The Grey Man: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW HAS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ho-Lee-Shit this $200 million movie is atrocious.

The Grey Man is the new action film directed by Marvel billion-dollar blockbuster makers the Russo Brothers (Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame) and produced by Netflix, which premiered on the streaming service on July 22nd.

The movie, which stars Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans and tells the story of an off-the-books CIA hitman gone rogue, is most notable because its production budget is $200 million, which makes it the most expensive Netflix movie ever made. And you thought gas was expensive?

Inflation must be very real because $200 million just doesn’t buy you what it used to. The reality is that it would have been a much better decision, and infinitely more entertaining, to just use an intern’s iPhone to record Netflix executives lighting a $200 million pile of cash on fire than to make the disaster area that is The Grey Man.

The plot of the film exists but I’m not sure I can bring myself to actually write it as it’s so derivative and inane. Just know that a sort of Bourne-type CIA assassin (Gosling) goes off the reservation and now the CIA, most notably bitchy bureaucrat Denny Carmichael, played by a truly awful Rege-Jean Page whose acting style consists of nothing but occasionally yelling, are out to get him.

The Grey Man is one of those movies that’s so bad that it’s astonishing, as it seems impossible for so many professionals to be so incompetent at their jobs all at once.

Directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Joe also co-wrote the script) are the most to blame for the shitshow that is The Grey Man. I cannot recall a film that was so poorly directed, as everything from the story to the dialogue to the visuals to the staging to the action sequences to the acting is abominable. In addition, the film is all over the map in terms of tone and feels like ten different movies, all bad, smashed together into one.

The action sequences, which no doubt account for the majority of the bloated budget, are so amateurish and poorly shot as to be criminal. One scene, which must have busted the bank, involves an inner-city European trolley chase and gun fight that looks like it was conceived and shot by a one-eyed man with cataracts who lives in a dumpster behind the School for the Artistically Impaired.

On top of that, the performances are so excruciatingly poor they would make Michael Bay blush.

Ryan Gosling is the star of the movie and plays Sierra 6, so named because “007 was taken”. How clever. Gosling is a charming actor and makes the most of the uneven snarki-ness, but he is not even remotely menacing as a bad-ass CIA assassin, and, thanks to the inadequacies of the Russo Brothers his action sequences are a blurred and obstructed mess.

The luminous Ana De Armas plays a laughably-not-believable tough-as-nails CIA agent working with Gosling’s 6 and then against 6 and then with 6 again. Her character makes no sense and her performance is as throwaway as the rest of the movie.

Chris Evans plays a mustachioed villain named Lloyd Hansen who looks like he just stumbled out of a low-end Provincetown hot spot named “Harvard Hunk Hole” on a steamy summer afternoon. Evans isn’t exactly Laurence Olivier…or Tommy Wiseau for that matter, and the most egregious thing about his performance in The Grey Man is that you can see that he actually thinks it’s amazing. It’s like the wind whistling through his empty skull is playing the Academy Award theme song in every scene and he gets hypnotized by it and actually believes it.

Watching Evans pout and sashay around the movie like a psychopathic Richard Simmons at a sold out Miami Beach Liza Minelli concert was the equivalent of watching the art and craft of acting get hit by an apocalyptic meteor….speaking of which, watching The Grey Man made me envious of the dinosaurs and their extinction.

Speaking of the apocalypse, poor Billy Bob Thornton is in the movie and plays some CIA type dude, and he gets the honor of speaking such sterling dialogue as “hey, she’s got a pacemaker, you asshole!” Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

To give you an indication of how little thought and time went into making this $200 million monstrosity, consider this, not once, not twice, but three times, the Russo Brothers use the same action movie trope involving a grenade to propel the story. As each instance of this idiocy occurred, I kept wondering if I was having a stroke and was suffering from fast-onset dementia. But trust me, despite wishing I was having a stroke so I could lose consciousness and escape The Grey Man, I wasn’t…it was all just the Russo Brothers not giving a shit or even trying when they made this anti-cinematic abomination.

The bottom line is, if someone told me that The Grey Man was actually a science experiment where a band of syphilitic monkeys were locked in a room and given a typewriter, a movie camera and an editing machine, as well as copious amounts of Jack Daniels and meth amphetamine, and then came out three weeks later with this movie in the can, I would’ve believed it but still thought they under-performed.

If you want tangible evidence of how poorly run Netflix is and why it is going into a nosedive, look no further than the atrocity that is The Grey Man.

I urge you to avoid this movie at all costs. You’ll hate yourself even if you just hate watch it…it’s that bad.

©2022

Nope: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.

Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.

What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.

Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.

Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.

I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.  

Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.

Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.

Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).

Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.

I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.

Is it coherent? Nope.

Is it well-written? Nope.

Is it well directed? Nope.

Is it well-acted? Nope.

Is it a good movie? Nope.

The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.

Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.

I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.

As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.

Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.

Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.

The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.

Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.

Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.

Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.

Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.

And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.

Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.

Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.

It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.  

In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.

As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.

©2022

Thor: Love and Thunder - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manic misfire of a Marvel movie. If you are a Marvel completist then save your money and wait for it to stream on Disney +.

In order to set the context for my review of Thor: Love and Thunder, which premiered in theatres Friday July 8th and is the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and the Marvel behemoth’s 29th movie overall, it’s important to note that I am an enormous fan of the film’s writer/director Taika Waititi.

Waititi directed my favorite Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnarok – of which Love and Thunder is a direct sequel, and also adapted his 2014 vampire comedy movie What We Do in the Shadows into my current favorite television show of the same name, which is set to premiere its fourth season on FX this coming Tuesday.

The reality is that Waititi’s distinctive comedic style is an acquired taste, and, like the new strain of Super Gonorrhea going around, I most certainly have acquired it.

Which brings us to Thor: Love and Thunder. As exhilarating as Thor: Ragnarok was, Thor: Love and Thunder is disappointing. Yes, it has its moments, but those moments are very few and very far between.

The film’s plot is relentlessly convoluted, and revolves around Gor the God Butcher, a surprisingly subdued Christian Bale, who seeks revenge on the gods for the death of his daughter. Gor kidnaps the kids of New Asgard, who are the perfect dream children for Disney’s human resources department because of their remarkable ethnic diversity, and uses them as bait to draw in Thor and his goofy companions.

The plot twists and turns make just about no sense at all, and the tonal shifts of the film are jarring to the extreme. Make no mistake about it, the film is a comedy, but it opens with a little girl dying and then puts other little kids in frightening peril as a key plot point. The comedic tone and the kids in peril plot mix together like birthday cake at a beheading.

Needless to say, this PG-13 movie is much too scary/dark to be suitable for kids under 13…and frankly, much too shabby to be worthwhile to adults with half a brain in their head.

There are some bright spots though, among them the brief appearance of the Asgard Players acting troupe, which features Matt Damon and Melissa McCarthy dramatizing great moments in Asgardian history on stage. As well as Korg, Thor’s sidekick (voiced by Waititi himself) repeatedly mis-stating Jane Foster’s name…a gag that made me laugh every time. There’s also an absolutely absurd appearance by a hammiest of hams Russell Crowe as Zeus. Crowe’s Zeus is a gonzo piece of bloated bizarreness but I found it amusing as hell.

Another very bright spot is Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is so good as Thor it’s simply miraculous. Hemsworth is, of course, buff beyond belief and impossibly handsome, but he’s also effortlessly charming and astoundingly funny.

Unfortunately, Natalie Portman is the exact opposite. Portman returns to the Thor franchise as Dr. Jane Foster, Thor’s ex-love interest, except this time, through some not very clear plot machinations, Dr. Foster is somehow turned into a Thor…and takes the title of The Mighty Thor.

Portman as Jane Foster/Mighty Thor is more wooden than a log cabin and makes a cigar store Indian seem lively in comparison. Portman pushes so hard to be frolicky and fun but she’s so stiff and unnatural that when she attempts to smile, she seems like a cadaver getting a colonoscopy.

Portman may very well be a talented actress, or she may not be, but what she definitely isn’t is a gifted comedic actress and that is glaringly obvious in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Other issues with the film abound. For example, Gor’s villainous minions are these shadow creatures that are so generic and bland as to be ridiculous.

These shadow creatures highlight the film’s other big problems, namely its lack of visual clarity and cinematic crispness, as well as its pedestrian fight sequences…in other words the movie features third-rate action sequences and looks like shit, which is criminal for a movie with a $250 million budget.

And last but not least, the movie, like seemingly all Marvel movies and tv shows nowadays, of course, features some heavy-handed human resources inspired social engineering and woke pandering and preaching. The previously mentioned rainbow of Asgardian kids being a perfect example. As is the cringiest of cringe scenes where Gor calls Portman’s Thor, “Lady Thor”, and she angrily responds “my name is The Mighty Thor! Or you can call me…DOCTOR! JANE! FOSTER!” My only wish was The Mighty Thor aka Dr. Jane Foster had been wearing a pink pussy hat in that scene for affect. That cringilicous scene along with the “female Avengers unite” scene from Avengers: Endgame, should only be legally permitted to be played in voluminous vomitoriums because they’re such gag-worthy, girl-power garbage.

On top of all that, the final act of the film is entirely rushed and completely devoid of any dramatic impact while being detached from narrative coherence.

Due to my love of Thor: Ragnarok and my Waititi fandom, I was looking forward to Thor: Love and Thunder. I was also curious to see if, after the cinematic and creative debacles (and for the most part, box office misfires) of the recent spate of Marvel movies, from Black Widow to Shang-Chi to The Eternals (God help us!) to Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, with the brilliant Waititi at the helm and the equally brilliant Chris Hemsworth in the lead, could stop the bleeding over at the Marvel money factory that pays for Mickey Mouse’s mansions. I am here to report that it doesn’t.

Thor: Love and Thunder will do fine at the box office, but it won’t signal a return to Marvel magnificence. The reality is that Marvel is in deep shit, and if they don’t realize that then they’re delusional. Their new movies are sub-par, their tv shows are cratering in quality (I’ll have a review of Ms. Marvel out late this coming week – here’s a preview…”YIKES!”) and it is now very clear that the Marvel monstrosity has lost the plot and has their head’s so far up their asses they’re incapable of finding it.

Marvel has dominated cineplexes and our culture for nearly fifteen years, but Thor: Love and Thunder is just one more piece of proof that the bloom is off the Marvel rose and I’m here to tell you that it ain’t coming back.

The bottom line is that Thor: Love and Thunder is nothing but a major disappointment. If you are a Marvel completist, then wait for Thor: Love and Thunder to stream on Disney + in a few weeks or months, and watch it then, because it simply isn’t worth your time and hard-earned money to see in the theatres.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

On this episode, Barry and I run for our lives from the dino-disaster that is Jurassic World: Dominion. Topics discussed include Jaws/Jurassic Park and the primordial fear of moving down the food chain, the mystery of awful writer/director Colin Trevorrow's career, and the sizzling sexual chemistry between Chris Pratt and Blue the Raptor.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Jurassic World: Dominion - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This dismal dino-disaster has all the charm of a rotting Brachiosaurus carcass left out in the hot Malta sun.

Ever since Steven Spielberg busted the box office with his signature Spielbergian grandiosity and grating emotional simplicity in the original Jurassic Park back in 1993, the franchise has been an exercise in diminishing returns, with each successive movie declining precipitously in terms of cinematic quality.

Jurassic World: Dominion, which opened in theatres June 10 and stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, is the third movie in the Jurassic World trilogy and the sixth cinematic dino-venture, and allegedly the final installment, in the nearly thirty-year-old Jurassic Park franchise, and it feels distinctively like hitting bottom.

Beating the Jurassic Park dead dinosaur to dust has been a profitable exercise for Executive Producer Spielberg and his corporate cohorts at Universal over the years, but this most recent miserable meteor strike of a movie should only be warmly welcomed because it seems to signal a Jurassic franchise extinction-level event.

The good news is that Jurassic World: Dominion has a plot, the bad news is that the parts of it that aren’t completely incoherent are utterly absurd. The globe spanning story features, of course, dinosaurs on the loose, an evil bio-tech company with the rather on the nose name of Bio-Syn (subtle), as well as a beautiful teenage clone with a posh British accent.

The plot and its atmospherics are so ridiculous and stereotypically “Hollywood” they sound like something bandied about in a rejected Entourage script.

The same is true of the second-generation Hollywood royalty populating the cast, with Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Laura Dern (Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd’s daughter) and Campbell Scott (George C. Scott’s son) headlining the nepotism all-star team dreamed up in the halls of power at some nefarious Tinsel Town talent agency.

Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, the leads from the original Jurassic Park, reprise their rather forgettable roles in Dominion and mix and mingle with the equally forgettable characters from the Jurassic World trilogy.

I suppose this call back to the original is an attempt at nostalgia, but it’s a fruitless one since no one gives a flying fuck about these drab and dismal characters. The only reason to watch a Jurassic Park movie is to see dinosaurs roam the earth and wreak havoc, not to see Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum collect a paycheck.

The same is true of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Pratt is sort of a C+ level movie star and is charming enough, and Howard is an equally pleasant on-screen presence and is easy on the eyes, but let’s not kid ourselves, no one would care if they, or Neill, Dern and Goldblum were just another high-priced dino-meal at the Jurassic Park café.

In fact, if T-Rex, or one of his even larger dinosaur co-stars, were to devour one of these mindless Hollywood meat puppets, it would make the movie delightfully worthwhile. But similar to Top Gun: Maverick, another current corporate money grab, no main character is allowed to die in this movie for some apparent reason.

This rather sterile creative decision is so egregious as to be criminal. If this is indeed the last installment of the franchise, and God knows it should be, then writer/director Colin Trevorrow should’ve used that as a blessed opportunity to shamelessly milk this bloated brontosaurus for all the drama it’s worth.

Why not have Neill’s Dr. Grant nobly sacrifice himself to save his beloved Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) and then have Sattler eventually end up with his nemesis, Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm? Or have Dr. Ian Malcolm die in a blaze of over-acting glory to save the rest of the cast? Or have Chris Pratt get killed by his best friend/part-time lover Blue the Raptor? Hell…why not have Chris Pratt, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum all get eaten and then Bryce Dallas Howard and Laura Dern can raise the cloned teenage girl in a sort of “my two mommies/down with the patriarchy!” type of situation?

Speaking of which, the usual cultural politics of the day are on display in Dominion, with cartoon cutout minority characters, namely, Bio-Syn communications director Ramsey Cole (an appealing Mamoudou Athie) and ex-Air Force pilot and current sassy black lesbian Kayla Watts (a luminous DeWanda Wise), being the ones who save the day and everybody else’s pasty white asses. How patronizingly progressive or progressively patronizing, whichever you prefer.

Writer/director Trevorrow, who wrote all three of the Jurassic World movies and directed two of the three, has proven himself to be the poster-child for Hollywood hackery.

His movies seem like two-hour trailers for themselves, as there’s just no “there” there. As evidenced by Jurassic World: Dominion, Trevorrow’s stories are convoluted, his dialogue utterly atrocious, and his action sequences often derivative.

Another striking thing to me is that somehow the dinosaurs from the original Jurassic Park thirty years ago, look considerably better and more realistic than the ones in Jurassic World: Dominion. That is probably a function of cost-cutting and just plain old not giving a shit, but for whatever reason it occurs, it’s entirely unforgivable.

Jurassic Park movies are meant to be entertaining, mildly elevated monster movies, with a scintilla of sub-text about philosophy and science bubbling underneath the spectacle of dino-carnage. But what has ended up happening is that the films have been marketed more and more toward younger kids and also become more and more silly while also becoming more and more violent and dark. This dichotomy has made for a strange combination as the movies now seem much too scary for kids and much too stupid for grown-ups.

The bottom line is that the tortuously dopey Jurassic World: Dominion is a typical piece of mindless Hollywood franchise filmmaking that is devoid of both quality and interest. The once ferocious T-Rex from Spielberg’s startling 1993 original has been reduced to be nothing more than a creatively comatose, cold-blooded cash cow, and is definitely not worth your valuable time or hard-earned money.

©2022

Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 70 - Top Gun: Maverick

On this episode, Barry and I take the highway to the danger zone because we feel the need...the need for speed... as we dissect Tom Cruise’s return as Maverick in Top Gun: Maverick. Topics discussed include the mystery of Jon Hamm and the recurring theme of attacking a Death Star, the difficulty of playing volleyball covered in baby oil, and how many G forces could we handle?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 70 - Top Gun: Maverick

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 69 - Operation Mincemeat

On this episode, Barry and I don a stiff upper lip as we try to grin and bear the new Netflix WWII movie Operation Mincemeat starring Colin Firth. Topics of discussion include the banality of evil that is sub-mediocre cinema, John Madden as great NFL coach and commentator but abysmal film director, and the missed opportunity of a Weekend at Bernies World War II movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 69 - Operation Mincemeat

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 68 - Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Grab your tinfoil hat and tune in to this blockbuster, groundbreaking episode, that absolutely everyone is talking about, in order to hear Barry expose the most diabolical conspiracy in cinema history involving Sam Raimi and Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. This is the episode that will change everything, everywhere across the multiverse!

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 68 - Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully dull stroll through the multiverse of mundanity where Marvel malaise rules the day. If you need to see it, save your money and wait until it hits Disney’s streaming service.

In the wake of having witnessed Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the 28th, and most recent film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I sat waiting for the usual end-credits scene and had a few thoughts.

The first of which was, if you’re the type of person who unironically uses the term “y’all”, I automatically think you’re a moron. I’m not saying that I’m justified in that belief, just that’s what I believe.

Another thought I had was if you pronounce words that begin with “s”, like “street” or “strange”, by adding an “h” to them and saying “shtreet” or “shtrange”, or if you’re so verbally lazy that you skip the pronunciation of “t’s” in words like “Manhattan”, and instead say “Manha’an”, or if you replace “th” at the end of a word with an “f” and instead of saying “mouth” and “breath” you say “mouf” and “breaf”, then you should drown yourself in a bathtub because you are so fucking stupid you don’t deserve to live.

The reason I was thinking about those rather random things is because a young white woman in her early 20’s sitting near me in the theatre was sharing her opinion of Dr. Strange, or as she called it, “Dr. Shtrange”, as the credits rolled and liberally used the term “y’all” and spoke about how the film was set in “Manha’an” and that it took her “breaf” away.

Unfortunately, “Dr. Shtrange” did not take my “breaf” away, although at various times throughout the movie I was wishing that I would stop breathing and be put out of my misery.

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness opened on May 6th and, not surprisingly, has won the box office battle its first two weeks, raking in nearly $700 million worldwide against a $200 million budget. Marvel dominates modern movie going and it feels like we all have to pay our Marvel tax a few times a year just to stay on top of the cultural comings and goings, and I am no exception.

My relationship to Marvel movies and tv shows is that I am routinely underwhelmed by them but feel it my duty to watch. This says more about me than anything else, and what it says isn’t particularly positive.

Marvel’s new post-Endgame game plan seems to be to inundate audiences with sub-mediocre movies and tv shows with ever more complicated multiversal mania that are required watching if you want to stay relevant with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For example, if you haven’t seen the truly dreadful Disney + Marvel wokefest of a tv show What If…? then you might be a bit lost while watching Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The same is true of Loki and even more true of the show WandaVision, which was an ambitious and mildly entertaining series starring Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, the character she plays in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

But rest assured, being up to date on Marvel’s required watch list doesn’t make Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness coherent, it just makes it slightly less incoherent.

The plot of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is so convoluted as to be absurd, just know that there isn’t a single universe in the multiverse that is even mildly interesting. This isn’t the multiverse of madness, it’s the multiverse of dullness.

Adding to the malaise in the multiverse is the fact that this film looks and feels cheap and rushed. For example, the visual effects are at times embarrassingly amateurish. Add in a scattershot script, generally poor performances and derelict direction, and you have a recipe for sub-mediocre Marvel movie mundanity.

What makes this movie so disappointing is that it’s directed by Sam Raimi, who you may recall, among other things, directed the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies from the early 2000s. Those films, particularly the first two, were very good and extremely well made (the third one was a hot mess…but two out of three isn’t bad!). Raimi is a quality filmmaker and yet on Dr. Strange he seems to have succumbed to the Marvel virus and made the most sterile and anti-septic piece of incoherent corporate comic book crap imaginable.

To be fair, the first Dr. Strange (2016) film was pretty forgettable too, but this sequel somehow feels even more inconsequential, which is unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate because of a few things, the first of which is that Dr. Strange is actually quite a fascinating comic book character. After seeing the first film I had a reader send me some Dr. Strange comic book titles to read and I thought they were terrific. The character, and his world, is weird, but not weird for weirdness sake. It’s a complex character and one worthy of a decent cinematic exploration.

Another thing that irritates about these Dr. Strange movies is that the films never live up to the stand out casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as the master of the magical arts and former Sorcerer Supreme himself. Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange is a deliriously intoxicating combination of insecure smugness and aggressive arrogance that is pretty great to behold…but the stories they put him in and the movies that surround him are needlessly vapid, vacuous and abysmal.

Speaking of abysmal, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness boasts what may very well be the worst performance by an actress in Marvel Cinematic history, which is quite an achievement. Xochitl Gomez plays America Chavez, a young-women who possesses the ability to traverse the multiverse. The dead-eyed, charisma-free Gomez is so awful in the role that it was physically uncomfortable to witness. It was like watching a homeless person defecate under the golden arches in front of a McDonalds and then put it on a bun and serve it to an unsuspecting public.

Gomez’s character, America Chavez, of course speaks Spanish because we have to hit all the right demographic buttons, and on top of that box-checking bit of virtue signaling she also has two mommies. In a nod to Marvel’s supreme subtlety, the name of Ms. Chavez’s universe of origin where everyone is a Spanish speaking Latina lesbian is…the Utopian Parallel. I shit you not. Here’s hoping the woke brigade and their alphabet contingent at Disney can learn Spanish and move to the Utopian Parallel and churn out their shitty movies to their heart’s content and spare the rest of us in this miserable universe their insipid cultural politics.

Speaking of mommies, Elizabeth Olsen is a good actress who was absolutely phenomenal in WandaVision playing Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, but who is remarkably dreadful playing the same character in Dr. Strange. It’s sort of bizarre, but Olsen’s angry mommy on a multi-versal rampage just feels off here. Olsen seems completely uncomfortable on-screen as Wanda/Scarlet Witch, which manifests by her continuously being completely off-breath and off-voice throughout.

The rest of the cast, including some surprise cameos from stars playing Marvel icons - all of which will go unnamed so as to avoid spoilers, are pretty awful too. One is so horrendous that it genuinely shocked me.

As for the movie’s fate, Dr. Strange is undoubtedly going to dominate the box office for weeks on end and by year’s end will be one of the top grossing films, but that says less about the quality of the film and more about the crumbling nature of the entertainment business and the rapid decline in audience expectations. Such is life in this universe of corporate controlled, crap art/entertainment.

My advice is to avoid Dr. Strange in the theatre as it is most definitely not worth your hard-earned money. But if you’re a complete-ist and you want to stay on top of all things Marvel, just wait for it to stream on Disney + and watch it there. But even then it’ll still feel like a giant waste of time.

The bottom-line regarding Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that it made me yearn to live in a universe where Marvel movies weren’t so reliably and relentlessly sub-par.

©2022

The Northman: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SEE IT. This weird, arthouse action movie is flawed but also unique, interesting and gorgeously photographed, so best to see it in the theatre.

The Northman, directed and co-written by arthouse darling Robert Eggers, may be the most brazenly bizarre big budget action movie in cinema history.

The best way I can describe the film is to say that it’s like if Conan the Barbarian and Hamlet had a baby and Norse mythology was its wet nurse.

Writer/Director Eggers is one of the more intriguing talents to come along in recent years, and he made a name for himself with his distinctly stylized, visually impeccable, first two films, The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019). Those movies were arthouse ventures through and through, and while I liked The Witch much more than The Lighthouse, I respected what Eggers was up to in both films.

With The Northman, Eggers is stepping out of his comfort zone and stepping up in budget to an estimated $90 million, in an attempt to expand his audience with a more action-oriented movie. With more money comes, well, less responsibility, as Eggers lost the power of final cut of his movie, leaving him no doubt unhappy to have his film be left at the mercy of soulless suits from the studio.

The plot of The Northman is as old-school as it gets, as it’s a revenge story, one which has no doubt been told and retold since the dawn of history.

The film follows the trials and tribulations of Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), a Viking prince who sets out on a journey to avenge the murder of his father and capture of his mother.  

Amleth’s odyssey is epic in concept but Eggers makes it feel intimate in execution, whether that is a plus or minus is entirely a matter of taste, with arthouse aficionados probably liking it and action fans being disappointed by it.  

What makes The Northman so fascinating as an action movie, and it is an action movie as there are some gorgeously shot battle sequences that are as good as it gets in the genre, is that scattered among the usual revenge story twists and turns are scenes that explore the esoteric spirituality of the Vikings. To put it mildly, these scenes are weird, and viewers who signed up to just watch the spectacle of a Viking kicking some ass will no doubt be irritated and annoyed by such artsy distractions.

I found these forays into the Norse netherworlds to be fascinating, but I am admittedly a strange person and that sort of stuff is right up my alley, so take that for what it is worth.

The biggest problem for me about The Northman was not the winding story or the esoteric detours, but rather something much more basic…namely that the film’s star, Alexander Skarsgard, isn’t up to the job.

To be clear, Skarsgard isn’t a bad actor and he doesn’t embarrass himself as Amleth, the Berserker on a mission. No, the trouble with Skarsgard is that he simply lacks that “it” factor which all movie stars need. Yes, he’s is impossibly handsome and he is in incredible shape for the role of a Viking – for example, his traps are absurd, but Skarsgard just doesn’t have the requisite supply of charisma, magnetism and blind ambition to make a compelling enough screen presence.

Skarsgard is in nearly every frame of this film and yet he never jumps off the screen. Unlike his co-star Anya Taylor Joy, who obviously loves the camera and the camera loves her back, Skarsgard often times seems to be trying to hide from the camera and by default, audiences. In contrast, Taylor Joy’s ambition oozes out of her every pore, and you see her seek out the camera at every opportunity, but Skarsgard feels like a reluctant leading man.

That said he does pull off the action scenes with aplomb, but it’s when things slow down, that Skarsgard recedes into his shell.

As for Anya Taylor Joy, who plays Olga – a Slavic Sorceress, she makes the most of her supporting role. Taylor Joy was fantastic in Eggers’ first film The Witch, and her career is in steep ascendance, and you can see why in The Northman. She steals nearly every scene in which she appears, and her magnetism and dynamism are absolutely undeniable. She is a star who is in the early stages of going supernova.

Other actors in supporting roles, like Ethan Hawke as Amleth’s father-king, and Willem Dafoe as a court jester, do solid work in smaller roles.

Nicole Kidman plays Amleth’s mother Queen Gudrun, and while I admire the attempt, she seems to be out of sync with the acting style of the rest of the film.

Unfortunately, Claes Bang, who plays Amleth’s nemesis Fjolnir, is not up to his task and makes for an underwhelming villain.

The real star of The Northman is director Robert Eggers and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. There are sequences in this movie, most notably the climactic battle scene and an earlier scene of a raid on a village by Vikings, that are stunning to behold. Gloriously and gorgeously photographed, The Northman is elevated from a run of the mill blood, beards and brutality Viking tale into a piece of semi-populist cinematic art.

The screening of The Northman I attended was the first screening on the Sunday of opening weekend, and it was sold out. I saw the film in a mall in a rural part of upstate New York, and the audience reactions were very muted. No doubt audience expectations of a blood and guts action movie were thwarted by Eggers’ unique arthouse style and narrative decisions.

Due to my experience of seeing the film in “rural America”, I can’t help but feel that The Northman will under-perform at the box office because it’s arthouse weirdness will alienate regular viewers and negative word of mouth will be the kiss of death.

That would be a shame, as The Northman isn’t a great movie, but it is a good and interesting one. Despite its weak leading man, The Northman is a captivating cinematic experience that is worth the effort to see in theatres…but you should hurry as I don’t think it’ll be in theatres long, and its stunning cinematography will seem less so on a smaller screen.

In conclusion, if all action movies boasted the masterful artistry and depth of understanding of The Northman, then cinema would be a much more interesting and relevant artform than it is now. We need more movies like The Northman, not less. I pray to Odin that he makes it so.

©2022

Everything Everywhere All at Once: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see on the big screen but definitely worth checking out when it hits a streaming service.

Everything Everywhere All at Once, the new film written and directed by the “Daniels”, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, which is currently in theatres, has gotten a bevy of buzz and is the sleeper hit of the Spring.

It’s easy to understand why as on its surface Everything Everywhere All at Once is an exceedingly ambitious movie to the point of being audacious.

For example, one way to describe the film would be to say that it’s an existential kung fu family dramedy with weaponized dildos, butt plugs and lesbians with hot dog fingers. That sounds pretty audacious to me.

But barely beneath that zany surface lies a foundational narrative that is so orthodox and generic as to be trite.

At its core the story of Everything Everywhere All at Once is a simple family drama about a Chinese immigrant woman, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who is ashamed of her troubled lesbian daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), judged harshly by her old school, patriarchal Chinese father (James Hong), and stuck in a lifeless marriage to her feckless husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan).

That baseline story acts as a launching pad for the metaphysical madness of multi-verses, and the accompanying weaponized dildos, butt plugs and lesbians with hot dog fingers, to rain down on Evelyn like a major monsoon.

You see, outside of her mundane existence running a Simi Valley laundromat in our universe, Evelyn exists in an infinite number of other universes and she discovers that she can access her more powerful self in those other universes in order to fight against an inter-dimensional villain named Jobu, who seeks to destroy everything everywhere.

If all that sounds confusing, it sort of is, but not so much so that you can’t enjoy the silly spectacle of the movie. The multi-verse jumping may not make much logical sense if you stop to think about it, but the movie keeps things moving pretty fast so you never stop to question what the hell is happening, you just enjoy the mad-capped mayhem.

On the bright side, Marvel’s recent full-fledged foray into multi-verses has definitely paved the way for audiences to accept the universe bending of Everything Everywhere All at Once, but unfortunately, Marvel mainstreaming multi-verses has also blunted this film’s narrative edginess.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is definitely fun and entertaining and maybe even at times poignant, but for a film that poses as being profoundly philosophical in nature, it is remarkable for being completely devoid of profundity, and ultimately ends up feeling like a lot of empty calories.  God knows there’s nothing wrong with empty calories, and everybody likes a treat now and then, but let’s not confuse Jujubes with Filet Mignon.

The philosophical message of the movie is the equivalent of those posters with a cute kitten hanging onto a branch with the words “Hang in There!” written underneath.

The narrative nuttiness of the movie papers over the film’s stifling conventionality. The drama of the Asian immigrant experience and the accompanying tension between generations feels so played out at this point as to be cliché, and Everything Everywhere All at Once doesn’t bring anything new to the table. And the inclusion of an LGBTQ storyline into that orthodox immigrant tale feels entirely forced and like a bit of blatant pandering.

The movie also suffers because despite a plethora of action sequences, it isn’t particularly well-shot. Visually, the movie feels very flat and rather stale, and the action sequences are energetic but not particularly original.

One of the best parts of the film though is that across the board the cast does terrific work.

Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn is captivating from start to finish, and she commands the viewer’s attention like the middle-aged movie star and great actress that she is. This movie never works without Yeoh, as her physical and emotional presence in the film elevates the material enormously.

But the greatest acting revelation in the movie is unquestionably Ke Huy Quan as Waymond, Evelyn’s husband. Quan was a child star, you may remember him as Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back in 1984, but his career floundered as he aged and he basically dropped out of acting about 25 years ago.

In Everything Everywhere All at Once, Quan is back and he is spectacularly good. He switches between his “real world” Waymond, and the Waymond of other universes with remarkable ease and believability. In one sequence, he goes from being weak-kneed Waymond to a sort of Chow Yun-fat looking leading man, and the transition is entirely seamless and quite stunning. It’s a shame that Quan got chewed up and spit out by Hollywood, but I found it exhilarating to have him back and for him to be so outstanding.

Also quite good is Jamie Lee Curtis as Deidre, a surly IRS inspector. Curtis fully inhabits the uncomfortable skin of Deidre with aplomb and seems to thoroughly enjoy her screen time as the irritatingly enigmatic shlub.

On the whole, Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t a great film, it’s rather a fun yet flimsy movie that entertained but didn’t enlighten. It’s popcorn entertainment masquerading as philosophical cinema and edgy art. That said, if you manage your expectations, it’s certainly worth checking out when it hits a streaming service, but not worth shelling out hard earned money to see at the theatre.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 65 - Pig

On this episode, Barry and I dig through the dirt to discover the truffle-like gem that is Pig, starring Nicholas Cage. Topics discussed include the strange career arcs of Nic Cage and director Michael Sarnoski, Matthew McConaughey as used-care salesman, defying audience expectations, and the shameful paucity of competently made movies in our cinematically troubled times.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 65 - Pig

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Film 'Come and See', the Russian Psyche, and the War in Ukraine

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT NOW. Arguably the greatest war film, and greatest anti-war film, ever made.

‘COME AND SEE’ IS VITAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN PSYCHE REGARDING THE WAR IN UKRAINE

A few years ago, in order to commemorate the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day, I wrote a list of the best war films ever made that was published at RT.com, an English-language Russian news outlet. I got a lot of feedback on my list, as readers shared their favorite war films and compared them to mine. Interestingly, I was inundated with emails and comments from Russian readers who were outraged I failed to have Come and See, the 1985 Soviet war film directed by Elem Klimov, not only not on my list, but not at the top of it.

The truth was I hadn’t seen Come and See because it isn’t widely or easily available here in the U.S. The film, which for years was nearly impossible to find on any streaming service, is now available on the Criterion Channel (which is wonderful and a must have service for any cinephile). Having finally watched the movie I can now say that those Russian readers were right and I was wrong…Come and See deserves to be on the top of the list of best war films ever made. It is a terrible injustice that the film has thus far remained mostly undiscovered in the West as it is an astonishing piece of cinematic art.

I think now, as the war in Ukraine rages into its second month, it’s most imperative that Westerners watch Come and See in order to better understand historical context and how it effects the collective Russian psyche regarding perceived enemies on its western border.

The dramatically scintillating Come and See is unquestionably a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t use that word lightly. The film chronicles the odyssey of Florian Gaishun, a young teenage boy trying to survive the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Republic of Belarus in 1943.

Florian is eager to join a rag tag group of Soviet partisans in a guerrilla war against the Nazis. But his mother, afraid to be left alone in their small village with two young twin daughters, is adamant he stays home.

But once Florian discovers a discarded but usable weapon buried in the dirt, the partisans come to his house and officially conscript him into service.

Thus begins Florian’s coming of age story, which is a trial by fire where a Focke-Wulf 189 German reconnaissance plane haunts the skies above his head like a blood-thirsty vulture and Nazi savagery dominates and decimates the fragile world around him.

Florian is thrust into most harrowing journey through the brutality of war and the darkness of the human heart, and must endure the most hellacious of circumstances and devastating of tragedies.

It’s impossible to adequately describe Florian’s gruesome crucifixion upon the cross of war, and the ungodly horrors he must suffer. The viewer must simply bear witness to them too and suffer the same visceral anguish as Florian.

The film boasts two terrific performances, one from Aleksei Kravchenko as Florian, and the other Olga Miranova as Glasha.

Kravchenko’s face over the course of the film is a roadmap of the horrors he’s experienced. His ‘thousand-yard stare’ is a monument to the soul-crushing and heartbreaking ordeal he’s undergone.

Miranova is electrifying as Glasha, a young woman Florian meets in the early days of his time with the partisan guerrillas. Miranova is like a beautiful, gaping wound walking the earth, trying to avoid catastrophe but sentenced to an endless parade of calamities.

Director Klimov pulls no punches on Come and See, as he masterfully, using a variety of clever and intriguing filmmaking techniques, such as a split diopter lens and the use of reduced sound to heighten drama, tells Florian’s tale. Klimov’s brilliant direction immerses the viewer in the hell of war, as well as expresses the collective rage against the Nazis that unleashed a wave of brutality and barbarity against the Soviets that is staggering to contemplate.

This is why it’s so imperative that Westerners watch Come and See, because it so forcefully conveys the palpable fear, anxiety and angst left on the Soviet/Russian psyche by the barbarity of the Nazi invasion forty years after it happened, as well as today.

Hitler sent his very best divisions when he invaded the Soviet Union because he understood that to win the wider war the Nazis needed to destroy the USSR and usurp its plethora of resources, most notably oil and wheat, which would then fuel and feed Hitler’s war machine.

Hitler, like Napoleon before him, found out the hard way that invading Russia is never a good idea, as the winters are brutal and the people made of extraordinarily stern and resilient stuff.

Roughly 30 million Soviets died in World War II (compared to about 418,000 Americans), but their deaths were not in vain as it was the Soviets who broke the Nazi war machine’s back and won World War II. But there isn’t a Russian family that didn’t suffer immensely during the war and for generations after, and the psychological damage from that trauma still resonates today.

In the West, when we hear talk of Russia wanting to “de-nazify” Ukraine, it sounds like a vacuous talking point. To Russians it deeply resonates though because it’s driven by a palpable existential fear – a fear perfectly captured in Come and See.

My intention here is not to try and change any minds regarding the war in Ukraine, as I’m aware enough to know that when emotions are as inflamed as they are now, and the bullshit propaganda is piling up so high you need wings to stay above it, as it is now, appealing to reason and logic is a fool’s errand.

But what I am here to do is to try and get people to watch Come and See for its cinematic mastery, and its collective cultural insights, so that they can at least understand the deeper psychological and historical context of Russia’s actions and impulses.

For instance, most people in the US don’t know this but in 2014 the US backed a coup in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected government. The overthrown government was more inclined to Russia’s viewpoint, and the newly-installed government was beholden to the US.

To Americans, that bit of history is largely unknown, but to Russians it’s not only well-known, but deeply troubling and anxiety-inducing.

The same is true of the fact that the newly installed Ukrainian government sat idly by as 42 pro-Russian activists were burned alive in the Trade Union House in Odessa, Ukraine post-coup in 2014, something which most Americans don’t know but that Russians know all too well (and which is remarkably reminscernt of one of the more horrifying scenes in Come and See).

Another example, which most Americans don’t know but of which Russians are keenly aware, is that this same US installed Ukrainian government then banned the Russian language and went to war with ethnic Russians in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. Since that war started in 2014, nearly 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, including women and children, have been killed.

Another piece of historical context largely ignored in the US is that when Russia and Ukraine signed a ceasefire/peace agreement called the Minsk Agreements (Minsk Protocol signed in 2014, and Minsk II – a ceasefire signed in 2015), it seemed peace was possible, but Ukraine and the US ignored those agreements and the slaughter of ethnic Russians continued in the Donbass.

To watch Come and See gives Americans an opportunity to see the developments in Ukraine through the eyes of Russians. To Russians, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which western media reported on extensively for years as a battalion of devilishly devout Nazis but which now ignores that context, is not an outlier, but the crux of the issue. As evidenced by the brutal wholesale slaughter of an entire Belorussian village in Come and See, which the film informs us was something that happened to 628 Belorussian villages at the hands of the Nazis during the war, Nazi bloodthirst isn’t a speculative talking point to Russians, it’s a historical fact and a traumatic trigger.

The way Russians see it, the US installed a Nazi friendly regime in Ukraine, and Russians remember what the Nazis did the last time they had power in the region…and it was genocidal in its scope and scale and demonic in its unabashed cruelty.

When Russians see pro-Russian activists burned alive in Odessa, and ethnic Russians massacred in the Donbass, the horrors of World War II as exquisitely captured in Come and See are conjured in all their grueling and gruesome savagery.

I understand that many Americans, fed a hearty diet of establishment media Zelensky worship as well as ludicrous propagandistic tales of the Ghost of Kiev and the Heroes of Snake Island, might watch Come and See and interpret it very differently. For instance, Americans might watch Come and See and believe Putin to be Hitler and the modern-day Russians in Ukraine the equivalent of the Nazis in Belarus in 1943.

I disagree with that assessment and find it to be historically illiterate and painfully myopic, but that said, I completely understand why, after years of relentless Russo-phobic propaganda, people would be conditioned to feel that way.

Regardless of how you interpret Come and See, I whole-heartedly encourage you to watch it. By being one of the greatest war movies of all-time, Come and See succeeds in being the greatest anti-war movie of all-time.

As for the war in Ukraine…like all wars, I hate it and vehemently oppose it. I understand why it’s happening, what triggered it, the wider forces at play in it and the stakes involved in it, but I despise war in all its brutality and callousness and inhumanity.

I know most people don’t believe in this sort of thing anymore, and frankly I don’t blame them, but I ardently and earnestly pray every day that the war in Ukraine ends and an everlasting peace is found and prospers. Ukraine is nothing but a boiling cauldron of suffering, and the last thing this world needs is more suffering, the brilliant Come and See is a testament to that fact.

©2022

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

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

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

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

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

Now…onto the awards!

 Worst Film of the Year

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

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

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

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

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

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

Worst Performance of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most Overrated Film of the Year

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

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

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

And the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® goes to…

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

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

Eternals - See Above.

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

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

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

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

Worst Director

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

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

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

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

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

Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice

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

POS Hall of Fame –

The Smith Family

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022

Morbius: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This super-vampire movie sucks.

Unless you are a comic book aficionado, you probably had never heard of the character Morbius prior to the marketing campaign for the new aptly titled Sony movie, Morbius, that arrived in theatres this Friday. If you have the great misfortune of seeing this movie, you’ll no doubt wish you could return to that pre-Morbius golden age of ignorance.

Morbius is a D-level superhero in the Marvel universe. That doesn’t mean that he’s a useless character, he isn’t, in fact, having read a bunch of comics featuring Morbius I can say that he’s pretty fascinating and definitely worthy of a big screen adaptation…just not THIS big-screen adaptation.

Morbius is a rather unorthodox comic book character best described as a self-made, self-loathing vampire, basically a good guy who does bad things. But director Daniel Espinoza and screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless churn out the most generic and painfully bland film to tell Morbius’ tale.

Morbius’ background is that he was born with this painful and terrible blood disease that requires him to get complete blood transfusions three times a day. But he’s also a genius, so he develops a type of artificial blood, which earns him a Nobel Prize, which he refuses for some reason.

Morbius then turns his attention to a special kind of bat and trying to fuse the bat DNA to human DNA in order to help his blood coagulate. This leads to a bunch of scenes where Morbius, like Batman’s alter-ego Bruce Wayne, is surrounded by a cauldron of bats who, for some reason, accept him as one of their own. When Morbius then injects himself with bat/human hybrid DNA in order to cure his disease, it leads to very unexpected complications.

Morbius is a dark story, as he’s more villain than hero, but Morbius the movie not only can’t walk that archetypal and tonal tightrope, it ignores it altogether and like a blind, deaf and dumb Wallenda steps-out off of the ledge and falls ninety stories flat on its face leaving little but a blood splatter in the shape of a clown face.

Morbius is an incoherent mess of a movie that boasts atrocious visual effects, embarrassing action sequences, and utterly incomprehensible characters and plot. In short…this movie sucks, pun intended.

It’s striking how abominable the visual effects are in the movie, as Morbius’ super-fast movements are reduced to just color trails like in a Roadrunner cartoon. The only thing missing was a snarling, jagged toothed “Meep-Meep”. This approach renders all of the fight sequences utterly impotent. The rest of the film is just as visually mundane as the fight sequences and visual effects.

Across the board the cast are adrift in a drab ocean of lethargy, just like the ship in the film where Morbius does his experiments…which is named the Murnau – after F.W. Murnau the director of the classic vampire movie Nosferatu. Clever.

Jared Leto plays Morbius and coasts through the movie like a stoned Jordan Catalano at a first period math class. The impossibly handsome Leto has mastered the art of having his eyes be both beautiful and blank at the same time. I’ve seen Cigar Store Wooden Indian with more spark in their eyes.

Matt Smith plays Morbius’ childhood friend Milo, also a victim of the same blood disease, and it feels like he showed up from another, even worse movie.

Adrian Arjona plays Martine Bancroft, a doctor who is Morbuis’ co-worker/accomplice/love interest. Dr. Bancroft is not so much a character as a piece of furniture that talks. What is astonishing about Ms. Arjona’s performance is how relentlessly anemic it is. She may be the least charismatic human being to ever appear in a major role in a super hero film. Of course, the character is so poorly written as to be egregious so it’s not all Ms. Arjona’s fault that it doesn’t work, but she certainly doesn’t help matters.

Morbius’ failing may be a result of director Espinoza’s incompetency, or it might be due to too many Sony suits with too many bad ideas and too much power to make them happen. Or, and this is the more likely scenario, it’s an odious combination of the two.

No matter who’s fault it is, there’s no denying that this movie is, in its own D-level comic book character way, a disaster.

Unlike the rest of the Marvel characters which are owned by Disney, Sony controls Spider-Man and the “Spider-verse”, which includes a bunch of Spider-Man villains, including Venom, which has had two solo movies, and now Morbius, as well as Kraven, who has a movie coming next year.

Judging by the two lackluster post-credit scenes in Mobius, Sony is either trying to create a team of Spider-verse villains to take on Spidey and compete ‘solo’ against the MCU monstrosity, or it’s trying to develop more characters to sprinkle in to the MCU movies and share in the wealth. But if Morbius is any indication, Sony’s master plan faces a very steep climb and minimal chance at success.

The bottom line is, as good as Spider-Man: No Way Home was, Morbius is just as awful. You’d be more entertained using a hot spoon and a plastic straw to drain every ounce of blood from your own body than you will be sitting there for an hour and forty-five minutes watching this toothless cinematic venture.

©2022

8th Annual Mickey™® Awards: 2021 Edition

THE MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Mickey™® Awards are undeniably the most prestigious award on the planet….and they almost didn’t happen this year. You see 2021 was the worst year for cinema in recent memory, so singling out movies to celebrate with the highest honor in the land seemed an impossible task.

For example, this past January I was invited on my friend George Galloway’s radio show The Mother of All Talk Shows, to discuss the best cinema of 2021. In preparation I tried to put together a top ten list…and could not find ten, or even five, films I thought were decent enough to label as ‘good’, never mind ‘great’. Thankfully, George and I had an interesting conversation nonetheless about the state of cinema rather than a more conventional top ten list because I couldn’t conjure one.

The bottom line regarding 2021 is that there wasn’t a single great movie that came out this year. Not one. I have to admit that I was stunned by the cavalcade of cinematic failure on display, as a year where PT Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Adam McKay and Denis Villeneuve put out movies, and in Ridley Scott’s case he put out two, should have some gems in it, but this year had nothing but dismal duds.

Let’s not kid ourselves, last year was no walk in the park either, but this year was even worse. But what’s more alarming to me than the deplorable state of cinema is the even more deplorable state of film criticism. It felt like this year was the year where critics just decided that slightly below mediocre was the equivalent of greatness. Never have I felt so disheartened by cinema and criticism.

To think it was just three years ago that we were blessed with a bountiful bevy of brilliance. In 2019 we had four legitimately great films, Parasite, Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman, as well as significant arthouse films like Ad Astra, Malick’s A Hidden Life, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Claire Denis’ High Life, in addition to finely-crafted, middle-brow entertainment like 1917 and Ford v Ferrari. All of those films were significantly better than anything that came out in 2021. All of them.

But, after consulting with the suits on the Mickey™® Committee, we have come to an agreement that the Mickeys™® will take place this year but under protest. The Mickeys™® retain the right to revoke these Mickeys™® at any time in the future if we feel like it.

Before we get started…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, streamer or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive one acting coaching session with me FOR FREE!!! Yes…you read that right…FOR FREE!! Non-acting category winners receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, you aren't actors so I know you can eat carbs, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). Actors who win and don't want an acting coaching session but would prefer the lunch…can still go straight to hell…but I am legally obligated to inform you that, yes, there WILL BE SUBSTITUTIONS allowed with The Mickey™® Awards prizes. If you want to go to lunch, I will gladly pay for your meal…and the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge.

Enough with the formalities…let's start the festivities!!

BEST ACTOR

Joaquin Phoenix – C’Mon C’Mon – C’Mon C’Mon was not a great movie. In fact, it was one of the more irritating cinematic experiences I had this year because the kid character in the movie is so annoying and his mom is one of those awful mothers who creates a monster of a child but who still thinks she’s a great mother – an uncomfortably common species in Los Angeles. All that said, Phoenix eschews his signature combustibility and gives a subtle and powerful performance as just a regular guy. A quiet, touching and skilled piece of acting.

Oscar Isaac – The Card Counter – I’m not a fan of Oscar Isaac as I’ve found much of his work to be trite and shallow over the years. Much to my surprise, in The Card Counter, Oscar Isaac creates a character that is grounded whose internal wound is palpable. It is easily the best performance of his career.

Matt Damon – The Last Duel – Damon co-wrote this screenplay and took on the most complex of all the roles. Gone are his movie stardom and good guy persona, and front and center is an insecurity and egotism that fuels his delusion and destructiveness. A really finely tuned, well-crafted performance and a great piece of mullet acting.

And the Mickey™® goes to….

Joaquin Phoenix – C’Mon C’Mon: Phoenix is the best actor on the planet and in a year when no one even noticed, he still gave the best performance.

BEST ACTRESS

Jodi Comer – The Last Duel – Comer is an oasis in the conniving and brutish world of The Last Duel. She effortlessly changes the mask she is required to wear for each re-telling of the story of the attack on her character. Comer exudes a magnetism that you can’t teach, and it is on full display in her masterful performance here.

Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter – Colman is the best actress working right now (readers should check out her work in the intriguing HBO mini-series Landscapers). Her presence elevates any project in which she appears. In the dreadful The Lost Daughter, Colman is unlikable, unlovable and unenjoyable, but from an acting perspective, she is un-look-away-able. Colman is on a Michael Jordan in the 90’s type of run right now and we should all just sit back and enjoy her brilliance.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Jodi Comer – The Last Duel: Comer has been overlooked by the multitude of other awards, but she wins the only one that matters.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Jonah Hill – Don’t Look Up – Jonah Hill does nothing more than be Jonah Hill in Don’t Look Up, and while it isn’t exactly the greatest performance of all time, it is undeniably amusing.

Bradley Cooper – Licorice Pizza – Cooper goes all in as hair cutting mogul, lothario and Barbra Streisand boyfriend, Jon Peters. An absolutely batshit crazy performance of an even crazier person.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Bradley Cooper – Licorice Pizza: The most striking thing about Bradley Cooper has always been his ambition rather than his ability. But as Jon Peters he goes balls to the wall and injects much needed life into PT Anderson’s rare misfire.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Kathryn Hunter – The Tragedy of Macbeth – Hunter was so mesmerizing as the witches in Macbeth that it unnerved me. She contorted her body and voice to such elaborate degrees that she transformed into a supernatural presence that was captivating and compelling while also being chilling and repulsive. Pure brilliance.

Ariana DeBose – West Side Story – West Side Story was a useless cinematic venture, but the lone bright spot was DeBose, who brought a dynamic presence to every scene she stole.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Kathryn Hunter – The Tragedy of Macbeth: Hunter’s incredible performance is what acting is all about, and this Mickey is well-deserved.

BEST SCREENPLAY

The Last Duel – This screenplay, despite at times being a bit heavy handed in its sexual politics, was at least interesting in how it was structured (like Rashomon). It isn’t earth-shattering, but it’s better than anything else from this dismal year.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

The Last Duel: Well, I guess Matt Damon and Ben Affleck can put another trophy on the mantelpiece, but this time it’s the greatest trophy of all time.

BEST BLOCKBUSTER

Spider-Man: No Way Home – Not a great movie, but a really fun one. It gave fans anything and everything they could ever want out of a Spider-Man movie.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Spider-Man: No Way Home – What’s better than three Spider-Mans? One Mickey.

BEST DIRECTOR

Ridley Scott – The Last Duel – The duel that takes place at the end of The Last Duel, is the most compelling piece of filmmaking I saw this whole year. That’s not saying much…but it is saying something.

And the Mickey™® goes to…

Ridley Scott – The Last Duel: This film is not among Scott’s greatest, by any stretch, but it at least is the best one he put out this year, as House of Gucci was god-awful. Regardless, Ridley showed he might have lost his fastball, but he can still bring some heat with The Last Duel.

BEST PICTURE

5. The Tragedy of Macbeth – An ambitious but very flawed re-telling of the old tale of the Macbeth by one Coen brother. Beautifully shot in a German expressionist style, the film suffered from uneven and sub-par performances, most notably from Frances McDormand.

4. Licorice Pizza – An uneven movie that had some very bright spots but ultimately lacked narrative cohesion and clarity of purpose. Was less mesmerizing than it was meandering.

3. Nightmare Alley – Gorgeous to look at, this very bleak meditation on the heart of darkness deep inside the American psyche was flawed but still managed to cast a spell on me.   

2. The Last Duel – Let’s not kid ourselves, The Last Duel is flawed, but it was good enough to land on the list of best movies of the year. That says a lot…and not all of it good.

1.Bo Burnham: Inside – Bo Burnham: Inside isn’t a movie, it’s a comedy special on Netflix. So why is it ranked number one on my list of films for 2021. Because there were no great films in 2021. None. And the thing that I watched this year that I thought was the most insightful, most artistically relevant and frankly the very best, was Bo Burnham: Inside. It should be an indicator to readers of how dreadful this year in cinema was, and how brilliant Bo Burnham is, that I, self-declared cinephile of cinephiles, would name a Netflix comedy special as the Mickey™® Award winner for Best Picture.

But no movie made me think or feel as much as Bo Burnham: Inside. It was a subversive, stunning, singular piece of genius caught on camera. And in honor of Bo Burnham’s undefinable and distinct brilliance, I hereby do honor him with the most prestigious award in all of art and entertainment…the Mickey™® Award.

And thus concludes another Mickey™® awards. We usually have quite the after party to celebrate the winners but due to the abysmal state of cinema, the after party is cancelled. Everyone should go home and think about what they’ve done and figure out a way to do better.

God willing the art of cinema will bounce back after two tough years in a row, and next year we’ll really have something to celebrate.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next year!!

©2022

The Cuckold vs the Comedian - The 2022 Oscars Round Up

THE OSCARS NEEDED A KICK IN THE ASS…BUT GOT A SLAP IN THE FACE

Well, the Academy Awards happened last night and I need to apologize to readers for being so wrong on my Oscar prediction post. I ended that post by writing, “In ten years, no one will remember CODA. In five years, no one will remember CODA. In a year, no one will remember CODA. And by Monday morning, no one will remember these Academy Awards.”

Boy was I wrong. CODA didn’t need a year to be totally forgotten as it’s already out of mind just 24 hours after winning Best Picture because these Oscars were rendered unforgettable due to “The Slap”.

As I’m sure everyone knows by now, Will Smith got up and bitch-slapped Chris Rock on-stage at the Oscars after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife Jada and her bald head. After the slap, Smith sat in his seat and yelled to Rock that he needed to “keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth”.

Watching it live it first felt like a comedy bit, but then it became clear it wasn’t, which made it easily the most compelling moment at the Oscars in my lifetime.

HOW DO THE OSCARS SUCK? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

The fact that this was one of the all-time awful Oscar telecasts leading up to, and then after, that bitch-slap, should come as no surprise. As a rule, the Academy Awards generally suck, but this year the Oscars turned up the suck to 11.

Speaking of sucking, the opening for the show was a pre-taped performance from Beyonce at a tennis court in Compton. Beyonce’s status as some sort of entertainment Queen amuses me no end as she is a middling talent at best, and her Oscar opening performance was excessively anemic and the song relentlessly bad.

After Beyonce’s video, the three hosts, Amy Schumer, Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes came out and stumbled through some half-hearted, hackneyed attempts at humor. The comedy throughout all fell flat, which was a recurring theme of the evening.

Equally awful were the live musical numbers, which, good lord, can we stop with the fucking musical numbers. No one wants to see or hear that garbage. It is always awful. Always.

The most alarming thing about the Oscars, besides the bitch-slapping, was the egregious directing of the show. The camera would often cut to audience members responding to things on-stage that viewers at home had not been shown. And there were technical gaffes, like cutting to the Williams sisters during Will Smith’s speech, which resulted in extended periods of time with nothing but an Oscar logo on-screen, which were catastrophic.

Speaking of catastrophes, poor Liza Minnelli was wheeled out near the end of the show with Lady Gaga to give an award. Liza is wheelchair bound and cognitively not all there. I don’t say this to demean her, but she never should’ve been on that stage, it wasn’t fair to her. It was incredibly uncomfortable watching her ramble and babble on in utter confusion in front of millions of viewers. Lady Gaga was very gentle with her and handled the situation gracefully, but neither woman should’ve been put in such an awkward position.

OSCAR THE TERRIBLE

The overall theme of the show seemed to be how can the Academy Awards be as unlikable as possible? With raging mediocrities like CODA winning Best Picture, Will Smith winning Best Actor, and Jane Campion winning Best Director, the core cinephile audience was bound to feel letdown and betrayed. With the hosts and award-recipients reflexively and relentlessly signaling their virtue by pushing some insipid political-cultural agenda that was so vapid as to be embarrassing, wider audiences must have felt like the Academy Awards were actively trying to alienate anyone not all in on woke cultural issues. Not exactly a great strategy to build or maintain an audience.

THE CUCKOLD VS THE COMEDIAN

As for the Will Smith – Chris Rock brouhaha, I have some thoughts.

First off, I completely understand the impulse to crack somebody in the head for no other reason than they deserve it. In Will Smith’s eyes, Chris Rock deserved it. That said, in the real world you can’t just smack somebody because they said something you don’t like. You know why? Because that is a crime called assault. Violence is bad. Condoning it is bad too.

And here is another point to consider, and that is that Smith was wise to slap Rock and not punch him, because punching someone can have catastrophic medical and legal results even if not intended. You can kill somebody with a single punch, it happens far more frequently than you’d think.  

I have to say I do find it curious that Smith was so emotionally overwhelmed and out of control that he hit someone on national television, but was conscious enough to hit with an open hand and not a fist.

Another curious thing is that video evidence shows Will Smith laughing uproariously at the same joke that ultimately inspired him to commit assault on national television.

KING CUCK

Adding to the oddity is that Will Smith is a public cuckold, as his wife Jada has stated that she, in fact, repeatedly had sex with her son Jaden’s friend August Alsina, during their marriage. Classy. Apparently and conveniently, Jada then convinced Will to make their marriage “open”. Host Regina Hall actually made a joke about Will and Jada’s “open relationship” early in the show but for some reason that didn’t send Will into an uncontrollable rage at all.

The truth is that Will Smith has always been, and will always be, an incorrigible douche-bag and mealy-mouth twat. He’s no man defending his wife from slander, he’s a hyper-sensitive cuck lashing out at his own emasculation.

Smith is as full of shit as anyone in Hollywood, which is really saying something, and his antics at the Oscars would’ve gotten any other actors expelled from the ceremony. Imagine if Mel Gibson had done that. He would’ve been expelled and arrested.

My hope is that now that Smith has revealed himself to be an asshole, and he has finally gotten his Oscar, that he can please go away forever, but of course he won’t.

Will Smith is a shitty actor, shitty rapper, shitty father, shitty husband, shitty person. His wife Jada is a deplorable human being, his kids are blights on the earth. The Smiths are a collection of the most malignant, noxious narcissists imaginable.  

HYPOCRITES AND THE FORKED TONGUE OF A MAN-CHILD

Smith’s speech after the assault sickened me too. The hypocrites in the audience clapped for this clown after he assaulted somebody in public and said that God called him to be a vessel for peace and love. Will Smith should’ve been grabbed by security and escorted off of the premises, not cheered as he wept during his insipid Oscar speech.

Look, as I said, I understand the impulse to beat the hell out of somebody, hell, I’d like to beat the hell out of Will Smith for making such awful movies and such putrid music, but I wouldn’t do that because I’m a grown man who understands the dangers of violence and its consequences. Will Smith is a 53-year-old, grown man too, he should know better. He’s not a child, he’s not some teenager or twenty-something under the sway of an over-abundance of testosterone and weak impulse control. He’s a grown man. If a grown man is going to hit somebody, it better be a life and death situation, not a hurt feelings situation.

The reality is that Will Smith isn’t a man at all. He’s never been a man and he’ll never be a man. A real man wouldn’t get his panties in a bunch over a joke and sucker-punch somebody he knew wouldn’t hit him back. It was a despicable and disgusting thing to do.

BETWEEN CHRIS ROCK AND A HARD PLACE

As bad as all this is for Will Smith, it’s much worse for Chris Rock.

Rock made a living walking around with big balls on the comedy stage, and now he’s been castrated on live television. After the slapping, when Will is yelling to “keep my wife’s name out your mouth”, Rock responded, “I will”. So weak, so terribly, terribly weak.

I get that Rock was shocked and that’s why he didn’t defend himself or retaliate, but with the verbal lashing he was receiving, it’s unconscionable that Rock didn’t just double-down and start trash talking Jada and talking about how Will is a cuck. He should’ve said that Will hit his cheek almost as hard as August Alsina hit Jada’s ass…or something along those lines. You have to respond, and if Will gets up again, good…then you know he’s coming and you defend yourself. Chris Rock grew up in Brooklyn, I’m sure he has a lot of experience in defending himself.

Rock was once the best comedian on the planet, but for two decades now he’s been a shadow of his former self. And it is difficult to imagine him bouncing back from this incident without a massive verbal counter attack in public.

Rock’s already shaken confidence must be shattered, but if he wants to make lemonade out of these lemons, he needs to put a scathing set together where he skewers himself for his cowardice, but then lambastes Will, Jada and the rest of the Smith’s for their heinousness. Call Will a cuck, Jada a whore, Jaden a dandy and Willow a tramp…do whatever you can to stick the knife in and twist it. It’s the only way he can ever hope to get his mojo…and his balls…back.

And if it works, then you get a $20 million deal with Netflix for the comedy special and you get your balls and street credibility back.

‘A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE’

As for Will Smith’s impact on the Oscars, it's uncomfortable to mention this but after years of complaints about #OscarsSoWhite, this year it was a very diverse show with a black producer, two of three hosts being black women, three of four acting winners being minorities, a female Best Director winner for the third time ever, and yet Will Smith committed black-on-black crime on national television and reduced the once prestigious Oscars to little more than the Source awards with higher production value. Not good a look for anyone involved.

On the bright side, I did win my Oscar pool getting a respectable 19 out of 23 categories correct. On the down side, I had to watch the Oscars, which was a truly dreadful experience.

The big takeaway from this year’s Academy Awards is that the Oscars are over, not just for this year, but really forever. They are now utterly meaningless. And as much as it breaks my heart to say it, I fear cinema is fast becoming irrelevant as well.

JUMPING SHARKS

In conclusion, I saw today that someone on Twitter wrote, “Will Smith committed a violent crime, took no responsibility, and then blamed it on his feelings. Perfect encapsulation of our times.”

Someone else said to me this morning, “it doesn’t just feel like the Oscars jumped the shark last night, it feels like civilization and the species itself jumped the shark last night too.”

I wholly concur with both assessments.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 64 - Deep Water

On this episode, Barry and I don our snail costumes and slowly slither into the slime that is Deep Water, Adriane Lyne's unintentionally hysterical "erotic thriller" starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, that is neither erotic nor thrilling. Topics discussed include snails, the snail room, the sexiness of snails and why the hell are there snails in this movie?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 64 - Deep Water

Thanks for listening!

©2022

94th Academy Awards: 2022 Oscar Prediction Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Cinematography

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

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

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

Best Hair and Makeup

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

Best Costume

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

Best Documentary Short

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

Best Live Action Short

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

Best Animated Short

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

Best Documentary

• Summer of Soul – Seems about right.

Best Supporting Actress

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

Jessie Buckley – The Lost Daughter

*Ariana DeBose – West Side Story

Judi Dench – Belfast

Kirsten Dunst – The Power of the Dog

Aunjanue Ellis – King Richard

Best Supporting Actor

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

Ciaran Hinds – Belfast

*Troy Kotsur – CODA

Jesse Plemons – The Power of the Dog

J.K. Simmons – Being the Ricardos

Kodi Smit-McPhee - The Power of the Dog

Best Original Screenplay

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

*Belfast

Don’t Look Up

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

The Worst Person in the World

Best Adapted Screenplay

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

CODA

Drive My Car

Dune

*The Lost Daughter

The Power of the Dog

Animated Feature

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

*Encanto

Flee

Luca

The Mitchells vs the Machines

Raya and the Last Dragon

Best International Feature Film

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

*Drive My Car

Flee

The Hand of God

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom

The Worst Person in the World

Best Actor

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

Javier Bardem – Being the Ricardos

Benedict Cumberbatch – The Power of the Dog

Andrew Garfield – Tick, Tick…Boom!

*Will Smith – King Richard

Denzel Washington – The Tragedy of MacBeth

Best Actress

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

*Jessica Chastain – The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Olivia Colman – The Lost Daughter

Penelope Cruz – Parallel Mothers

Nicole Kidman – Being the Ricardos

Kristen Stewart – Spencer

Best Director

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

Kenneth Branagh – Belfast

Ryusuke Hamaguchi – Drive My Car

Paul Thomas Anderson – Licorice Pizza

*Jane Campion – The Power of the Dog

Steven Spielberg – West Side Story

Best Picture

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

Belfast

*CODA

Don’t Look Up

Drive My Car

Dune

King Richard

Licorice Pizza

Nightmare Alley

 The Power of the Dog

West Side Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

©2022