- Benjamin Purcell Morris
© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent
Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo
On this episode, Barry and I hop on one leg down to New Orleans to talk all things Causeway, the new Jennifer Lawrence movie now streaming on Apple TV +. Topics discussed include my shameless name-dropping, J-Law's lost mojo, and the basic fundamentals of film-making missing from this movie.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway
Thanks for listening!
©2022
On this episode Barry and I man the trenches and do battle as we discuss the new Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front. Topics discussed include Barry's unhealthy obsession with Spartacus, the troubling paucity of anti-war movies and the powerful dichotomy of cinematic beauty and wartime brutality.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An absolute mess of a movie.
Don’t Worry Darling, the much-hyped and much-discussed sophomore directorial effort from actress Olivia Wilde, premiered with a resounding thud in theatres back on September 23rd and is now available to stream on HBO Max…and I just watched it.
My three-word review of Don’t Worry Darling would simply be, “definitely worry darling”. Unfortunately for you, brevity has never been my strong suit, and therefore neither has wit, so I’ll expound further upon my thoughts.
Don’t Worry Darling was actually deemed an Oscar contender heading into this year because Hollywood had crowned Olivia Wilde as the new “it” girl moviemaker after her first film Booksmart (2019) received positive reviews but underwhelmed at the box office.
I was less enthused about Booksmart and Ms. Wilde’s alleged directing abilities than my brethren in the critical community. It seemed to me that Booksmart, a middling rip-off of Superbad, was, like Lady Bird (2017), vastly overrated because Hollywood and weak-kneed critics wanted to celebrate a female filmmaker even when they made an at-best mediocre movie.
Booksmart and Lady Bird, and their directors Olivia Wilde and Greta Gerwig, were hyped beyond all proportion as a result of Hollywood and the access media being desperate to show allegiance to the #MeToo mania gripping Tinsel Town. Hollywood’s obsession post-2016 election and post-Weinstein scandal has been to hire as many female and minority moviemakers as possible, the overwhelming majority of which have been completely devoid of talent, skill and craftsmanship. If you want to understand why the movie industry and the cinematic arts are suffering so much right now, look no further than this blind addiction to diversity, representation and inclusion over talent, skill and craftsmanship. That’s not the only reason for the recent drought of good films, but it’s certainly a major reason for that shortage.
It was due to this current female filmmaker hype and hysteria that Don’t Worry Darling got labelled as an Oscar contender before anyone even saw it. But then the discussion about the film quickly shifted from the female empowerment of it all to the various “scandals” surrounding the production.
There was the alleged feud between the film’s star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde. There was the rehashing of the firing of Shia LeBouf which included a back and forth about exactly why he was fired, the result of which revealed Olivia Wilde to be a bit of a liar. And then there was the allegation that Ms. Wilde was having an affair with LeBouf’s replacement, cast member and co-star Harry Styles, during filming…while she was married to Ted Lasso…oops, I mean Jason Sudeikis. Oh dear.
That’s a lot of negative press swirling around a movie. The problem though is that those gossipy stories are infinitely more compelling than anything that actually happens in Don’t Worry Darling.
Describing the plot of Don’t Worry Darling is a difficult if not impossible thing to do, not because I want to avoid spoilers but because it’s so ridiculously convoluted and incoherent.
The basic premise, I guess, is that there’s a couple, Alice and Jack, living in what someone suffering from #MeToo induced mania would describe as some sort of banal precursor to the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale disguised as a 1950’s supposed utopia in the California desert named Victory. Victory – a less than subtle declaration of victory for the patriarchy, is a company town where all the men work on the mysterious, top secret “Victory Project” for their boss Frank (Chris Pine), who seems more like a cult leader than anything else.
While Jack (Harry Styles), a bargain basement looking James Bond with the fancy car to match, and his fellow employees go off to work every day, their cadre of beautiful housewives stay home and cook, clean and gossip.
Alice, played by the ever-captivating Florence Pugh, is one of these sexy housewives who gossips with the other sexy housewives in between making sumptuous dinners, keeping a tidy house and having Harry Styles perform oral sex on her.
But something seems off. Alice can’t quite put a finger on what it is but she keeps having dreams and flashbacks to…something…that is not of this neat and controlled world she finds herself inhabiting.
As the plodding movie progresses and the plot further unfurls, all of the supposed promise of that premise evaporates into thin air. Eventually there’s absolutely nothing of any note left to hold onto.
The film is a D-level Stepford Wives for the modern generation as it’s obviously trying to make some profound statement about the patriarchy and the inherent evil of men, but to call the film’s gender politics trite would be the most profound of understatements.
To be fair to the film, there are some positives. For example, Florence Pugh is terrific. I remember the first time I see Pugh in a film, it was 2016’s Lady Macbeth, and I instantly recognized what a special actress she was, writing, “Pugh…has stardom written all over her. She is a beautiful woman, but her beauty never overshadows her talent. She is blessed with the skill of being able to convey her character's intentions and vivid inner life with the slightest of glances. Pugh is a charismatic and powerful screen presence who exudes an intelligence and strength that few young actresses possess. I am willing to bet that she has a most stellar career in front of her.”
Pugh is such a dynamic, magnetic and charismatic screen presence in Don’t Worry Darling that she’s able to overcome the albatross of the moronic script and middling moviemaking and avoid embarrassing herself.
Cinematographer Matthew Libatique also does notable work as he gives the film an appealingly crisp visual style and luscious, cinematic flair.
As for everything else…oh boy…its bad.
Screenwriter Katie Silberman needed at least three more drafts of this script as it simply makes absolutely no sense as currently structured.
Wilde also drops the ball consistently as the film’s pacing is relentlessly lethargic yet the plot also moves too fast in the second half to be remotely comprehensible.
Pugh aside, Wilde is incapable of drawing solid performances from her cast, most obviously from herself in a supporting role. Wilde’s acting is just as bad as her directing, as there’s a lot of posing and preening and histrionics but nothing believable.
I remember the first time I ever saw the film’s co-star Harry Styles. I had never heard of, or seen, his boy band One Direction, because, you know, I’m a grown man and not a teenage girl. But then while watching Sesame Street with my young son I saw this group of absurd pretty boys singing some song about the letter “U”. I had no clue who these people were or the tune they were using, but I immediately noticed this one guy who jumped off the screen. Upon further investigation I learned it was Harry Styles. As silly as this sounds, Styles’ Sesame Street performance impressed the hell out of me because it oozed with an effortless charisma and lack of self-consciousness that you just can’t teach. In addition, he seemed to innately understand how to fill a screen, another skill not easy for people to pick up.
I then saw Styles in Christopher Nolan’s magnificent movie Dunkirk, where he played a desperate British soldier trying to survive and escape France as the Germans closed in on Dunkirk. Styles’ role was pretty minimal in the movie, but once again I was impressed by him.
The next time I saw Styles was in a post-credit scene for the truly unwatchable Marvel monstrosity Eternals. I have no idea what Styles was doing in that moronic scene, and frankly, it looked like he had no clue either.
And now Styles, who is currently dating Olivia Wilde to much fanfare, has two movies out. The first is Don’t Worry Darling and the second is My Policeman, a film I intend to see very shortly.
As much as I had high hopes for Styles’ acting career, I see them fading very, very fast as the bloom is definitely off the Harry Styles acting rose. He’s truly, abysmally awful in Don’t Worry Darling. I’m rooting for this guy to be good and goddamn he is just one cringe after another in this movie. There are scenes where his amateur acting status is laid so bare as to be uncomfortable. And his girlfriend/director Olivia Wilde does him no favors as it seems he wasn’t “directed” at all but rather left to his own rather limited devices.
That said, I did find it somewhat amusing seeing pretty boy pop star Harry Styles with glasses, bad skin and greasy hair in one of the movie’s flashback/dream sequences.
The bottom line regarding Don’t Worry Darling is that the various controversies surrounding the film have nothing to do with how bad it is. To be clear, I don’t care who Olivia Wilde is sleeping with, unless of course she wants to sleep with me, something I’d be more than happy to accommodate.
What I want from Olivia Wilde is not juicy gossip but a good movie, something she seems incapable of delivering. On Don’t Worry Darling Wilde’s bloated ambition vastly exceeded her minimal talent, and the end result is a movie that is so poorly put together that it’s actually embarrassing.
My hope for Wilde’s next film, and she’ll definitely get another one, is that she reins in her inflated ego, loses the infatuation with trite cultural politics and instead focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling and the art of cinema. A man can dream.
©2022
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW…BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS AWFUL AND YOU SHOULD NEVER WATCH IT!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Abysmally amateurish movie that is entirely and utterly forgettable in every single way.
I’m old enough to remember when Jennifer Lawrence was a solid and sometimes spectacular actress who also happened to be the most captivating and compelling movie star in Hollywood.
In 2010, at the tender young age of 20, she had proven her acting bona fides by giving an absolutely scintillating, Oscar-nominated performance in the uncompromising arthouse gem Winter’s Bone.
She then made some extremely savvy career moves. First, she joined an existing popular film franchise, X-Men, as Mystique, and then originated a franchise as Katniss Evergreen in The Hunger Games. These moves, which made not only Lawrence but a lot of other people a lot of money, solidified her standing in the industry and with younger audiences, and set her up to consistently have high profile work with a built-in fan-base for the foreseeable future. Very smart.
She also made a savvy move to continue to reinforce her status in terms of prestige by following up her artistic success in Winter’s Bone by teaming with Hollywood auteur and Oscar darling David O. Russell for three films. The result of this collaboration was a Best Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which she won at 22 years old, followed by a Best Supporting Actress nomination for American Hustle (2013). Pretty impressive.
Back then Lawrence was a charming presence and a luminous beauty, with impressive acting chops and artistic bravado. She was also sexy yet approachable because she was goofy, grounded and genuine. She was the woman other women wanted to be and the woman guys didn’t just want to have sex with but hang out with.
But then things started, slowly but surely, to fall apart.
The Hunger Games franchise lost steam after the first two movies as budgets expanded and box office diminished. The final two movies of the four-film franchise continued to make money, but they failed to capture the cultural imagination of the earlier films.
The collaboration with Russell hit a snag as well with the 2015’s Joy, which saw Lawrence miscast and resulted in the movie being a misfire. Lawrence and Russell have not worked together since.
The X-Men franchise found new life with Lawrence in the cast for her first two movies, X-Men: First Class (2011) and Days of Future Past (2014), but then immolated with the abominable X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) and the catastrophic to the point of ending the franchise, Dark Phoenix (2019).
Between Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix another auteur tried to use Lawrence to elevate an arthouse film. That auteur was Darren Aronofsky and the movie was Mother! (2017), a mindbogglingly ambitious cinematic enterprise that ended up being an epic disaster despite Lawrence’s noble efforts in it.
She also tried to start another franchise with Red Sparrow (2018), a spy thriller about a Russian woman trained in the art of sex and seduction. The movie garnered some headlines because Lawrence was naked in it, but unfortunately her nudity was the only good thing to be found in this dreadful dud.
This stretch of bad movies resulted in Lawrence stepping back from the industry for a bit. In 2019 she got married and in 2022 she gave birth to her first child.
This brief pause in her career could have been a reset, and Lawrence could’ve come back and reclaimed her title as the biggest star, or the best actress, or both. But that’s not what happened.
In 2021 she co-starred in Adam McKay’s apocalypse comedy Don’t Look Up. What was remarkable about Don’t Look Up is that it’s easy to forget that Jennifer Lawrence is in it. She isn’t bad in it, she just isn’t very memorable, which is not something you’d ever expect to say about Jennifer Lawrence.
The film is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as a Leonardo DiCaprio movie first, and an Adam McKay movie second. Lawrence never comes into the equation.
Which brings us to Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence’s new film which is streaming on Apple TV +.
The movie is almost instantaneously forgettable for a variety of reasons, such as the meandering script and the amateurish direction. But what makes Causeway so alarmingly bland is that Jennifer Lawrence seems utterly lifeless and charisma-free in every scene she inhabits.
Yes, her character, Lynsey – who was wounded in Afghanistan and is now back home in New Orleans and trying to get back to Afghanistan, isn’t supposed to be some dynamic presence, but what is striking about Lawrence ‘s performance is that she is so dead behind her eyes. There is no internal life, no fire in her eyes, or belly or anywhere else. It was unimaginable to me that I would ever feel like Jennifer Lawrence was just going through the motions of a role, but here we are.
This dead-eyed performance is accentuated by the moribund script which gives Lynsey essentially zero character arc, but still, Lawrence used to be the type of actress that could fill this character with something…extraordinary. And now she’s unable to bring the most minimal bit of life to her.
A great actress would’ve created something out of the nothing that is Lynsey. A movie star would have brought a boatload of charisma and magnetism to the Lynsey and made audiences root for her. As much as it pains me to say, Lawrence is no longer a great actress or a movie star, as she is incapable of doing either.
Another actor considered top-notch by some people in the know is Brian Tyree Henry, who plays James in Causeway, a local mechanic who fixes Lynsey’s truck and strikes up a friendship with her.
I’ve never thought Henry was as great as everybody else says he is…and his trite work in Causeway reinforces my skepticism.
To be fair to Lawrence and Henry, the acting is the least of the problems of Causeway.
The script is atrocious as the story goes nowhere, the characters have no arc and the drama is non-existent.
The biggest problem of all though is director Lila Neugebauer. Neugebauer is a theatre director and this is her first feature film…and it shows. The most rudimentary aspects of moviemaking go awry in Causeway. For example, a freshman film student knows to never put somebody smack dab in the center of the frame and yet this happens so consistently in Causeway as to be maddening.
In another scene, Henry’s James reveals an important piece of information about his body, that he has a prosthetic leg. In the scene James tells Lynsey about his leg and then lifts his pant leg up and shows it to her…but the director never shows this to the audience either in the wide shot or in a close-up. It’s as if they couldn’t afford to just get a prosthetic leg and shoot it in a cutaway or something. What makes this all the more bizarre is that later in the film there’s an entire sequence showing that James has no leg. This is just the most rank amateur filmmaking possible.
In another scene, Lynsey visits her brother in prison and we find out her brother is deaf. Of course he’s deaf because everyone in this movie has to be either handicapped, gay, or gay and handicapped. Anyway, Lynsey and her brother have a long and seemingly important conversation through sign language at the prison, but for some inexplicable reason halfway through the scene the sub-titles disappear. I assume this is some artistic choice on the part of Neugebauer, and it’s a laughably bad one.
The bottom-line regarding Causeway is that it’s not just a dull, languid, listless misfire of a movie, it’s that it feels like the end of the line for Jennifer Lawrence being a relevant actress and movie star.
Lawrence could’ve gotten away with playing this type of role back when she was the life of the Hollywood party in 2013 or 2014. She could’ve been Lynsey and brought her vivacity and vibrant inner life to the work and screen and it would’ve been accepted by the audience and notable to critics, with the caveat that a different, much better, director were at the helm.
But now, with Lawrence having lost her movie star mojo and also apparently her acting chops, this role and this movie come across as nothing but an artistically anemic, dramatically lethargic, narratively meandering exercise of which there is no meaning or purpose.
I personally think the world is better when Jennifer Lawrence is a relevant movie star and actress, and I sincerely hope that happens again someday. But if I’m being honest, after watching Causeway and ruminating on the downward trend of her movies over the last decade, I’m not optimistic.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic film that tells a story that is as relevant today as it’s ever been.
It is morbidly ironic that as German director Edward Berger’s bleak and beautiful new remake of the classic World War I film All Quiet on the Western Front begins streaming on Netflix, that all is most definitely not quiet on Europe’s Eastern front.
It’s not insignificant that the movie, a remake of the 1930 Academy Award Best Picture winner based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which recounts the tale of a group of young German men intoxicated by the fantasy of fighting in World War I who are then eviscerated by the brutal reality of it, should premiere while a vicious war rages on Europe’s Eastern front between Ukraine and Russia.
The lesson of the book and all film iterations of All Quiet of the Western Front is that war is a fruitless, savage endeavor that, like an insatiable, gruesome beast, devours men’s bodies as it mangles their spirits and souls.
Of course, we know all of this to be true about war, and yet, we in the West, in the U.S. in particular, are such thoroughly disinformed, misinformed and propagandized Russo-phobic war fetishists and superhero fantasists that we convulse with glee at the notion of escalating the war in Ukraine – a war which we started via the U.S. backed Maidan coup and ensuing slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, up to and including calling for more muscular American military intervention and even the use of nuclear weapons.
This is all madness…but as All Quiet on the Western Front teaches us, all war is madness, and some form of extreme psychosis is required to participate in it. Berger’s two-and-a-half-hour film effectively captures this madness, from the young men’s giddy rush to enlist at all costs to their grim death sprint out of the open air coffin trenches and across the hell of no man’s land.
The movie is exquisitely and exceptionally photographed, and that cinematic beauty juxtaposed against the inhuman brutality of the behavior captured in the frame is jarring and deeply unnerving.
Berger also uses a technique which I almost always find off-putting but which works here, which is using modern music in a period piece. The music is a grinding, industrial guitar that accompanies the young German men as they take their first few steps out of the fantasy of war and into the reality of it. This music is used sparingly throughout, but it is remarkably effective in conveying the sense of this war, as is true of all wars, as being a mindless meat grinder, industrial in its level of dehumanization and carnage.
The opening of the film, of which I will refrain from revealing the specifics, is simple yet extraordinary in transmitting this same sensation of war as mass murder incorporated, and it sets the stage for the rest of the film to expound upon that thesis.
The battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front are realistic, disturbing and exceedingly well-executed. Director Berger and his cinematographer James Friend are able to maintain audience orientation while never sacrificing artistic vision. The battles look, and therefore feel, grounded, gritty and gruesome.
Cinematographer Friend masterfully lights and composes his frame not only in the battle scenes but in the quieter moments. There are shots of landscapes, trees and the sky in this film that would look right at home in a Malick movie or framed in a museum.
The acting, particularly Felix Kammerer as the lead Paul Baumer and Albrecht Schuch as Kat, are terrific as both men bring quiet intensity and sensitivity to their roles. Kammerer’s mastery of the thousand-yard stare and Schuch’s innate humanity elevate their performances and the movie.
The rest of the cast are subtle and superb as well, bringing life to what in lesser hands would be well-worn war movie stereotypes.
The film is not perfect though, as the narrative break aways to follow the ceasefire negotiations among the German contingent of bureaucrats, headed by the great Daniel Bruhl as Matthias Erzberger, feel like they should be in a different movie. These sections are interesting, but they break the spell of the film by removing the viewer from the myopic madness in the muck and mire of the front lines. I understand the desire to want to take a glimpse of things from 10,000 feet so to speak, but in this case, it works against the film’s better interests and drama.
That said, the rest of the movie is glorious as it vibrates with a sort of dramatic Malickian chaos mixed with existential inevitability that is captivating, compelling, exhausting and unnerving.
This movie should be mandatory viewing for Americans, the majority of whom are vociferous cheerleaders for the current war in Ukraine. These American idiots with Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios are no different that the young German men at the center of All Quiet on the Western Front eager to prove their worth and courage, except, of course, that those Germans didn’t just pose and preen about war on social media, they actually went and fought and died in it.
The neo-con, armchair tough guys who’ve gotten us into every war of my lifetime, of which we’ve won none, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now Ukraine, are like the bloated and bloviating military bureaucrats in All Quiet on the Western Front as they’re eager for other men to pay dearly for the exorbitant faux-nationalist checks that their flag-waving egos were so excited to write. The neo-cons con is to destroy their host nation from within as they accuse dissenters from the self-destruction of being traitors (or in the case of Ukraine - Putin shills and apologists) . These nefarious neo-cons always demand other, more masculine, working class men sacrifice their bodies, minds and souls for the sake of the neo-con’s fragile eggshell egos and deep-seated genital insecurities.
If you follow media narratives throughout history, this war in Ukraine has all the markings of America’s typical modern war psyops/propaganda playbook. There’s scaremongering using the delusional domino theory about some expansionist enemy/ideology, be it communism (Vietnam), Islamism (Afghanistan/Iraq) or Putinism (Russia), that will conquer the earth if the U.S. don’t role play as Churchill to some new Hitler. And there’s always a new Hitler, an alleged madman who is a history breaking tyrant that is simultaneously an evil genius and an incorrigible, bloodthirsty idiot. Today it’s the media-crafted Bond villain Putin. Before him it was the madman Saddam, or the madman Qadaffi, or the madman Bin Laden, or the madman Ho Chi Minh and on and on and on.
Will watching All Quiet on the Western Front wake up American morons from the establishment media’s Russo-phobic propaganda spell and remove from the memory hole the U.S.’s and Ukraine’s role in starting and enflaming this war? No, probably not. Nor will it disabuse Americans of the notion that they are the good guys and that this is a good war, as there are no good wars and there are no good guys fighting in them.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a fantastic movie, but it’s not a miracle worker and it would take a miracle for America and the rest of the West to wake up from their propaganda-fueled dream of the war in Ukraine as history-making hero machine and to see it for what it really is, a senseless, money-making meat grinder, which contains within it the possibility of a worldwide war of unimaginable carnage.
All Quiet on the Western Front is Germany’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It most definitely deserves to be nominated, and in my mind is thus far the number one contender for the award.
You should watch All Quiet on the Western Front because it’s an excellent film, and also because it contains lessons that we in the West should already know but apparently need to learn over again, and fast…namely, that war is hell and only devils want it.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but smart and original horror movie that keeps you on your toes. If you like horror, you’ll love this.
I must confess that I don’t consider myself to be much of a horror movie afficionado. That’s not to say that I dislike horror movies, just that a horror movie has to be very good movie for me to enjoy it. I know people who just adore the genre and watch every horror movie and love it just because it’s a horror movie, but that’s not me.
My taste in horror is pretty specific, I love supernatural horror movies like The Shining, The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, and I also like classic horror films. For example, this year on the week of Halloween I watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as well as the Universal Monster Movie classics Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and thoroughly enjoyed them all for their originality, craftsmanship and artistry.
In contrast, I didn’t watch the most recent and allegedly last movie in the seemingly endless Halloween franchise, Halloween Ends. I loved the original Halloween (and most John Carpenter films) but I just don’t see the need to ever watch another Halloween movie.
In the wake of Halloween, the holiday not the movie, I did sit down and watch a new horror movie that has generated some buzz recently and which is now streaming on HBO Max. That movie is Barbarian, which is written and directed by Zach Cregger, and stars Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgaard and Justin Long.
Barbarian was released in theatres in September and despite having the most minimal of marketing budgets, it generated an impressive box office of $43.5 million against a $4.5 million budget.
I knew nothing about Barbarian prior to seeing it and the HBO description simply says that it tells the story of a woman who gets stuck sharing an AirBnB with a strange guy. Red flags immediately went up for me when I read that description as I assumed the movie was going to be just another flaccid #MeToo-men-are-monsters movie. As a devout kidnapping enthusiast who over the years has kept a multitude of women captive in my incredibly creepy basement, the last thing I want to watch is another scolding “men are awful” movie, thank you very much.
Fortunately, Barbarian masterfully plays with that expectation, and while it most certainly is a meta-textual meditation on #MeToo and the menace of men, which at times gets a bit too heavy-handed, it’s also a sophisticated sub-textual criticism and fascinating deconstruction of the #MeToo archetype.
I will not even begin to delve into the plot of Barbarian in order to avoid any semblance of spoilers, but will only say that, thankfully, the movie is so deftly directed and written by Zach Cregger that it’s never what you expect it to be. In fact, the film uses viewer’s preconceived notions, assumptions and cultural conditioning against them to always keep them off-balance. The film keeps its audience on its toes and is always one step ahead.
The film is structured in three acts with each successive act luring viewers deeper and deeper into the disorienting maze that is Barbarian.
The first act, starring Campbell and Skarsgaard, is so well-done as to be astonishing. Cregger plants various notions into the audience’s mind as to what type of film this is going to be…a Detroit-based Amityville Horror? A mixed-race The Sixth Sense or a mixed gender Single White Female? A straight-forward rip-off of Saw? Or is it an homage to all of the above and more?
Just when you think you know what’s going on in Barbarian, Cregger nudges you in a different direction and leads you by your nose down into a very dark and disorienting path.
Act two features the criminally under-appreciated Justin Long in a fantastically Long-ian role that spotlights his likeability and immense talent. Once again, I will not get into specifics of plot, but the jump from act one to act two is so jarring as to be cinematically glorious.
I admit that act three is the weakest of the three, and I found it to be considerably less engaging, intelligent and challenging, but, once again without giving anything away, I think that has to do with the type of horror movie that act three is paying homage to…which is my least favorite type of horror.
The thing I enjoyed the most about Barbarian is that while it’s certainly a #MeToo movie, it never panders and or signals its socio-political virtue too much. It tackles that complex topic with a nuance and complexity that is shocking for a low budget horror film.
Also tantalizing is how Cregger turns the film into a profound statement not just on the predatory nature of men but also on the apocalyptic results of Reaganism on America and the dehumanizing nature of poverty.
While there were certainly some flaws in Zach Cregger’s directing, most notably in a scene shot in dim light that fumbles perspective (to avoid spoilers I won’t say anything more than that) and act three’s many mis-steps, he’s obviously a filmmaker with some interesting ideas. One can only hope that Barbarian is a stepping stone for Cregger to make even better things.
The bottom-line regarding Barbarian is that if you are a horror afficionado you’ll love this movie as it operates from a deeply well-informed position in the genre. If you are, like me, a rather fair-weather horror fan, or are less-inclined to enjoy the genre, Barbarian is good enough to be worthwhile even though it sort of loses its way in act three.
The reality is that 2022 has thus far been an utterly abysmal year for cinema, so Barbarian, despite its glaring act three flaws, stands out because it’s a well-crafted, original piece of work, and that is reason enough for me to recommend it.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I head to Detroit to confront our darkest fears as we talk all things Barbarian, the sneaky-good horror hit currently streaming on HBO Max. Topics discussed include the joy of Justin Long, the misery of the Motor City, and why exactly does Barry feel so at home in creepy basements?
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 81 - Barbarian
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made, well-acted series that gets better as it goes along. The best of the current fantasy tv bunch.
House of the Dragon, the prequel to HBO’s massive hit series Game of Thrones, concluded its ten-episode first season on Sunday night.
My first impression of House of the Dragon was tepid, as I found its first episode to be rather middling, but I’m happy to report that as its first season progressed the show got progressively better.
The series is not as good as its esteemed predecessor, but it did benefit by being in direct competition against another much-hyped prestige fantasy tv series, Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which debuted a week after House of the Dragon.
The Rings of Power was an embarrassing, amateurish, unmitigated disaster, and by comparison, House of Dragons is absolutely stellar. House of Dragons defeated The Rings of Power like Mike Tyson obliterated poor Michael Spinks back in the day - by brutal first round knockout, and now stands as the current undisputed, undefeated Fantasy TV Champion of the World.
In our current art/entertainment destroying age where cultural/political issues such as diversity and representation rule the day and talent and quality are rarely considered, it can be easy to confuse competency with mastery. House of the Dragon is not a masterful piece of work, at least not yet, but it stands out due to the mere fact of its baseline cinematic competency.
For example, in the season one finale the closing scene is a joy to behold because it is so deftly written, directed and acted, something which never occurred in The Rings of Power.
In the scene, where Daemon brings tragic news to Queen Rhaenyra, there is no dialogue. The story and the drama are conveyed to the audience through visuals. It is a rather simple scene, but it is very effective because of its simplicity. And that level of simplicity is a sign of the director and producer’s confidence in their storytelling and their filmmaking, something that was very evidently missing in The Rings of Power.
The confidence and competency of the producers and directors of House of the Dragon, who put together the cast, writers, costume and set departments, is in stark (no pun intended) contrast to the hapless and helpless bunch of buffoons who ran the good ship The Rings of Power into the rocks. The writing, acting and filmmaking that elevated House of the Dragon are what you get when people know what they’re doing are in charge, and the two-bit, throwaway soap opera of The Rings of Power is what you get when Bad Robot interns trying to fill diversity quotas are at the helm.
To be clear, House of the Dragon isn’t perfect. For instance, the time jumps were often jarring and scuttled some dramatic momentum, and some narrative choices, like when Rhaenys fails to torch the Hightowers on coronation day, beggar belief as it was not only the most emotionally satisfying thing to do but also the most rational thing to do. But House of the Dragon captivates because it boasts both superb aesthetics, most notably the costumes and sets, and most importantly, sublime acting across the board. Paddy Considine, Matt Smith, Rhys Ifans, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke, Milly Alcock and Eve Best were all superb on the show.
Considine’s performance as the conflicted and often feckless King Viserys was a triumph and a testament to his abundant talent.
Matt Smith’s dark turn as rogue Prince Daemon revealed his impressive level of skill and craftsmanship.
The transition from young Rhaenyra and Alicent, played by Milly Alcock and Emily Carey respectively, to adult Rhaenyra and Alicent, portrayed by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, could have been catastrophic, but went off without a hitch. Alcock’s growth into the role of young Rhaenyra was glorious to behold and when D’Arcy took over the role, she didn’t skip a beat. Carey struggled to captivate as young Alicent, so when Cooke took over the role it blossomed and became pivotal to the drama of the show.
Rhys Ifans and Eve Best as Ser Otto Hightower and Princess Rhaenys respectively, are two fine actors and their craftsmanship elevated their roles to glorious heights.
All of these actors and even all of the ones I haven’t mentioned, were vastly superior to the second-third-and fourth rate actors hamming it up on The Rings of Power. Which begs the question…why didn’t Amazon spend at least a little bit of their billions bagging big-time actors to fill their Tolkien fantasy world?
As for House of the Dragon, its first season ended on a dramatically potent note, and portends that the best is most definitely yet to come, which will no doubt generate excitement when season two comes around. By contrast, The Rings of Power stumbled and staggered through its flaccid first season and never generated any significant drama so it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most die-hard sycophants tuning in to its second season.
Game of Thrones, particularly its earlier seasons, was a truly masterful piece of television, and while House of the Dragon doesn’t measure up to that high standard, it is a faint enough of an echo of that glorious show to still be considered appointment viewing. There is definitely room for improvement, and hopefully season two can make that leap. Considering the arc of season one, I’m actually optimistic that House of the Dragon will grow to be even more worthwhile as it progresses.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I head to Kahndaq to go toe-to-toe with Black Adam, the new DC superhero movie starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Questions debated include to Rock or not to Rock? Will aliens murder us to put us out of our cinematic misery? And who ya got...The Rock or John Cena?
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 80 - Black Adam
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW..BUT THE MOVIE IS SO BAD IT DOESN’T MATTER!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bad, boring movie.
I just watched Black Adam, the new DC superhero movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, which tells the tale of, you guessed it, D-level superhero Black Adam, a 5,000-year-old super being awakened to either wreak havoc on modern-day earth or save certain segments of it, and there’s only one thing I can take away from the film…that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is going to eventually be the President of the United States of America.
I don’t think The Rock is going to be president because the movie is great and he’s fantastic in it. The movie is garbage and The Rock makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Sir Laurence Olivier. To give an indication of how bad Black Adam is, after the film, my date, a much younger woman who, the last time we went to the movies we saw Eternals, debated which movie was worse. We concluded Eternals was worse…but it was close.
No, the reasons I think the The Rock will be president are multitude. The first of which is that, even people who loathe his consistently atrocious movies, like me, still begrudgingly say that The Rock seems like a nice guy because he does seem like a nice guy. Americans love the idea of the “nice guy” president, which is how we got not only dementia-addled pedophile Joe Biden, but also bailout Barack Obama – the drone king and Espionage Act champion, and sociopathic war criminal George W. Bush (remember – he was the guy people wanted to have a beer with…yikes!).
Secondly, like his presidential predecessors (most recently The Donald), The Rock is a raging sub-mediocrity that has consistently failed upward throughout his life despite not actually being good at anything but self-promotion. Once you get past his incessant charm offensive it becomes clear that The Rock is so devoid of substance that even his attempts at style feel vapid.
Coincidentally or not, The Rock’s presidential bona fides are fully on display in Black Adam as he kills people with ease and without a second thought, and does so with a cock-eyed smirk on his face. Like numerous previous presidents, The Rock as Black Adam kills all these people in the Middle-East, but unlike those other presidents, the people he kills in the movie are almost universally white. I’m sure some will see that as progress.
Put on your tinfoil hat because Black Adam feels like a rather shameless subliminal and symbolic two-hour campaign ad for The Rock’s presidency directed at the only constituency that truly matters – the behind-the-scenes, nefarious power brokers who pull the strings in our perpetually fucked-up world. The soulless, blood-thirsty beasts at the World Economic Forum, as well as members of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Club of Rome, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, and the Bilderberg Group, among many others, will adore Black Adam, and will no doubt loudly receive the message from The Rock that he is all-to-happy to fellate them and serve their interests, and they will act in kind to make him the charming front-man to cover for their relentless deviousness and deviancy.
For example, the Illuminati hand symbol is a major plot point in the film, and is the symbol for the superhero/anti-hero Black Adam. The Illuminati symbol leads to and unleashes Black Adam – a Christ/anti-Christ figure, awakening him from a 5,000-year slumber. Black Adam’s rise brings all the non-white peoples of Khandaq, some exploited shithole in the Middle-East, to join together to repel, of all things, Satan. Yes…Black Adam is basically the second-coming of Christ but this time he’s a ruthless killer who splits Satan in two – again more duality symbolism. You see Black Adam isn’t actually destroying Satan, he’s destroying the Christian archetype of the last 2,000-years. The new ruling archetype will be an even older, more barbaric, more savage, less forgiving one, and it will usher in an equally barbaric, savage and unforgiving age.
In terms of just pure modern-day, mindless American politics, The Rock’s Black Adam is a champion of non-white people, for that is who he represents and rules over. Black Adam even performs the most blatantly false of symbolic acts when he destroys his new throne atop Khandoq to show that he’s not a king, he’s a man of the people. How subtle.
Delicious conspiratorial musings aside…and boy are they delicious, Black Adam is less an actual movie than a series of dull movie trailers strung together with barely the least bit of coherence.
Black Adam is a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the DC film universe. When DC goes otherworldly instead of gritty, things get shitty really quick. Gods and spells and ancient dog shit make for bad plots, bad cgi, bad action, and bad movies.
The action sequences in Black Adam are almost as dull as the non-action sequences, which is quite an accomplishment for director Jaume Collet-Serra. The film has all the visual style of month-old roadkill.
The script is, not surprisingly, laborious. The back story of Black Adam is convoluted and stupid, and the modern-day story lacks any and all interest and intrigue.
The characters are, across the board, moronic, annoying, or both.
The non-superhero characters, Adriana and her son Amon, are the types of people you pray get killed in every scene in which they appear. Amon, played by Bodhi Sabongui, is the most irritating character in any movie I’ve seen in recent memory. Amon is basically a Middle-Eastern Eddie Furlong from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and The Rock’s Black Adam is Arnold’s good guy Terminator who must be taught that killing is bad and what catch-phrases to say. Like Furlong’s teen John Connor, Amon skateboards – and is super fucking annoying. I’ve never wished so much for a character to be murdered in my entire life.
The collection of D minus level superhero characters aren’t any better.
Poor Aldis Hodge, a usually appealing screen-presence, plays a race-washed Hawkman and is given nothing but catch-phrase buffoonery to regurgitate. Noah Centineo is supposed to be the comic relief as Atom Smasher, but isn’t funny. Quintessa Swindell is a nearly invisible Cyclone, who may be the dullest superhero ever created. And finally, Pierce Brosnin plays Dr. Fate…and is actually pretty good. I’d prefer to see a Dr. Fate movie than a Black Adam one.
The Rock has been accused of always playing The Rock in his movies, and that holds true in Black Adam…and reinforces my subliminal and symbolic presidential campaign ad thesis.
The Rock’s biggest flaw as an actor is that he is completely devoid of any genuine charisma and is unconscionably dull. He is, at heart, a meathead wrestler who thinks arching an eyebrow is clever and meaningful.
To his credit, the guy is 50 and looks more like a superhero than any superhero we’ve ever seen, so he obviously works hard in the gym and with his pharmaceutical team, but at some point, you’ve got to bring the goods. Schwarzenegger was a steroid addled meathead too, but he had at least some inner life to him on-screen. Stallone too fits into the steroid/meathead type too, but he imbued his characters with a certain sad-eyed, sad-sack persona. The Rock isn’t Arnold or Sly, he’s a sort of dead-eyed, cheap imitation of them. But that won’t stop him from ruling us all from the White House someday.
But for now, The Rock will have to try and rule the world from the box office. And while fans will no doubt flock to see Black Adam…the movie is not going to break any box office records. Word of mouth will be brutal, and this movie, unlike The Rock’s political ambitions, will quickly fade from the spotlight and public consciousness. But that won’t stop the Sauronic powers that be from acquiring this one Rock to rule them all. You’ve been warned.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I grab our magical dufflebag filled with a never-ending yet mysteriously weightless supply of beer and head into a war zone to discuss The Greatest Beer Run Ever, the new Peter Farrelly movie currently streaming on Apple TV. Topics discussed include awful acting, bad movies about great stories, and the curse of endless and empty streaming content.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1/2 star out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series should be thrown into the fiery depths of Mount Doom.
Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which just concluded its highly-anticipated first season, was the tech behemoth’s attempted fantasy foray into the land of prestige TV.
So, was Bilbo Bezos’ billion dollar bet on building his one ring to rule them all in the form of a J.R.R. Tolkien TV universe worth those beaucoup bucks?
Nope.
It’s not hyperbole to declare that The Rings of Power is an unmitigated disaster as it’s gone over about as well as an all Hobbit (or Harfoot) team competing in the NBA.
It’s difficult to know the exact ratings for the series as streamers are coy about specifics, but it’s not difficult to see that the show was a catastrophe creatively and gained zero cultural traction except in generating memes that mocked it.
The sprawling series, which chronicled various, rather flaccid dramas across Middle-Earth in the Second Age involving Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Harfoots and Humans, felt astonishingly small for something with such large ambitions and attempted scope.
The final two episodes of the series were touted as the episodes that would vault The Rings of Power out of the morass of the miserably sub-mediocre episodes that came before it and into the public consciousness. But boy-oh-boy that ‘twas not to be.
Episodes seven and eight were just as painfully amateurish as the rest of the series.
The big battle billed in episode seven was in practice a small skirmish that felt foolish and looked absurd, like something scrapped together from the cutting room floor of an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, rather than something in a billion-dollar tv show.
Then there were the big revelations in the season finale that weren’t very revealing at all. Sauron was unmasked – even though any idiot with half a brain in their head already knew who Sauron was all along, and then there was the pseudo-mystery of the Gandalfian wizard who the lawyers haven’t figured out yet if they can actually call him Gandalf. Not exactly earth-shattering or even drama-inducing.
Aesthetically, the series, despite its bulging budget, looked and felt like a show on the low-rent CW network. The costumes and sets probably weren’t cheap but sure as hell looked cheap. And the paucity of background actors made every well-populated scene seem like a high school drama class rehearsal.
The writing on the series, in both the dialogue and the narrative, was shockingly pedestrian to the point of literary malpractice. Considering the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, only previous experience was fetching coffee at J.J. Abrams’ Bad Reboot…oops, I mean Bad Robot production company, this is less than surprising. The only surprising thing is that Amazon invested a billion dollars to do business with these two simpletons.
Payne and McKay were considerably more committed to adhering to Amazon’s cultural political agenda of diversity uber alles and girl boss empowerment garbage than to staying true to Tolkien’s luxurious lore.
The other enormous issue with The Rings of Power is the abysmal cast. Much internet outrage and counter outrage ensued due to the series casting minority actors in what had been white roles in Tolkien’s written works and in Peter Jackson’s film versions. The question for me remains regardless of their race or ethnicity, why cast such bad actors? At their very best these are soap opera level actors…at worst they should be digging ditches in community theatre. Game of Thrones and its prequel The House of the Dragon, have some massive talent among its acting ranks – both well-known and newly discovered…so why couldn’t Amazon shell out some decent money for good, never-mind great actors?
What bothers me the most about the failure of The Rings of Power is that it could have, and should have, been great.
Tolkien’s writing is a rich and glorious garden from which many fruits can grow and prosper, but when the pesticides of cultural politics are introduced, they act not as growth agents but as poisons that destroy.
The evidence of this is plain to see in Peter Jackson’s highly-successful Lord of the Rings films, which while not perfect, are at least foundationally committed to Tolkien’s lore. In contrast, Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy takes a bite from the culturally/politically poisoned apple and is thus neutered of psychological power resulting in the films faltering. The same is true of The Rings of Power, which fails to understand the power of Tolkien’s myth and instead embraces the superficial (cultural/political), and ends up producing an insipid, if not insidious, piece of vapid non-entertainment that’s incapable of being satisfying on any level, most notably psychologically.
The best way to understand how universally shallow The Rings of Power is, and what a failure it is, is that even the people who claim to like it will never watch season one over again. Another damning piece of evidence is that even the sad sack sons of bitches who vociferously defended the series from the get-go, most notably establishment critics who fawned over the series due to its cultural politics, are now admitting the show is a “stinker”.
Regardless of what I, or the bevy of Bezos bought media shills, have to say about The Rings of Power, Amazon has committed five seasons and more than a billion dollars to the series. But considering how bad the show is, and trust me, it really is bad, the biggest billionaire flex of all would be for Bilbo Bezos to not give a shit what anyone else thinks and just keep setting his money on fire to produce a show no one but he likes or cares about.
Ultimately, all I can say about The Rings of Power and about a philistine like Bilbo Bezos having all that money to burn is…what a terrible waste.
©2022
On this episode, Barry and I let the wind blow up our dresses as we discuss the bleak Marylin Monroe bio-pic Blonde, directed by Andrew Dominik and starring Ana de Armas. Topics discussed include the mystery of Marilyn's Cuban accent and shifting aspect ratios, Netflix's curious foray into the land of NC-17, and the incandescence of the one and only Marilyn Monroe.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 78 - Blonde
Thanks for listening!
©2022
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****
My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. DO. NOT. WATCH. This is easily the worst Marvel show (no small feat) and one of the worst shows I’ve seen in quite some time.
In Rob Reiner’s brilliant 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, Reiner’s Marty Di Bergi delicately brings up to the band Spinal Tap a critical review of their dismally received previous album, “Shark Sandwich”. The concise and precise review he references has only two words, “shit sandwich”.
After enduring the odious slog that was the nine-episode first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney Plus, the two words that kept popping into my head were, “shit-hulk”.
In keeping with the fecal theme, I would declare two things. First, that She-Hulk truly is one of the most abhorrent shit sandwiches of a show I’ve ever seen, and second, the finale was the diarrhea icing on the repellent poop cake.
The fourth-wall busting finale was a desperate attempt to salvage a flaming garbage barge floating on a sea of sewage and it failed miserably.
The show decided to get all meta in the finale in a brazen attempt to disguise the fact that it had literally lost the plot. The result is it’s too clever by half and not half as clever as it thinks it is.
Believe it or not, it turns out the true villain in She-Hulk is not Abomination or Titiana, but rather people on the internet who criticize the show. I’m not joking. The insecure and self-absorbed makers of She-Hulk decided to make their online critics out to be the ultimate villains, and labeled these alleged internet trolls as misogynist incels in the process. How clever. How brave.
I guess in some ways She-Hulk’s finale is meta-textually interesting since it takes the decidedly feminist route of discarding reason and accountability in favor of embracing mealy-mouthed victimhood, a common approach in this narcissistically addled, masculinity-deprived day and age.
In this vein, people being held accountable is something that is of the utmost import to She-Hulk, and she makes sure in the finale that all the dubious men she comes across are all held to account for their failings. But in true girl-boss, neo-feminist fashion She-Hulk is herself allergic to self-reflection and blames others instead of taking responsibility for her own misdeeds and missteps. Big green physician, heal thyself.
She-Hulk is one of the most terrible, awful, no-good shows of all time for a variety of reasons, bad writing, bad acting and bad CGI not the least among them, but what bothered me most about it was that it defecated upon poor Daredevil while it shat upon itself, and I don’t know if the character will be able to escape the stench.
Daredevil the series was a stellar Netflix production (2015-2018) that ran for three season and Disney has now gotten back control of it and is saying it will reboot or restart the series.
The Netflix Daredevil was the best Marvel series ever made and it isn’t even close. Netflix gave Daredevil a gritty, grounded, R-rated feel…which is exactly what the character and story demanded and needed.
Rumors are that Disney is going to give its Daredevil its patented G-rating treatment and totally neuter the character and the series in the process. Watching Daredevil’s impotent appearance on She-Hulk was like witnessing a castration, and forbodes the once great Daredevil being turned into just another flaccid Disney Plus piece of trash series. Mark Ruffalo’s eunuch of a Hulk was bad enough, but now Daredevil? Can’t Disney just leave these big, bad conflicted men alone and let them kick ass and crack skulls?
The bottom line in regards to She-Hulk is that it’s instantly forgettable and entirely atrocious. It’s a cornucopia of everything that is wrong with our current culture and popular entertainment. I hated this show. I truly hated it. The only thing that would’ve made me hate it more was if Lena Dunham was in it.
On the bright side, at least the makers of She-Hulk succeeded in proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that women are entirely, absolutely, unequivocally incapable of being funny. Good to know.
As for the bigger MCU picture, She-Hulk’s egregious failure is a warning sign for Disney that the Marvel machine is in dire straits. The last three Marvel TV series, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel and now She-Hulk, have been absolute disasters. The last three Disney/Marvel movies, Thor: Love and Thunder, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Eternals, have been equally abysmal.
Marvel is such a money maker that the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule does not apply, but it also doesn’t mean that Marvel is invincible. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out in November and a lot is riding on it. The original Black Panther made a billion dollars, but this is a different time and different movie with Chadwick Boseman’s unfortunate death. If the advertising is to be believed, the new Black Panther is a woman, and the movie has the familiar stench of Disney once again pushing a socio-political agenda on to viewers. Will audiences flock to Wakanda Forever? Maybe. Or will audiences be less inclined to go out and see it because they’re tired of the relentless cultural propaganda? A distinct possibility. My guess is the film will do well…but not too well, and not well enough to cast concerns over Marvel’s future into the abyss.
As for the tv side of things, the slate of upcoming Marvel TV series does not look very promising. And if the shitty She-Hulk is any indication, Marvel TV has gone deep into the toilet and it’s going to take a Herculean effort to remove it from its dark and dank depths. Consider me not optimistic.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. It’s not great. It’s not terrible. It just is.
I love Halloween. Due to my being a rather weird, Irish-Catholic, existentially-obsessed, netherwordly-adjacent, ethereal Jungian shadow-magnet-at-heart, it has always been my favorite holiday. The problem with Halloween though is the same problem with many horror movies or Halloween-themed series or shows…they’re much better in theory than in practice.
As much as I love Halloween it was always a letdown as a kid because no matter how demonically cool MY costume, growing up in the Northeast, my parents always forced me to wear a coat over it because it was cold and parents always ruin everything fun. Such is life.
That said, every Halloween I still get fired up and filled with hope for some profoundly spooky connection…either in the real world or the less apparent one.
Which brings us to Werewolf by Night, which is the first “Marvel Studios Special Presentation” currently streaming on Disney Plus. The hour-long Halloween special stars Gael Garcia Bernal and is written by Heather Quinn and directed by Michael Giacchino.
The show is based upon the comic of the same name and tells the tale of a group of monster hunters who, in the wake of the death of master monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, compete to kill a monster and become possessor of the powerful talisman the Bloodstone.
There are elements of Werewolf by Night which I really liked. For example, it’s very clever that the special is filmed in black and white and consciously recreates the aesthetic of the Universal Monster Movies from the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, like Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Universal Monster Movies are classics and I love them even if they are not quite as horrifying to modern eyes as they were back in the day, so I appreciated the aesthetic choice.
I also thought the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal, a terrific actor and pleasing screen presence, as the lead Jack Russell, was a wise decision, as was casting the always excellent Harriet Samson Harris, who nearly steals the show as the supporting character, Verussa Bloodstone.
I saw Harris on-stage in Chicago nearly twenty-five years ago in The Man Who Came to Dinner. Her performance was sublime but the play was inferior…such is life in the theatre. Here as Verussa Bloodstone she is gloriously weird and unnerving as a grieving widow and conniving step-mother.
And finally, there’s some top-notch CGI on display in the special in the form of the monster Man-Thing, a pleasant change from Marvel’s recent run of dismal special effects in both tv and film projects.
That said, the special also has some issues.
For instance, the Universal Monster Movie aesthetic is great but it’s undermined by the curious decision to insert somewhat graphic violence and explicit language – two things which were anathema back in the Universal heyday. To be clear, I’m definitely not someone fucking asshole opposed to violence and bad language in a tv show or movie! But the insertion of both things into Werewolf by Night is at cross-purposes with the throw-back atmospherics and ultimately ends up being a distraction and mood breaker.
Another issue is, as much as I agreed with Gael Garcia Bernal as the lead, the problem with Werewolf by Night is that it under-uses him, and instead focuses more of its attention and effort upon Laura Donnelly as Elsa Bloodstone. Donnelly is a less-than-compelling actress and Elsa a less-than-compelling character (at least in this special). Donnelly is like an acting vampire as every second she is on-screen she drains the life out of the show.
Thirdly, as good as the Man-Thing CGI is, the werewolf make-up/CGI is dreadful. If you’re going to update the Universal Monster Movies for the modern age, it’s the make-up CGI that has to do it, not inserting gratuitous violence and salty language.
The werewolf metamorphosis scene (of which I’ll give no relevant information regarding the characters involved so as to avoid spoilers) is good…until it isn’t. It starts off with the human to beast transition taking place in shadow on a wall behind a character as they watch in horror as it occurs in front of them. This works because its old-fashioned movie making where through camera placement and lighting, we see the transformation in shadow and the reaction to it in light. But then the camera slowly moves in for a close up of the reacting character’s face, and in so doing obscures the werewolf shadow until it is completely diminished. This is such directorial malpractice as to be criminal. The shot , if it moves at all, should’ve moved slightly in and down, putting the reacting face at the bottom of the screen and the werewolf shadow looming over it at the top, so viewers can see both simultaneously until the scene’s conclusion.
After that botched metamorphosis sequence, the werewolf comes into clear view and the make-up/CGI is so bad as to be laughable. This isn’t Teen Wolf level bad, this is I Was a Teenage Werewolf level bad.
As much as I like the Universal Monster Movies and admire the attempt to pay homage to them, I found director Michael Giacchino and the makers of this special lacked the skill and craft of their monster movie forefathers. They also certainly never earned the Wizard of Oz nod they gave themselves at the end of the special, which felt less like homage than blatant disrespect fueled by mis-placed ego indulgence.
I’ve not read the Werewolf by Night comics, so I have nothing invested in the success or failure of this Marvel special, but I couldn’t help feeling that it could have and should have been considerably better.
Ultimately, Werewolf by Night isn’t great and it isn’t terrible, it just is. And what it is - is an atmospheric, visually limited, narratively stunted, dramatically benign, rather slight, somewhat disappointing production devoid of horror.
I guess I’ll have to make a pilgrimage back to the original Universal Monster Movies again this Halloween to get my horror fix.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unforgettable true story turned into a completely forgettable motion picture.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the amazing, nearly unbelievable, true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, a seemingly dim-witted, ne’er do well merchant mariner from Inwood in New York City, who decides to show his support by traveling to Vietnam in 1968 to deliver beer to his neighborhood buddies serving in the war.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is written and directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Zac Efron and is currently streaming on Apple TV +, is a really great story…but unfortunately, it’s a bad movie.
Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) won a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar four years ago for Green Book, his much-maligned movie on race relations, which was also set in New York City in the 1960’s and dealt with a conservative seeing the light and embracing a more progressive vision.
Green Book wasn’t as bad as the interminably aggrieved victimhood brigade would have you believe, but it also definitely wasn’t Best Picture material (although with the laughable CODA winning the award last year who the hell knows what a Best Picture worthy movie is anymore). Green Book was basically a well-crafted, well-acted, rather simple-minded movie about hope for humanity, no wonder it was so hated in our current awful age.
With The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Farrelly seems to, in the wake of the Green Book criticisms, be trying to either bolster his much tarnished liberal bona fides or give a mea culpa for his perceived sins against the new woke religion. Whatever he’s trying to do…he fails miserably.
Green Book, for all its shortcomings, worked as a piece of middlebrow entertainment masquerading as upper middle-class art, because it featured two really terrific actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali (who won a Best Supporting Actor for his work). The Greatest Beer Run Ever is not so blessed, as it stars poor Zac Efron.
Efron seems like a nice guy, and I have absolutely no animus towards him whatsoever and wish him nothing but success. But the truth is he’s an extremely limited actor and those limitations are laid bare in this film.
Efron’s Chickie is like a more handsome, street-smart Forest Gump who stumbles through history oblivious to his own buffoonery. As one Sergeant says upon meeting Chickie in a war zone, “don’t worry about him, some people are just too stupid to get killed.”
As for Efron, he’s a good-looking kid (“kid” – he’s 34!) but he’s utterly devoid of charisma and magnetism. He almost seems to be trying to hide in front of the camera. Emotionally he’s a black hole from which no life or light escapes. And his dismal New Yawk accent is come and go for the first third of the film and then disappears completely for no apparent reason.
To be clear, Efron isn’t the only bad actor in the movie. The entire supporting cast, with two notable exceptions, are simply dreadful. The egregiously amateurish cast are either over-the-top caricatures or underwhelming to the point of invisibility.
In particular, Chickie’s group of friends in New York are portrayed by a collection of the worst actors I can remember seeing in a mainstream movie and their accents are less New York than they are a rancid stew of Providence, Boston and Maine. I won’t name any of them out of some twisted sense of compassion, but holy shit they are embarrassingly bad.
The two notable exceptions regarding the abysmal acting are Bill Murray as The Colonel, a World War II vet who runs the local bar, and Russell Crowe, as a journalist in Vietnam. Murray and Crowe are not particularly exceptional in their roles, but whenever they are on-screen a sense of relief comes over the viewer as they know at least they’re in the hands of professionals. Murray and Crowe feel at home on the screen, whereas everyone else, most notably Zac Efron, does not.
To be fair to Efron, Farelly’s script and his direction are no help either as they’re utterly atrocious.
There are major plot points and dramatic moments throughout the movie that need to be earned but simply never are, like when Chickie makes the decision to go to Vietnam, it just sort of happens…and everything, particularly the crucial emotional beats, are as vacuous as that.
Another grating thing about the movie is that a major plot point is Chickie must carry a bevy of beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) in a duffle bag across the ocean and all over Vietnam. Beers are heavy, but Chickie’s wondrous bag always seems nearly weightless and empty, but he continuously pulls beer after beer after beer out of it like it’s a magic hat.
If that bag were realistic, and Chickie had to lug it around and decide between dumping out beers or staying true to his mission, then the story and his burden would take on great meaning. The duffle bag literally could’ve been Chickie’s (and America’s) cross to bear across the globe for the sin of the Vietnam war…but instead it’s just a ticky-tack prop that draws viewers out of the reality of this astounding true story.
Another major issue is that Farrelly’s tone through much of the movie is whimsical, and it undermines the horror of the war we see unfolding before us and it all feels…unseemly. There’s a scene like this at the front lines in Vietnam which is so poorly choreographed and directed, and tonally off-kilter, that I found it repulsive.
What’s so grating about The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that it really could have, and should have, been great.
As I watched I kept thinking of how amazing this film would’ve been if it were made in the 1970’s, when the topic, a conservative ‘Road to Damascus’ moment regarding the crime and calamity that was the Vietnam war, would have more cultural resonance, meaning and impact. Imagine a movie like that directed by someone like Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson, I mean God-damn…THAT would’ve been worth seeing!
But instead, we get this rather pathetic modern-day effort from Farrelly and Efron that feels almost instantaneously forgettable.
To be fair, there are a few sequences that I thought were well done, most notably when Chickie runs into a little Vietnamese girl in a field and tries to interact with her. The scene is shot without sound with music playing over it and it’s easily the best and most profound scene in the film. Another interesting visual is what I will call “the falling-man” shot…which was very reminiscent of 9-11 and therefore was loaded with uncomfortable but insightful symbolism.
What is most interesting to me about the rather uninteresting The Greatest Beer Run Ever though, is that Farrelly was attempting to make somewhat of an anti-war movie in an age when anti-war movies are so rare as to be extinct. The reason for this is two-fold…first, the Pentagon and intelligence community control Hollywood and the messages about the military and war that it produces – and anti-war sentiment is not on their agenda. This manifests in movies and tv shows like Top Gun: Maverick and Seal Team getting made and movies like Oliver Stone’s long planned project on the My Lai massacre not finding funding. Secondly, the anti-war movement in America, along with Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party and the rest of the populist movements of both left and right, have been successfully co-opted and crushed by the establishment, resulting in the anti-war movement being virtually non-existent today.
Anti-war sentiment is now anathema in America, as liberals – long the vanguard in anti-war movements, have been so easily conditioned to demand blood lust, most notably against Russia. The same liberals I marched with against the Iraq war in 2003 are now ignoring the War in Yemen and demanding all-out war in Ukraine – up to and including nuclear war, and unthinkingly regurgitate vapid establishment propaganda like children reciting their A-B-C’s.
If you apply logic and dare to question establishment propaganda, like the obvious inanities of the Ghost of Kiev, or the Snake Island buffoonery, or the less obvious but equally dubious claims of the Bucha massacre, or the supposed Russian rape camps, or you speak out against the U.S. escalating the war by sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine (in the form of weaponry) and sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, you’ll be reflexively tarred and feathered as a shill or stooge for Putin.
People have become deathly allergic to context (and thinking), so if you point out the fact that the U.S. instigated the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014 ,and later broke the Minsk Peace agreements, and point out the fact that Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians (who were Ukrainian citizens) in the Donbas in the eight years after the coup, and that the Ukrainian government is riddled with fascists who banned the Russian language and shut down media outlets and opposing political parties, you’re just a useful idiot on Putin’s payroll.
This sort of shallow, simple-minded, historically illiterate, Manichean, knee-jerk jackassery used to be what liberals called out on the right and righteously fought against, but now liberals act exactly like flag-waving, McCarthy-ite right-wingers demanding all those with opposing views slavishly obey the establishment line or be branded a traitor or Russian sympathizer, or both. These empty-headed, emotionalist liberal fools are afflicted with the same disease they used to fight against, and are completely blind to their reactionist Russo-phobic conditioning.
The co-opting of the anti-war left by neo-con war mongers and neo-liberal corporatists is a calamity and will be catastrophic for the health of our nation, and may well lead to another world war and all of us to a fiery death.
On that less than pleasant note, let’s return to an equally unpleasant but much less important topic…The Greatest Beer Run Ever.
In more skilled and gifted-hands The Greatest Beer Run Ever could have made salient points on these weighty and vital issues and held a mirror up to reveal the madness that has engulfed America and its anti-anti-war discourse and actions. But unfortunately, Peter Farrelly lacks the needed craft, talent and courage to make such a meaningful movie, and instead churns out this flaccid, flimsy, D-level nonsense that will come and go with no one noticing.
The bottom line is that The Greatest Beer Run ever is a missed opportunity, and you would be wise to miss it too.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ambitious mess of an arthouse movie that misfires on all cylinders.
If you’ve always wanted to see an artistically decadent, narratively and dramatically impotent, nearly three-hour-long slog that recounts the endless abuse Marilyn Monroe endured during her tumultuous life, starring an actress with an absurdly pronounced Cuban accent playing the American icon…have I got the movie for you!
Blonde, the new NC-17 rated Netflix film based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates, which stars Ana de Armas and is directed by Andrew Dominik, is a most puzzling movie.
The film, like the novel upon which it is based, takes dramatic license with the facts of Monroe’s tragic and turbulent life, and is a fictional biography despite chronicling some true events.
The only way I can make sense of this baffling film is to look at it not as a bio-pic, but as a horror movie with Monroe reduced to being the pretty victim trying to survive the devil stalking her. The film does nothing but portray Marilyn as she endures the continuous nightmare of her existence. There’s no reprieve for Marilyn, or the audience, as she drags the heavy cross of her exploitable beauty on the death march to the New Golgotha known as Hollywood. There’s also no growth or salvation for Marilyn…or the audience…just the repetitious banging of the drum of despair.
On this journey Marilyn is subjected to a cavalcade of either vicious, or cruel, or viciously cruel men, all of whom are icons or icon adjacent, who use and abuse her like Roman centurions at a crucifixion, the only difference being the centurions assigned to torture Jesus knew not what they did, while Marilyn’s abusers know exactly what they were doing.
My thesis that this is a horror film, which to be clear - still doesn’t make it a good film, requires the audience to understand and accept the fact that Hollywood is a death cult, fame is an evil demon, and that Monroe’s beauty and powerful sexual energy were not blessings but curses inflicted upon her.
In real life, Marilyn Monroe was captured by an energy and archetype that absolutely devoured her. Like two other of her contemporaries, Elvis and Marlon Brando, who became avatars for explosive sexual energy during the sexually repressed 1950’s, Marilyn was ultimately destroyed under the weight of her archetypal burden. Think of it as Dionysus’s revenge.
Unfortunately, director Andrew Dominik is incapable of exploring his subject matter with any such depth, and instead simply turns Blonde into abuse porn, and in so doing turns other American icons, like JFK and Joe DiMaggio, into vacuous props meant to convey the obvious point about the nefariousness of the American patriarchy.
Dominik is a visual stylist, of that there is no doubt, and I genuinely enjoyed his film The Assassination of the Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but on Blonde, Dominik is all style and no substance.
Dominik and cinematographer Chayse Irvin use a plethora of interesting stylistic choices, like going from black and white to color and back again, and changing aspect ratios, but these choices lack coherence and dramatic intent.
As I pondered the film and Dominik’s distinct visual choices, I wondered if he was attempting to make a larger statement about the disposable nature of Monroe’s life and career, something along the lines of things being ‘pretty but meaning-less’. Or maybe Dominik was trying to make a movie about the exploitation of Marilyn Monroe by actually exploiting the image of Marilyn Monroe, and the actress playing her. Those potential intentions are astonishingly vapid, but Blonde is so bad I’m left grasping at straws to decipher it.
Even the film’s politics are incomprehensible and at cross-purposes as the movie is both making a statement against the patriarchy but then also presenting a rabidly pro-life argument in regards to abortion. And the abortion stuff is not some throw away scene, it’s a recurring theme and one that is actually the most disturbing and most effective part of the film, but it will no doubt infuriate the movie’s feminist target audience.
Blonde has gotten quite a bit of attention because it’s the first Netflix film to be rated NC-17. I’m sure that rating will attract a few perverts hoping to see my two favorite things, nudity and gratuitous sex, but I found the NC-17 rating to be, pardon the pun, overblown. While the movie does feature a bevy of boobs, all of which belong to Ana de Armas, which are both real and spectacular, the sex is extraordinarily subdued and the nudity confined to the waist up. And while there is some adult subject matter dramatized, it’s nothing that an R rating wouldn’t comfortably cover.
Speaking of Ana de Armas, she is undoubtedly a beauty, but she is no Marilyn Monroe. De Armas is not well cast as she doesn’t particularly look like Marilyn and she most definitely doesn’t sound like her. De Armas’ Cuban accent, which manifests in the cadence of her speech and in pronunciation of certain letters and words, is egregiously incessant and a constant distraction. De Armas playing Marilyn Monroe is like having Desi Arnaz play JFK, or Matthew McConaughey play Fidel Castro.
To her credit though, de Armas does give her all in the very demanding role, but that said she is still terribly miscast.
There are really no other performances of note in the film. Bobby Cannavale plays Joe DiMaggio and Adrien Brody plays Arthur Miller and there’s not anything of interest there. Julianne Nicholson plays Marilyn’s crazy mom and she does crazy mom things.
Blonde felt to me like an arthouse bio-pic gone wrong. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Jackie(2016), which is a much better film, and Spencer(2021), which is not as bad as Blonde but still isn’t a good film (both are by director Pablo Larrain). I also thought of David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive, which does a substantially better job at depicting the corrosive and corrupt nature of Hollywood on women and the devil’s bargain that is fame.
Ultimately, Blonde is, unlike Marilyn Monroe, entirely forgettable. If I’m being generous, I’d call it an ambitious failure of a film. If I’m being blunt, I’d call it a rancid shit sandwich. Either way, Blonde is not something you should ever trouble yourself to watch even though it’s ‘free’ on Netflix. The time spent watching this misfire of a movie could be much better spent literally doing anything else…like seeing Marilyn Monroe’s performance in a small, breakout role in The Asphalt Jungle. When you see her on-screen for the first time you instantly get why Marilyn became the most famous woman of the 20th century.
©2022
There’s a lot happening in TV at the moment, and I just wanted to give an update on my thoughts about some of the bigger series dominating discussion.
I’ve already written reviews of the first few episodes of The House of the Dragon, Rings of Power and She-Hulk when they premiered, so here are my thoughts midway through their runs as well as my initial reaction to the new Star Wars show Andor.
House of the Dragon – HBO Max – 3 stars
At the halfway mark of the ten-episode first season of The House of the Dragon, the verdict thus far is that the show is not as good as its culture dominating predecessor…but it’s also not bad.
Fortunately, the first season of the Game of Thrones prequel has gotten progressively better with each successive episode.
A big part of that improvement has been the evolution of lead actress Milly Alcock as Princess Rhaenyra. Alcock’s growing comfort in the role has mirrored her character’s maturation and it’s been compelling to watch.
In fact, almost all of the acting in The House of the Dragon has been sturdy, if not stellar. The lone exception being Emily Carey as Alicent Hightower, who is not particularly charismatic and has never fully grasped her role with any vigor.
Alcock and Carey are set to be replaced in the next few episodes by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke respectively, who will play their characters as adults, and it remains to be seen if this transition will work seamlessly. I admit I have my doubts but hope for the best.
But overall, thus far The House of the Dragon stands out among the latest batch of prestige TV offerings because of its terrific cast – most notably Paddy Considine and Matt Smith, truly superb production design and costumes, and for its writing.
The show isn’t perfect by any stretch and is in many ways a distant shadow of its predecessor, but to its credit it definitely keeps you engaged, and that’s good enough for me.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Amazon Prime Video - .5 stars
Five episodes into the eight-episode first season of The Rings of Power and the series feels like it’s the Titanic…not the movie Titanic but the actual ship that sank into the Atlantic and sent 1,500 souls to their icy death. Episode five seems like the moment the Titanic went vertical just before its steep plunge to its watery grave.
The truth is that The Rings of Power is just an atrocious tv show.
What’s astounding to me is that Amazon supposedly spent a billion Bezos bucks to make this show and yet it looks unconscionably cheap. The sets and costumes are laughable and look like something from a high school drama class. The background actors too are abysmal, and the dearth of background actors populating the crowd scenes further undermines the credibility of the show.
But the two biggest culprits in The Rings of Power’s demise are the cast and the writing.
The cast are, across the board, dreadful. Morfyyd Clark plays the lead role Galadriel (or as some have mockingly called her – GUY-ladriel) and she is woefully miscast and criminally under-directed. Clark is an aggressively grating screen presence at best and is so unathletic and ungraceful as to be astounding. Galadriel is meant to be the hero but is one of the most annoying and unlikable characters in recent tv history.
Another awful performance comes from Ismael Cruz Cordova as Arondir the Elf. Cordova seems to have had charisma bypass surgery and is a chore to watch.
The rest of the cast are equally sub-par. It’s impossible to not compare and contrast The Rings of Power to The House of the Dragon as they premiered in the same time frame and are both “fantasy” shows. The thing that stands out so much between the shows is that The House of the Dragon is inhabited by professional, high-quality actors, and The Rings of Power rolls with second and third-rate actors and rank amateurs.
Another comparison of note between the two shows is that The Rings of Power’s production design and costumes are a bad joke compared to The House of the Dragon, as is The Ring of Power fight choreography, which is an utter clown show (the scene where Galadriel teaches Numenorian soldiers to fight is jaw-droppingly bad and ridiculous).
Ultimately, The Rings of Power seems like nothing but a low quality, CW-level fantasy soap opera that used Bezos’s big bucks to buy the prestige of the Tolkien name. It’s the equivalent of putting a Rolls-Royce hood ornament on the front of a Ford Pinto.
She-Hulk – Disney + - zero stars
Speaking of pieces of shit…It’s actually somewhat astonishing that despite seeming an impossible task, She-Hulk, which is six episodes in to its nine-episode first season, has managed to get more awful with each successive episode.
When I’m in the midst of watching it, She-Hulk feels like not only the worst show on tv right now, but the worst show to have ever appeared on any television at any time.
She-Hulk is allegedly a comedy but it’s as funny as watching an autopsy. I’ve never once cracked a smile viewing this shitshow.
The writing, acting, special effects and production design for She-Hulk are all an abomination.
Tatiana Maslany is just dreadful as She-Hulk, and her supporting cast are equally abysmal.
Anyone and everyone associated with this horrible show should be imprisoned for the rest of their natural born lives.
Andor – Disney + - 3 stars
Andor, which premiered its first three episodes of its twelve-episode first season this past Wednesday, is a prequel set five years before the events of the film Rogue One, which I consider to be one of the better Star Wars movies and certainly the best of the newest bunch.
In a case of benefiting from very low expectations, and considering the two catastrophically awful shows that preceded it – Obi Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett, my expectations were extraordinarily low, I find myself enjoying Andor.
A big reason why I like the show thus far is that it looks terrific. The set design is so much better than the previous two Star Wars shows, which looked terribly low budget and cheap. On Andor, every set has a tangible, grounded, gritty feel to it, and looks like a real place not just some generic set on a studio back lot.
In addition, the overall aesthetic of Andor feels sort of like the corporate dystopia of Blade Runner. The show has been described as a Star Wars series for adults, and I tend to agree with that as it doesn’t genuflect to the cutesy nonsense that so often overwhelms the franchise. The show is like a real story, a sort of spy thriller, that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe.
As for the acting, I’m not much of a fan of Diego Luna but thus far I think he’s been very good as Cassian Andor. Luna brings a sense of wounding and grievance to the role that is palpable and very compelling.
Other smaller roles are also done quite well. For instance, Rupert Vansittart is phenomenal as Chief Hyne, a superbly cynical bureaucrat. In a small scene that in lesser hands would’ve been mundane and throw away, Vansittart brings his skill and craftsmanship to bear and turns it into the best scene of the series, and maybe any Star Wars series, so far.
Andor still has nine episodes to go, so a lot can go right or wrong for it from here, but thus far I like the show and hope it keeps up its positive start. Consider me cautiously optimistic that Andor will be worth sticking with ‘til the end.
Thus concludes my TV round-up! I will check in with further thoughts at the end of the run of each of these series.
©2022
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! BUT THE MOVIE IS SO BAD IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!****
My Rating: .25 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Truly horrendous film. Go watch the original 1940 animated version instead.
I’m old enough to remember when Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis were considered among the most talented in their respective crafts in Hollywood.
Hanks won back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in the mid-90’s, the second of which came for his work in Forest Gump, which was directed by none other than Robert Zemeckis, a feat which earned him both a Best Director and Best Picture statuette at the Academy Awards.
Forest Gump was a coronation for both Zemeckis and Hanks. Zemeckis had been a “Spielberg-in waiting” ever since he hit the jackpot with the Back to the Future franchise and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and the Forest Gump Oscar triumph solidified his standing as the pop cinema auteur of his time. Hanks’s win for Forest Gump crowned him as the new Jimmy Stewart and nice guy King of Hollywood.
Well, a lot can change in 28 years.
Proof of that is the new live-action Pinocchio currently streaming on Disney +. The film is directed by Zemeckis and stars Hanks and it stands as a monument to how far their once glorious careers have fallen.
In the early 2000’s Zemeckis fell in love with motion capture CGI technology and churned out a plethora of idiotic, ugly garbage like The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. As a result of his CGI infatuation, Zemeckis’ career has gone deep down the toilet and landed in the septic tank that is Pinocchio.
Since the start of the 21st Century, intelligence agency asset/lapdog/mascot Tom Hanks has not fared much better as his choice in films and his performances in those films, has exposed him to be a rather shallow, vacuous, vapid and remarkably unskilled actor.
For example, even in good films, like say, Catch Me If You Can or Captain Phillips, Hanks manages to be the worst thing in them as he mucks things up with egregiously awful accents of which he has absolutely no clue, never mind mastery. In recent years he has been reduced to slumming it in second and third-rate direct to streaming projects like Pinocchio.
Which brings us to Pinocchio. It is sort of remarkable how appalling this movie is. The script is abysmally bad, the acting atrocious and the direction simply dreadful.
The story of Pinocchio is well-known, and I assume everyone’s seen the original Disney animated film from 1940 which Disney it’s theme song of “When You Wish Upon A Star”. That film is terrific, but Disney apparently needs to remake everything now in order to keep up with ever-changing cultural mores and assuage the PC police, and so we get the NEW Pinocchio.
This new Pinocchio features Tom Hanks as Geppetto, who once again rolls out once of the worst accents in film history. It is difficult to overstate the awfulness of Hanks’s acting in this movie. His shtick is so tired and amateurish it would be laughed off the stage at a Children’s Theater in a small Midwestern suburb.
Hanks, and the rest of the cast, do something that is a surefire sign that they are mailing it in and are being under-directed, which is they incessantly either laugh or smile to fill the empty space in scenes. Hanks spontaneously and inappropriately laughs so much in Pinocchio he appears to be having either a nervous breakdown or a stroke.
Luke Evans as the Coachman and Guiseppe Battistone as Stromboli do the same laughing thing over and over. And poor Cynthia Erevo, who is brutally miscast as the Blue Fairy, paints the most uncomfortable smile on her face for the duration of her dismal scene.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is the voice actor for Jiminy Cricket who, for some reason, has an accent from the American South despite the story taking place in rural Italy, and he sounds like John Waters reading the minutes from a NAMBLA meeting.
Changes were made to the Pinocchio cast and story in order to accommodate the current cultural climate, so we get a rather sever looking Erivo as the Blue Fairy and Kyanne Lamaya as Fabiana, the puppeteer of Sabina the ballerina. Poor Lamaya is forced to pretend to be a ventriloquist for no apparent reason, and then at one point in the film that charade is discarded, again, for no apparent reason.
Other changes are that the whale who swallows Geppetto and Pinocchio (in this version they are eaten together at the same time) has been morphed into a giant whale/squid/Kraken monster for some unexplained reason. And the ending of the movie is different too…again…for no apparent reason.
The film is riddled with inanities and idiocies that boggle the mind. For example, at one point Pinocchio and Jiminy want to go to sea to find Geppetto but can’t figure out how…but then they jerry-rig a seagull and para-surf out to sea. But then when they are escaping the sea monster, Pinoccio shows he can swim faster than any human because of his wooden legs and carries Geppetto to safety. I’d highlight more of this nonsense but let’s be honest…nobody gives a fuck.
On top of all this, the CGI in the film is so second rate as to be embarrassing. Zemeckis does all he can to accentuate how awful the CGI is by having real life actors hold and caress CGI animals, which only highlights how fake everything looks.
And of course, the movie ends with Pinocchio still a wooden toy but because in his heart he thinks he’s a real boy, then he is a real boy. I suppose this is Disney’s way of signaling their virtue regarding the trans movement. How brave.
The bottom line regarding this version of Pinocchio is that there is no reason to make this movie and certainly no reason to make it so poorly.
I’m sure Hanks and Zemeckis will make more movies going forward and I’m sure they’ll be as shitty as Pinocchio, but when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin of their insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.
©2022
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An amateurish, derivative piece of superhero drivel.
Samaritan, starring once-upon-a-time Hollywood mega-star Sylvester Stallone, is a new superhero movie now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
The film, based on the Bragi F. Schut graphic novel of the same name, is written by Schut, directed by Julius Avery, and produced by Sly Stallone himself, and tells the story of Samaritan, a superhero who died decades ago in a face off against his supervillain twin brother Nemesis…or did he? Thirteen-year-old Sam (Javon Walton) thinks Samaritan is alive and well and living as his neighbor in a dilapidated apartment building in a rough and tumble section of Granite City. Joe Smith (Stallone) is the shredded old-man who works as a garbage man that Sam thinks is the superhero in hiding.
Sam and Samaritan’s hometown, Granite City, is on the brink of collapse and is populated by a group of Nemesis worshipers who want to see the world burn. These Nemesis lovers are led by Cyrus (Pilou Asbeak), who is sort of a poor man’s Bane. Sam, trying to help his single-mother pay the rent, gets mixed up with some bad seed Nemesis people and Joe Smith comes to his rescue and the story goes from there.
I’ve not read the Samaritan graphic novel, but its premise sounds intriguing and this film version certainly has similar potential. Samaritan is trying to be an original, grounded, alternative superhero movie, in the same vein as M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. But I know Unbreakable, and due to dreadfully amateurish direction and abysmal acting, Samaritan is no Unbreakable, in fact, it’s absolute garbage.
Director Julius Avery is an unquestionable hack behind the camera. Avery is entirely incapable of eliciting even remotely competent performances from his cast, with the lone exception being the magnetic Pilou Asbaek.
Javon Walton is ostensibly the lead and is an egregiously grating screen presence. Apparently, Walton is the next big thing among young actors, but his work in Samaritan is atrocious.
Speaking of atrocious, Sly Stallone is nearly unwatchable in the film. Yes, Sly still has his absurdly ridiculous perfect body and surgically enhanced face to match, but he once again resurrects his usual sad-eyed, sullen-faced character of which he is so associated, without the least bit of aplomb. As evidenced by his decades long success playing Rocky and Rambo, you’d think Stallone could do tough-guy sad-sackery in his sleep, but Samaritan literally proves that thesis wrong as its just Sly sleep walking.
Stallone isn’t exactly Olivier, but he has always had his own distinct brand of charisma, but in Samaritan his dead-eyed performance is so awful as to be alarming. For example, Stallone’s monotone dialogue lacks all semblance of life as well as any natural rhythm. This isn’t Rocky mumbling some brain-damaged speech, in Samaritan Stallone sounds like a non-native English speaker reciting lines in a second or third language for the very first time. It’s like he’s an alien who has never heard people talk before. Sly is so appallingly bad in some scenes as to be astonishing.
Stallone was the producer on the film, so it’s not like he’s just playing the role for a quick buck, he’s invested in the movie, which is why his abominable performance is all the more concerning.
Stallone is so bad that one can’t help but blame not just Stallone but director Avery, who didn’t yell “Cut! Let’s do it again!” Maybe Avery felt he couldn’t actually direct his boss, who knows? Or maybe he just doesn’t know how to direct.
Another strike against director Avery is his work with cinematographer David Ungaro. There are some scenes in this movie that are so poorly filmed as to be ridiculous. For instance, there’s a rooftop confrontation in the movie where the lighting is so unprofessional that it would be laughed out of a student film.
As for the writing, the plot, its twists, and the rest of it, everything is second or third rate at best, including the production design which somehow makes the $50 million budget look like less than a million.
Samaritan is an MGM film and came over to Amazon when the Bezos behemoth bought the movie studio for $8.45 billion. Another MGM property which came to Amazon in that buy is the Rocky franchise, which propelled Sly Stallone to mega-stardom when it first hit big screens back in 1976.
My advice to anyone contemplating watching Samaritan is to do yourself a favor and skip this cheap, derivative piece of inanity, and just watch any of the Rocky movies, even the awful ones, instead. You’ll still see inanity aplenty in the Rocky movies, but at least you’ll also get to see Sly Stallone being a better version of Sly Stallone…one with life in his eyes.
©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
