 35 - Promising Young Woman
Ep. 40 - Tenet and Nolan Films
Ep. 41 - Top 5 Alien/UFO Films
Ep. 42 - No Sudden Move and Top 5 Heist Movies
Ep. 43 - WandaVision/Falcon and Winter Soldier/Loki
Ep. 44 - Bo Burnham: Inside & The State of the Comedy Union
Ep. 45 - Black Widow
Ep. 47 - Movie Streaming Recommendations
Ep. 50 - Eternals
Ep. 52 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Season 3 - 2022
Ep. 57 - Spider-Man: No Way Home
Ep. 67 - Ozark Season 4 Part 2
Ep. 68 - Dr. Strange in the Mutiverse of Madness
Ep. 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion
Ep. 72 - Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU
Ep. 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Ep. 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Ep. 88 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Ep. 89 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Season 4 - 2023
Ep. 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin
Ep. 95 - Oscars Wrap Up and Black Panther : Wakanda Forever
Ep. 98 - Ghosted
Ep. 99 - Air (pod)
Ep. 100 Part One - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 100 Part Two - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 101 - Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Ep. 103 - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Ep. 104 - Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Ep. 106 Ted lasso Season Three
Ep. 107 - No One Will Save You
Ep. 108 - Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Films
Ep. 109 - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Ep. 115 - Killers of the Flower Moon
Ep. 122 - Deadpool and Wolverine
DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW - 2024 ELECTION
The Trump Legal Charade and Other Uncomfortable Truths
Biden, Trump and the 2024 Election
Vices and a Stunning Lack of Virtues
Cheney, RFK Jr., Gambling and More
PROPAGANDA WATCH
November 2023 Propaganda Report - More 60 Minutes
Propaganda Watch: Ireland Edition
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Truth, Justice and the Curious Case of Chris Kyle
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
The Tragedy of Charlottesville and the Age of Identity
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Election 2016 : Random Dispatches From the Shitshow
Election 2016 Post-Mortem : Crossing the Rubicon and Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Election 2016 Aftermath : A Practical Handbook to Survive and Thrive in the Era of Trump
BLOG POSTS
2024
Hollywood’s Self-Inflicted Box Office Problem
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
10th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon
2023
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Ahsoka (TV)
Encounters (TV) - UFO Documentary
Winning Time (TV)
Jury Duty (TV)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Barry (TV)
Succession (TV)
Adventures in Idiocy - Dylan Mulvaney, Max and Monty Python
The Mandalorian - Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up (White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian)
The Last of Us (TV)
Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II
9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - Review and Commentary
House of the Dragon Season One - Final Analysis
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
The Greatest Beer Run Ever - Review and Commentary
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
The Rings of Power: Amazon’s Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens
The Last Movie Stars documentary
House of the Dragon - Episode One
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Episode One
Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Final Verdict
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Come and See (1985) and the War in Ukraine
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira, Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Has Defeated Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends the Woke Over the Edge
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv are crumbling just as new taboos around speech are being erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
A Not-So-Expert Opinion on our Future With the Coronavirus
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
What to Watch: TV Suggestions to Pass the Time
Coronavirus: Thoughts and Musings
Lost Opportunities and Dastardly Deeds in the Age of Coronavirus
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
The Super Bowl Halftime Shitstravaganza
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Martin Scorsese Top Five Films
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Anecdotal Observations on Elizabeth Warren
Thoughts and Musings: Featuring Fredo, Bed Bug, Lady Kicker and More
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Angry Americans, Shark Attacks and Synchronicity II
Quentin Tarantino Films Ranked Worst to First
Propaganda and the Delusion of Wokeness
Women’s Soccer, pay Equality and Pandering
Movie Subscription Services and Box Office Booms and Busts
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
The Emotionalist Buffoonery of Charles Blow
Brief Thoughts Before the End of Game of Thrones
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Game of Thrones: The Battle of Winterfell and the Fog of War
United Sheep of America: Assange, Fascism and Liberal Hypocrisy
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
Beating the Dead Horse of Grammy Award’s Racism
2018
Bush, Bertolucci and a Requiem for Truth
2018 Mid-Terms: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Serena Williams and Her Basket of Deplorables
Burt Reynolds and the End of the Movie Star
The Existential Catholic Crisis
The Awful File: Oscars, Millennials, Brie Larson and More
Thar He Blows: Charles Blow Has a Question...I have an Answer
Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two
Disturbing Dispatches From "Real America"
American Animals, Anthony Bourdain and Late Stage American Empire
Song of Experience in A Quiet Place
The Farcical Fury Over the White House Correspondence Dinner
Morgan Freeman and the #MeToo Whispers
Next Stop - Speculation Station: Syria and Scott Pruitt Edition
I Told You So: Conor Lamb Edition
A Wrinkle in Time, Film Criticism and White Liberal Paternalism
Thoughts on the Academy Awards
#MeToo: It's Not Broke, but You Can See the Cracks
Queen Oprah: Pope of the Cult of Personality
A Week of Holes: A$$holes, Sh*tholes and Rabbit Holes
Some Brief Thoughts on the Golden Globes
2017
Perversion and the Religion of Self
He Who Laughs Last - Edward S. Herman Edition
The Death of Edward S. Herman and the Death Knell for Liberalism in America
Sex Scandals and the Phases of a Panic
While We Were Sleeping...The Dogs of War Awoke
JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins
JFK and the Conspiracy Conundrum
The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don't
Eternal Darkness of the Artist's Mind
Mayweather, McGregor and the Heart of Darkness
Deconstructing Criticism of Oliver Stone's "The Putin Interviews"
The Whitewashing Controversy Part Two: A Response
Caesar Americanus : Trump, Shakespeare and the American Illiterati
Greg Gianforte, Punching Nazis and the Absence of Moral Authority
JOE McCARTHY WAS RIGHT!! Shocking Revelations From a Manchurian Op-Ed Writer
Curious George and the Banana Republic
Through the Looking Glass : Truth and Lies in Week One of 2017
Theatre of the Absurd : Road to Damascus Edition
Meryl Streep, Character and Moral Authority
TWIB : This Week in Bullshit (Feb 17- 24)
President Trump : A Viewer's Guide
Raping Truth : Brando, Butter and Last Tango in Paris
#OscarsSoWhite: Don't Believe the Hype?
The Way of the Gun: Meditations on America and Guns
OP-EDS
2022
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan - Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
In the Same Breath Docdumentary
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
In the Heights and the Woke Albatross
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Culture of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Defeats Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends Woke Poseurs Over the Edge
What Killed Michael Brown? Review
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv crumble just as taboos around speech are erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
2018
A Curious Case of Mystery Attacks, Microwave Weapons and Media Manipulation
In a Fit of Anti-Trump Pique, Liberals Shamelessly Embrace 'Deep State' Criminals
Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness
Captain America v Trump in Battle of the Useful Idiots
Hollywood's Self=Serving and Misguided Immigration Protests
Trump is Deadpool and We're All Doomed
Kanye Tweets He Loves Trump, Civilization on Brink
Hollywood's Malicious Propaganda Dehumanizes All Russians
The Pentagon and Hollywood's Successful and Deadly Propaganda Alliance
Profiles in PC Courage: Brave Millennials Attack 'Friends'
Echoes of Totalitarianism in #MeToo and Russia-Gate
2017
#MeToo Wildfire Rages Out of Control
Has Fear of Putin Seized Hollywood?
Stephen Colbert Heads For Russia Looking For Laughs; He'd Find Better Material at Home
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? Trump, That's What!
Trump - Griffin Scandal Underscores American Celebrity-Obsessed Culture
Suffering Children as Propaganda and the Jimmy Kimmel Story
Colbert Attacks Trump, Was it Homophobic? Hysterical? Or Both?
Oscars and Grammy Racism : Perception or Reality?
La La Land is Hollywood's Version of "Make America great Again"
Buzz Lightyear Claims Hollywood is Nazi Germany, Captain America to the Rescue?
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Snoop Dogg Barks Up The Wrong Tree
Express Yourself? Madonna Don't Preach!!
Goodbye Ringling Brothers, Hello Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow
JOHN OLIVER
The John Oliver Twist 1 : Court Jester as Propaganda Tool
The John Oliver Twist 2 : The Drumpf Affair and Little Bill Maher's Power Fetish
The John Oliver Twist 3 : Waxing Brazilian and Waning Credibility
The John Oliver Twist 4 : Out Trumping Trump on the Great Wall of Trump
John Oliver Twist 5 : Things Said and Unsaid
GENERAL
Irishness, Cultural Memory and the Curse of St. Patrick's Day
BOOKS
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Dreamland by Sam Quinones
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade
Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60’s by Tom O’Neill
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
The Duel by Anton Chekhov
Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov
The Bishop by Anton Chekhov
The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Projecting the Shadow : The Cyborg Hero in American Film by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz
Re-Membering Frankenstein : Healing the Monster in Every Man by G.H. Ellis
Man and His Symbols edited by C.G. Jung
Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C.G. Jung
Under Saturn's Shadow : The Wounding and Healing of Men by James Hollis
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou
Dark Alliance : The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb
Whiteout : The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
Boundaries of the Soul by June Singer
Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant by Daryl Sharp
Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louis Von Franz
Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger
Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt by Sylvia Brinton Perera
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
MUSIC
Centennial Collection by Robert Johnson
The Anthology, 1947-1972 by Muddy Waters
L.A. Woman by the Doors
Hendrix in the West by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Born Under a Bad Sign by Albert King
Burglar by Freddie King
Indianola Mississippi Seeds by B.B. King
Rhythm & Blues by Buddy Guy
The Complete Recordings by Mississippi John Hurt
Trouble in Mind by Big Bill Broonzy
His Best : The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection by Howlin' Wolf
Traveler by Chris Stapleton
The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth by Sturgill Simpson
A/B by Kaleo
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Charlie Parker by Charlie Parker
Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins
Go! by Dexter Gordon
Beauty is a Rare Thing : The Complete Atlantic Recordings by Ornette Coleman
Incesticide by Nirvana
Purple by Stone Temple Pilots
Mingus Ah Um by Charlie Mingus
Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam
Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden
Dirt by Alice in Chains
Brown and Roach by Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Moanin' by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderley
Superfly (Deluxe Edition) by Curtis Mayfield
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
Sea Change by Beck
Signs by Tedeschi Trucks Band
Walking the Line: The Legendary Sun Recordings by Johnny Cash
Misterioso by Thelonious Monk
Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins
The Sky is Crying by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Me and Mr. Johnson by Eric Clapton
The Story of Sonny Boy Slim by Gary Clark Jr.
Bootleg Series Vol. 8 : Tell Tale Signs by Bob Dylan
Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk by Jeff Buckley
Harvest by Neil Young
Email: mpmacting@yahoo.com
