The Menu: A Review - A Deliciously Dark Comedy/Horror Experience

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever, entertaining and darkly comedic swipe at foodie culture that is buoyed by solid performances.

A lot of people seem to love the Knives Out movies and often describe the reason for doing so being that the movies are “fun”. These people of course are unrepentant philistines and incorrigible buffoons as both Knives Out movies are utterly appalling and are the antithesis of entertaining.

The Menu on the other hand, is exactly what the Knives Out movies should be but aren’t, as it’s clever, funny, dark and above all else, entertaining.

The Menu, which is currently streaming on HBO Max and is still playing in some theatres, stars Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor Joy and chronicles a collection of rich assholes and food snobs as they shell out big bucks to attend an exclusive restaurant on a secluded private island operated by celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Fiennes).

The prestigious dining experience is limited to just 11 people, and they are all sinners in one form or another. There are the three-frat boy/hedge fund crooks, the rich couple with the philandering husband, the narcissistic faded movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant, the big-time food critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), and finally devout foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) and his last-minute date Margot (Anya Taylor Joy).

Julian Slowik is less a chef than a cult leader, and his staff, most notably his maître d’ Elsa (Hong Chau) are a militant group committed to obeying his each and every command. On this particular night Chef Slowik, who despises both the uncouth and the too couth, has the ultimate menu prepared for his unsuspecting guests.

I’ll refrain from going any further in describing the plot but I will say that The Menu is sort of a comedy/horror/thriller that skewers foodie culture and keeps you guessing, and intrigued, from the get go.

The comparison to the most recent Knives Out movie Glass Onion, is obvious since the film begins with a group of pretty insufferable people going to a private island for a special dinner and then a whole bunch of stuff is revealed.

The difference between the two movies though is that The Menu is better crafted and considerably more effective due to a far superior script, direction and most of all, performances.

Anya Taylor Joy plays Margot, the protagonist of the story, and she is simply a very charismatic and magnetic screen presence. The luminous Taylor Joy knows how to fill a screen (despite the fact that she appears to have never eaten a cheeseburger in her life – which is a joke you’ll get once you see the movie) and how to tell a story with just a simple glance.

Taylor-Joy is aided by the sublime Nicholas Hoult. Hoult, who is absolutely spectacular on the Hulu series The Great, once again sparkles in The Menu as the dedicated, die-hard foodie. Hoult’s commitment to his comedy is unwavering, and he never winks at the camera and lets you know he’s in on the joke.

Ralph Fiennes has long been a superb actor, but in recent years he’s transitioned to roles in more broad-based movies, and The Menu fits him to a tee. Fiennes’ Chef is an artistic avenging angel, filled with copious amounts of self-righteousness and self-pity.

Janet McTeer, who was so good on Netflix’s Ozark, is terrific as the pompous, know-it-all food critic, and Paul Adelstein is a subtle scene stealer as her ass-kissing editor.

Usually when a movie features John Leguizamo, one of the worst and most annoying actors of his or any other generation, I either refuse to watch it or am resigned to hating it. The Menu is the lone exception because it uses Leguizamo’s repugnance as a feature not a bug by casting him as an annoying, has-been actor.

The Menu, which is written by Will Tracy and Seth Reiss and directed by Mark Mylod, isn’t a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but for what it is, it’s mostly well-done.

For example, the movie’s premise is very clever and its politics are clear but never heavy-handed, and to its great credit it never becomes self-indulgent are self-aware, which makes it devoid of preachiness and results in a rather enjoyable viewing experience.

The best part of the movie is that, unlike the Knives Out movies, it earns almost all of its moments, and never insults the intelligence of its audience because it takes its premise and its plot seriously and never diverges from that. There is a scene, in fact, where any questions about the reality and veracity of the scenario playing out in front of viewers is directly addressed, and it’s very smart.

Mark Mylod has mostly directed TV prior to The Menu, as his credits include a bevy of Shameless, Succession and Game of Thrones episodes. His direction on The Menu is solid but not spectacular, and he gets the job done with minimal flair.

While The Menu has some plot points that don’t quite work, and some characters that aren’t totally fully formed, and some performances that could maybe have used better actors (I’m mostly thinking about Reed Birney’s role of Richard – the cheating husband), overall, the film works as a compelling and amusing piece of entertainment.

If you’re looking for dark fun and some laughs at the expense of pretentious foodie culture and the uber-rich, then The Menu will be a tasty and very satisfying meal, I recommend you dig right in.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 90 - Amsterdam

On this episode, Barry and I don our glass eyes and try to thwart a fascist coup as we discuss all things Amsterdam, the David O. Russell movie starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington. Questions debated include…is David O. Russell officially a hack? Is John David Washington the worst working actor in Hollywood? What the hell is going on with Margot Robbie? And for how many decades has Robert DeNiro been mailing it in?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 90 - Amsterdam

Thanks for listening!

©2023

White Noise: A Review - Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unconscionably boring and banal, poorly written, directed and acted movie. I’d rather die in an airborne toxic event than watch this movie again. Go read the book instead.

It has been said that White Noise, Don DeLillo’s classic 1985 postmodern novel, was unfilmable, and now with Noah Baumbach’s flaccid cinematic adaptation now streaming on Netflix, that assertion has been proven true.

At the very end of Baumbach’s brutally boring and banal White Noise something miraculous occurs. After enduring two-hours and sixteen minutes of the most middling of middlebrow and mundane moviemaking, the film ends with all of the characters doing a choreographed dance sequence in a supermarket to a new LCD Soundsystem song while the credits roll. This credit rolling scene pulsates with the wit, vitality, frivolity and vibrancy that is entirely devoid from the film that precedes it, and highlights the glory of what could have been.

White Noise stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, and tells the story of Jack Gladney (Driver), a professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, his wife Babette (Gerwig) and their four kids as they navigate life and contemplate death in 1980’s America.

The book is a clever postmodern meditation on existentialism amidst the controlling and conformist nature of America’s toxic, pre-packaged consumerist culture. Baumbach’s movie though is so poorly written, directed and acted that it barely scrapes the surface of those meaty topics and ends up being little more than an arthouse version of one of those Are We There Yet? movies starring Ice Cube.

Baumbach’s film tries to be an incisive satire of the 80’s, but ends up being an insufferable, self-indulgent, instantaneously forgettable piece of work largely due to a script that’s intolerably verbose with contrived dialogue that feels dramatically lethargic, if not leaden.

Baumbach’s decision to makes some changes to DeLillo’s novel, like adding a silly car chase scene and injecting Babette into the climactic sequence, not only dumbs down the material but is actively at cross-purposes with the drama and tone of the story.

The car chase in particular is cringe-worthy. The car mishap and drive through the river and woods that leads to a jump into a field is the most hackneyed, inane, embarrassing thing any filmmaker has done this year…and I say that having seen Amsterdam.

The fact that Baumbach added the car chase and yet cut from the film the scene in the book where Jack’s youngest son Wilder goes on a perilous and harrowing big wheel journey, is pretty telling of the kind of director he is…which is spineless and sackless.

To Baumbach’s credit, the credit rolling dance sequence really is infectiously enjoyable, as is a scene mid-film where Jack and fellow professor Murray co-lecture a class about Hitler and Elvis in a sort of dueling intellectual dance. Those two scenes are literally the only things that are remotely watchable in White Noise, and beg the question, why didn’t Baumbach make the whole film with that type of absurdist energy?

And I suppose it’s also to Baumbach’s credit that he attempts some ambitious things on White Noise, like using a few 360-degree shots, and imitating/paying homage to different directors, like Spielberg – whom he imitates by injecting some controlled familial messiness ala early Spielberg, or Robert Altman, whom he copies by having overlapping dialogue and conversations throughout scenes.

Unfortunately, Baumbach’s Spielbergian familial messiness feels a little too contrived and manufactured and his Altman-esque overlapping dialogue scenes feel unintelligible, cluttered and irritating because they’re undermined by subpar sound design and Netflix’s notoriously poor audio quality.

Baumbach is adored by critics but I find his filmography to be hit or miss…mostly miss. I liked the flawed The Squid and the Whale, and found While We’re Young to be amusing, but everything else is odious dogshit masquerading as arthouse gold. A perfect example was Marriage Story, Baumbach’s last film – which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay despite being an absolutely heinous, heaping pile of flaming garbage.

Baumbach’s films are usually much smaller in terms of scope, scale and budget than White Noise. This movie has a reported budget of $100 million, with some reports stating $140 million, and Baumbach doesn’t seem to know what to do with it. The film looks paper-thin and unconscionably cheap, with the exception being the gloriously staged supermarket with its spot-on color scheme and period proper pricing and products.

Maybe the budget went to the cast, but if so, that was a huge waste of money.

Adam Driver is horribly miscast as the lead Jack Gladney and gives an absolutely dreadful performance. Driver, like Baumbach, is a critical darling, but pinning down why exactly people think he’s a good actor is as elusive as getting a hug from Bigfoot – a role I’d actually like to see Driver play because then you wouldn’t see him much and when you did, he’d be hidden under make up and hopefully wouldn’t talk.

Greta Gerwig is another critical darling, and she’s in a long-term relationship with Baumbach, so they’re sort of the critical darling couple of American cinema. Gerwig plays Jack’s wife Babette and is abysmal in the role. Gerwig is nothing, she’s a dead-eyed, empty vessel entirely devoid of any gravitas or inner life. She’s like a tumbleweed rolling through scenes with no grounding and no life.

The rest of the cast are equally lifeless and/or underused.

Don Cheadle is never given enough to do. Andre Benjamin is a glorified extra. Poor Raffey Cassidy is distracting because she looks like a trans Harry Potter.

White Noise claims it is an “absurdist comedy drama”, but while the absurdity is self-evident, the comedy and drama are non-existent. There is nothing interesting, insightful, amusing or engaging in this entire two-hour and sixteen-minute venture except for the fun music video at the end.

If you’ve read the DeLillo book you’ll be entirely underwhelmed by Baumbach’s movie adaptation, as it loses everything in translation. If you’ve not read the book, you’ll be bored out of your mind watching Baumbach’s movie, not to mention completely lost in terms of its incomprehensible and incoherent plot.

The bottom line is that Baumbach’s White Noise is just another in a long line of directorial disappointments over the last few years in the world of cinema. The cinematic drought since 2019 is real and feels like it might even be getting worse.

I hope 2023 marks a turn-around for the art of cinema, but if the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that just when you think movies have hit bottom, and 2022 sure feels like the bottom, there’s always some deeper level of hell for things to fall to.

So, skip White Noise on Netflix as it’s a total waste of time, but if you’re interested maybe pick up DeLillo’s book and give it a read instead. It’s not transformational, but it is, unlike the movie, amusing. That’s how bad movies have gotten, I’m now recommending you go read a book. God help us all.

©2023

Amsterdam: A Review – Fascists, Coups and Assassinations...Oh My!

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

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Awful. Awful. Awful. Just an amateurish, dreadful, no-good piece of moviemaking. Go read Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” instead.

Amsterdam, written and directed by five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell and starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington, hit theatres with a resounding thud back in October, and is now streaming on HBO Max…and I just had the great displeasure of watching it.

The film, which describes itself as a “period comedy thriller” but feels more like a comedy thriller on its period, follows the travails of three old friends who met in World War I, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), Valeria Bandenberg (Margot Robbie) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), as they uncover a coup plot in America in the 1930’s and try to thwart it.

The coup plot in the film is based on the real-life 1933 Business Plot, where American oligarchs, like JP Morgan, Irenee DuPont, Prescott Bush – banker and future father and grandfather to two U.S. presidents, Robert Singer Clark – heir to the Singer Corporation fortune, and banker Robert Clark among many others, plotted to overthrow President Roosevelt and install a fascist military dictatorship here in America.

The real-life Business Plot was thwarted by General Smedley Butler (in the film the character is named Gil Dillenbeck and is portrayed by Robert DeNiro), one of America’s greatest but least known heroes, but was successfully covered up, disparaged and then memory-holed by the powers that be who control the media.

In real-life the Business Plot’s failure was only temporary though because in the long term it’s been a smashing success. Over the years the “Business Plot” simply morphed into other forms and used other tactics to find success.

The most obvious was when, thirty years after the Business Plot was thwarted, President John F. Kennedy, who had promised to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind”, got his brains splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind in Dealey Plaza by the the oligarch’s intelligence/muscle division - the CIA…oops, I mean by a “lone nut” (wink-wink)…all because Kennedy wasn’t going to make the villainous vampire class gobs of money by greenlighting the war in Vietnam, among a myriad of other reasons.

Prescott Bush (who, along with many of his Business Plot co-conspirators, supported the Nazis before and during World War II) had a son, George HW Bush – who later become the Director of the CIA, as well as Vice President and eventually President, he earned his stripes by being an integral part of the plot against JFK.

Nearly twenty years later in 1981, George HW Bush was Vice President to Ronald Reagan when The Gipper had the great misfortune of getting shot just months after his inauguration by…you guessed it…another “lone nut” (wink-wink), this one named John Hinckley.

If Reagan had died Bush would’ve inherit the throne – and would have been eligible to be president for nearly 12 years (nearly three full terms) since Reagan had just started his presidency…which makes the fact that the Bush family had deep connections to John Hinckley’s family, so deep in fact that Scott Hinckley (John Hinckley’s brother) was scheduled to have dinner at Neil Bush’s (HW Bush’s son) home the week of the assassination attempt, a very uncomfortable “coincidence” (wink-wink).

Since the assassination/execution of JFK, we’ve had a succession of fascist monsters from both political parties occupying the White House and ruling the land, most notably, but not exclusively, the aforementioned George HW Bush, as well as his diabolical son George W. Bush.

George W. Bush, you may recall, was president when 9/11 occurred and the War on Terror and War in Iraq were launched and ultimately failed, the torture and surveillance regime became mainstream, and the big money interests raped and pillaged America and gutted the working class…again…and then got “bailed out” by their cronies.

9/11 is another of those unfortunate Bush family coincidences (wink-wink), because on the morning of the attack George W. Bush, former President and father of the then current President, was at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton as a representative for the Carlyle Group meeting with the brother of Osama bin Laden – the CIA asset the CIA claimed perpetrated the 9/11 attack, sort of like how CIA asset Lee Harvey Oswald committed the JFK assassination. I’d wink again but I’m fresh out of winks.

As much as I’d like to ignore the abominable cinematic calamity of Amsterdam and dive deep into the rabbit hole and talk about the machinations of the wicked witches and warlocks ruling this country, I simply must, for the moment, return to this shit sandwich of a movie.

I suppose it is to Amsterdam’s credit that it even dares to bring up the Business Plot, something of which most people are completely unaware, but the movie is so cinematically repulsive and artistically repugnant that one must seriously consider that it’s an intentional piece of counter-intelligence propaganda meant to trigger audience revulsion at the mere mention of the Business Plot because it’s connected with this odious movie.

David O. Russell has always been an abysmal filmmaker, but Amsterdam is such a poorly made and dreadfully written, directed and acted film that it’s like Russell’s shitty filmmaking machine went into hyper-drive. The notion that Russell intentionally scuttled the production by imposing an astounding level of his fecal filmmaking flair in order to…I don’t know… appease some higher ups in the ruling class food chain in the hopes that his recent “troubles” – which include sexually harassing his transgender teenage niece/nephew, becomes less insane than it obviously sounds.

Whatever the reason, Amsterdam is sufficiently heinous enough that the Business Plot now has zero chance of becoming well-known amongst the piss-ants, proles and plebes of the general population.

Amsterdam has rightfully, and in my case righteously, been savaged by critics and lost nearly a $100 million at the box office, so congrats David O. Russell and your oligarchical overlords, your secret is safe as no studio executive will touch a Business Plot movie for at least the next 1,000 years, then it’ll be the problem of the next Reich, which by my calculations will be the Fifth, to put the fix in.

From a cinematic perspective, Amsterdam’s failure is no fluke as the script is an incomprehensible abomination that features a plot that’s so convoluted and so tonally incoherent as to be egregiously abrasive.  

Russell’s amateurish, heavy-handed and heinous direction is laughable, if not criminal. The reality is that Russell has always been a cinematic charlatan. Always. His movies, like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, have generated some broad-based appeal but they have been, for the most part, vacuous, vapid and venal piles of shit.

Russell’s movie Three Kings was his most interesting but…that’s not saying much. And just a reminder, Three Kings, which was about the first Gulf War, wasn’t an anti-war film at all but was actually advocating for MORE war…and magically the war it hoped for came to be a few years later in the wake of 9-11. Yay!

Russell makes the bizarre choice in Amsterdam to shoot a bevy of scenes where the characters are talking directly to the camera while in conversation with each other. This is so absurd as to be distracting, if not maddening. These conversations are sometimes between three or four people, and no one’s eye line matches, so it’s like Russell is cutting between characters talking in opposite directions. I get why he did it – Russell is playing the Hollywood political card and having the characters talk directly to us because they’re not-so-subtly warning us about the peril facing our democracy right now because of Trump…blah blah blah…but this sort of myopic Rachel Maddow-inspired nonsense ignores the fact that our democracy died a long, long time ago…also it’s so cinematically disjointed and disordered as to be catastrophic.

Russell’s continued focus on eyes in Amsterdam, whether they be Mike Myers weird blue ones, or Ed Begley Jr’s unblinking ones, or Christian Bale’s glass one, or the eyes of the actors speaking directly into the camera during scenes, is inanely ham-handed. Look (“see” what I did there?), we get it…the brave artist David O. Russell is trying to use his egregiously shitty movie to get us to see the Truth of our own world – but it’s so poorly done and so politically vacant it made me roll my eyes so far in the back of my head I nearly had a seizure.

As for the all-star cast…hoo-boy.

Christian Bale is a good actor and he does his best here but goodness gracious it’s like watching a man piss into hurricane-force winds and wonder why he gets wet. Bale’s Dr. Burt Berendson has a glass eye…reminiscent of the actor’s role in The Big Short…a far-superior film that should be connected to Amsterdam due to the sub-text and text of corrupt elites rigging the system but Amsterdam sucks so bad that connection is completely lost.

Margot Robbie, who plays nurse Valerie Vandenberg, is a luminous beauty, but her old timey New Yawk accent which she seems to fall back into in nearly every role, has become extremely tiresome. Robbie is a big movie star but the more you see her the less you think of her.

John David Washington, who I thought was so good in BlacKKKlansman, is so bad in this movie, and in his last bunch of movies, I can confidently declare he must have had quadruple charisma bypass surgery. Washington is simply dead behind the eyes and brings nothing to this role, so much so I could swear I hear a sucking sound every time he’s on screen.

Rami Malek has a supporting role and confirms what has become very apparent in recent years…Rami Malek is officially an awful actor. Chris Rock too has a supporting role that would have been better served if it never existed, and Taylor Swift has a supporting role and is remarkably successful in proving she’s not an actress. Good for you Taylor!

The bottom line is that the Business Plot is an important piece of history that has successfully been banished from our collective consciousness, and Amsterdam is such a God-awful, disaster of a movie that this crucial, treasonous event will only be further flushed down the memory hole and forever forgotten. Which is a shame since people should be aware that we live in a fascist, corporate hellscape ruled by cruel, vicious, blood-thirsty oligarchs just like the ones who tried to overthrow FDR, and who very successfully overthrew JFK.

This begs the question, where’s our Smedley Butler? And where’s the great Smedley Butler bio-pic or prestige TV series we so desperately need?

I’ll tell you where they are…they’re strangled in the crib by the ruthless ruling elites who use their lap dog media to stifle the truth of their tyranny and treason, ensuring it never sees the light of day and even if it did it would never be believed by the misinformed masses.

In conclusion, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I hated Amsterdam and implore you not to waste your time watching. The truth is I watched it so you don’t have to…and boy oh boy…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

©2023

Babylon: A Review - Damien Chazelle's Reach Exceeds His Grasp in Bloated Babylon

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A messy misfire of a movie that is not worth seeing in the theater but if you’re interested check it out when it hits streaming.

“BABYLON WILL BE LIKE SODOM AND GOMORRAH WHEN GOD OVERTHREW THEM. IT WILL NEVER BE INHABITED OR LIVED IN FOR GENERATIONS.” ISAIAH 13:19

I readily admit that I am a fan of director Damien Chazelle.

Chazelle’s first feature, Whiplash, which I recently re-watched, was a powerful announcement of the director’s arrival. La La Land, Chazelle’s second film, was an Oscar-winning blockbuster but also a subtle yet masterful movie that was considerably deeper than many understood. Chazelle’s third feature, the over-looked and undervalued First Man, was a brilliant and profound piece of cinema.

Now the Oscar-winning writer/director Chazelle is back with his newest film, the highly anticipated Babylon, starring Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.

With my Chazelle fandom as context, I’m sorry to have to report that Babylon, a three-hour and nine-minute, sprawling extravaganza, simply doesn’t work. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t good either.

Babylon chronicles a bevy of characters in the decadent and debauched old Hollywood of the late 1920’s as they navigate the industry’s transition from silent movies to talkies.

Even that description of the plot gives away the game as the film’s narrative is decidedly derivative. Other current filmmakers have made much better films on similar topics, be it P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights – which dramatized the porn industry’s drug-fueled move from film to digital, or even Quinten Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – which was about Hollywood’s transition from the studio system to the new Hollywood of the 1970’s.

Chazelle makes multiple references to both Boogie Nights and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so much so that it seems to be an homage to those movies (it’s also an homage to Singing in the Rain and its coda seems to pay tribute to Kubrick’s 2001), but that doesn’t make his story any more original or compelling.

For example, just the casting of Pitt and Robbie – who both stared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has an air of homage to it. But when Robbie’s character sits in a movie theater and unleashes a million-watt smile when she hears the audience respond to her performance on-screen – which is an almost identical scene from when she played Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it feels less like homage and more like imitation.

GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

The first thirty minutes of Babylon are an extended, pre-title card sequence that revolves around a massive party at a Hollywood producer’s home in very rural Bel Air.

This party is meant to highlight the debauchery of both the roaring twenties and Hollywood at its height, but Chazelle, unlike say P.T. Anderson, is incapable of adequately portraying the grime and grit under the glitz and glamour.

The party, which features a bevy of bodily fluids – including a woman pissing on a guy to satiate his perversion and a midget with a fake giant cock ejaculating on a crowd (not to mention the pre-party close-up of an elephant’s asshole which then shits profusely on some poor bastard), and a cavalcade of cocaine use, as well as an ample supply of nudity, feels incongruously sterile.

Chazelle’s use of bodily fluids in the film (later on there’s a tsunami of vomit too) are cheap substitutes for realism, most notably the blood and guts of emotional realism, in a story that is never able to fully form truly human, multi-dimensional characters.

The debauched party scene is so cold, controlled and antiseptic that it comes across as a virginal, pre-pubescent boy’s naïve beliefs about what sex and drugs are like. Chazelle is that virginal, pre-pubescent boy.

Once the party ends and the title card presents itself, the story finally begins. The main characters are Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), the biggest silent movie star of the moment, Nellie LaRoy, a Clara Bow-esque “it” girl who gets her big break and makes the most of it, and Manny Torres (Diego Calves), a Mexican film assistant who loves movies and works his way up the Hollywood ladder by dealing with incorrigibles like Conrad and LaRoy.

There are two other semi-lead characters, jazz trumpeter Sydney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) and cabaret singer/actress Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li). Neither Sydney nor Lady Fay are fleshed out to any satisfactory degree, and their presence in the film feels more like a rather ham-handed attempt to appease the diversity gods rather than to advance the story. It is no fault of the actors, but one can’t help but think that if these two characters were cut, and the runtime of the movie was subsequently trimmed by thirty minutes or so, we’d all be better off.

The first act of the film was my least favorite part, but to its credit it does get incrementally better from there, but unfortunately it never soars.

The third act is much more blatantly symbolic than the previous acts, such as when Manny descends into a near literal hell that becomes more and more disgusting and denigrating with every circle, and that approach resonated with me, which was a contrast to the first half of the film.

ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT

Pitt’s acting mirrors the film’s failings and successes. In the first two-thirds of the movie, Pitt gives a rather shallow, smirky and one-note Pitt-ian performance. He’s Brad Pitt, one of the biggest movie stars in the world, playing a character that is one of the biggest movie stars in the world…get it? But in the third act, Pitt eschews his empty movie star magnetism for a melancholy that actually becomes quite moving.

Margot Robbie is a luminously beautiful women, and she’s certainly ambitious – not unlike her character Nellie LaRoy, but there is something off about her in every performance she gives (I also just saw her in the most recent David O. Russell film Amsterdam and oh dear…but that is a discussion for another day). Whether it’s her over-reliance on a sort of old-timey New Yawk accent or what, I can’t quite figure just yet, but she always appears to be “acting” and everything she does feels mechanical and manufactured.

In Babylon Robbie works her ass off, of that there is no doubt, but it never coalesces into anything captivating. There’s lots of over-the-top yelling and gyrating and manic pixie dream girl mania and hysteria, but never anything that ever feels genuine or grounded.

Diego Calva is a pleasing screen presence, but his character Manny is under-written, as is his love story, and he never really gets his hands wrapped around this whole unwieldy thing to find its sweet spot.

As for the rest of the cast, it’s a mixed bag or worse. For instance, Jean Smart is overall pretty dreadful as a gossip columnist, but she does give a very effective monologue late in the movie that works quite well.

Eric Roberts plays Nellie’s dad and is utterly atrocious.

Lukas Haas plays Conrad’s producer and best friend and it’s an awkward and totally forgettable piece of work.

Tobey Maguire plays a crazy mob boss in a scene that is very, very similar to the “Sister Christian” scene from Boogie Nights, except this time there’s no firecrackers but instead a bodyguard who spits at random intervals. The scene could’ve been great I suppose, but just never comes together, and Maguire’s character is a freaky sideshow lacking gravitas.

The biggest issue with the acting is the same issue with the movie, it’s all light and no heat. There’s lots of yelling but nobody says anything.

It must be said that Linus Sandgren’s cinematography is at times glorious (even when seen through a sub-par projector which unfortunately is the case in most theaters nowadays), and the music and score by Justin Hurwitz (who won an Academy Award for the music in La La Land) are terrific.

It’s somewhat intriguing that Babylon is either a companion piece to La La Land or its outright prequel. Chazelle makes this fact pretty clear by repeatedly using an integral piece of Hurwitz’s music from La La Land as a cornerstone of Babylon.

The ethereal La La Land - the dream of Hollywood, contrasted with the nightmare of Babylon, is an intriguing formula, if only Babylon could hold up its end of the bargain.

A MOVIE ABOUT THE END OF AN ERA, MADE AT THE END OF AN ERA

I concede that making a movie about the impact of technology on the movie business and how Hollywood ruthlessly makes difficult transitions, is insightful in this era where streaming moves the earth beneath Hollywood’s feet and, much to my chagrin, auteur movies - like Babylon, face the real possibility of extinction. I also admit that as a fan of Damien Chazelle and also due to the evolution/devolution of the film business which seriously threatens to end the auteur era which I love so much, there’s a part of me that desperately wants to adore Babylon and declare that making a decidedly decadent movie about Hollywood decadence is in fact clever if not ingenious, but if I’m being honest, I have to say it’s actually pretty trite.

Ultimately, I wanted Babylon to be great and to my disappointment it wasn’t even good, instead it’s a messy misfire of a movie that’s an empty imitation of other more worthy films. I cannot recommend seeing Babylon in the theatre, but if you really want to see it wait until it hits a streaming service, that way the long run time and derivative drama will be more digestible, if not necessarily palatable.

©2023

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Review/Commentary with Spoilers

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT SPOILER FREE!!***

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THEM READ THE SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark by being shown one version of events in the first half of the film, and then in the second half they’re shown that the first half was all a ruse played on them by Blanc and Cassandra/Helen.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in and the movie’s super villain and stupid villain.

Then there’s Dave Bautista’s Duke, the meathead, men’s rights bro du jour who’s a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate.

And there’s also Kate Hudson’s Birdie, who is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

The most painfully obvious and cringe-worthy bit of white self-loathing and virtue signaling by Rian Johnson though comes in the fact that the crux of the story is that tech guru Miles Bron is not really a genius at all but rather a conman who stole the idea for his trillion-dollar tech company Alpha from the true genius – a black woman…Cassandra, and then used his money muscle and a corrupt judicial system to get his other friends to back his claim of having come up with the brilliant idea.

By the end it’s revealed that, just like in Knives Out, the white people, and in this case in particular the white guy – Miles, are irredeemably awful. And the minorities, most notably a black woman – Cassandra/Helen, are the real heroes and geniuses. And of course, the white women (Claire/Birdie) and black guy (Lionel) end up siding with the black woman (Cassandra/Helen) at the crucial moment because they, unlike Miles, definitely are redeemable because they aren’t white men.

That the ultimate revenge on Miles by this collection of minorities and white women comes in the form of destroying one of the greatest works of art ever created by man – just because Miles loves it, feels like an argument ISIS or the Taliban would make when they destroy the art of their enemy – or the rationalization used by those climate catastrophe clowns when they glue themselves to paintings. How about this…let’s keep art, particularly great classic and ancient art, out of political debates, arguments and activism? Art is about beauty and Truth, so let’s not desecrate it with our petty political bullshit.

Speaking of petty political bullshit, my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

There is one not-evil white guy character in Glass Onion, Derol, a slacker who lives on Miles’ Island. Derol is an acceptable white man because he’s a mindless loser who’s nearly invisible to everyone else – his catch-phrase is literally “I’m not here!”. That he’s played by Noah Segan, the actor who played the buffoonish white cop in Knives Out only buttresses my original thesis further.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Spoiler-Free Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. And insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in. Dave Bautista’s Duke, the gun-toting, meathead, men’s rights bro du jour is a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate. And Kate Hudson’s Birdie is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

I won’t get into the specifics in an attempt to avoid spoilers, but I will say that my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

On this episode, Barry and I jet off to a private Greek island to try and solve the mystery of who murdered cinema as they talk all things Glass Onion - A Knives Out Mystery, the new star-studded Rian Johnson movie on Netflix. Topics discussed include the structure of successful whodunnits, the absurdity of Daniel Craig's egregious Foghorn Leghorn impression, and the tragic lowering of cinematic standards.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 88 - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Two Pinocchios in one year? You better believe it! On this episode, Barry and I don our wooden shoes and head to Geppetto's workshop to debate the merits of Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion animated Pinocchio, available on Netflix. A bevy of heavy topics are discussed, including death, religion, and Barry's shocking Christmas confession.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 88 - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 87 - Sr.

On this episode, Barry and I chat about the Netflix documentary Sr., which examines the life and times of enigmatic filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. and his relationship with his superstar son, Robert Downey Jr. Topics discussed include, fathers and sons, on death and dying, and the power of forgiveness and the yearning for closure.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 87 - Sr.

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Banshees of Inisherin: A Review – Journey to the Irish Heart of Darkness

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but well-written and well-acted dark comedic fable that speaks to our current hyper-polarized time.

The Irish are often caricatured by outsiders as a bunch of rosy-cheeked, pseudo-leprechauns blessed with a persistent good-nature and the relentless gift of the gab.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Irish are not jolly jig dancing leprechauns, they’re a complicated people inflicted with a deep-seated darkness and melancholy that confounds psychiatry and could swallow universes whole.

Yes, the Irish are blessed with the gift of the gab but they’re also cursed with the impulse to jab. Wherever two or more Irishmen are gathered, a fight is more likely than not.

Which brings us to The Banshees of Inisherin, the new dark comedic fable written and directed by acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh which stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with supporting turns from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan.

The film, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, tells the story of Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), two men living on a small island just off the coast of civil war torn Ireland in 1923, as they navigate the end of their friendship.

The troubles (pun intended) start when Colm decides one day that life is too short to spend another moment in the presence of the dull and dim-witted Padraig. Fiddle-player Colm wants to leave his mark on the world by writing a great Irish song, and believes Padraig’s company is holding him back by taking up too much of his time. Colm would rather cut off his nose to spite his face than to spend another minute of his life chatting inanely with Padraig.

Padraig, who really is dull and dim-witted, is blindsided by this turn of events and simply can’t wrap his head around Colm’s behavior. Padraig is nice and only aspires to be nice, so Colm’s rather rude demand that they not be friends anymore is a shock.

The story of Colm and Padraig’s progressively uncivil civil war unfurls from there but I’ll refrain from sharing any more details to avoid spoilers except to say that things escalate to literally absurd extremes.

The Banshees of Inisherin has a lot going for it. For one, it is simply but beautifully shot, the setting is glorious and the costumes are sublime.

In addition, Colin Farrell gives a phenomenal performance as the doe-eyed dumb-ass Padraig. Farrell has discovered himself as an actor in recent years under the direction of both McDonagh and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Hell, he was even terrific in the Ron Howard nothing burger that was Thirteen Lives from this past Summer.

Padraig’s character arc gives Farrell a great deal to sink his teeth into and he makes the absolute most of it. I would assume that an Oscar nomination is in his future and he’s definitely deserving of a win.

Brendan Gleeson too is superb as the determined yet despondent, gruff but good-natured Colm. Gleeson is a fantastic actor and the more we get to see of him the better. Make no mistake, The Banshees of Inisherin is Colin Farrell’s movie, but none of it is possible without the subtle and sublime work of Brendan Gleeson.

Kerry Condon plays Siobhan, Padraig’s sister and she is captivating as she perfectly captures the tortured and tormented existence of the Irish woman stuck on an isolated island with the hell that is Irish men.

Barry Keoghan gives an uneven but at times spectacular performance as Dominic, the lonely and desperate son of the local brutish policeman. Keoghan sometimes gets lost in histrionics, but when he slows down and stills himself, he is capable of immense dramatic power and that is evident in his work as Dominic.

I’ve enjoyed Martin McDonagh’s plays but I’ve not been a huge fan of films. I thought In Bruges (2008) was good but not that good, and found his most recent effort, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri to be a steaming pile of donkey shite.

The Banshees of Inisherin is by far his best film as it tells a bleakly funny, layered and complex allegory about the nature of men, Irish men in particular, and the perilously polarizing nature of our fractious time.

Men like Padraig and Colm, are designed to communicate shoulder-to-shoulder, whether it be in a foxhole, the fields, an assembly line or at a bar. Shoulder-to-shoulder. The problems start when Colm forces a face-to-face discussion, which is unnatural to men. When men are face-to-face, they’re squaring up to fight…and that’s what occurs with Colm and Padraig…and with all men who attempt to deny their masculine nature no matter how suffocatingly self-destructive it may be.

As for the more current notions addressed in The Banshees of Inisherin, the recent trend of celebrating the banishing of friends or family over the differing of opinions, is front and center.

Nowadays as a cold civil war rages in America, disagreement over politics, of all stupid, fucking useless things, is punishable by exile, which is lustily cheered on by the cacophony of clowns manning the echo chamber of social media.

Like Padraig I’m a dim-witted dullard, and like Padraig I’ve been cast out of the garden by friends. Unlike Padraig, I don’t give a flying fuck. Like Colm I prefer to be alone, and do not want to waste my time or disturb my peace with inane chit-chat with dopes, dipshits and douchebags.

This is part of the brilliance of The Banshees of Inisherin as Padraig and Colm are two parts of the masculine Irish psyche that are forever in and out of accord with one another. Colm’s newfound, fear-of-being-forgotten inspired ambition and Padraig’s yearning for comfort coupled with his fruitless hope to be remembered as nice, are the two clashing desires in the heart of all Irishmen, and maybe in all men.

Ultimately, what Martin McDonagh understands is that the thing to remember about the Irish is that they are the best friends and the worst enemies. They’re happy to talk your ear off or rip your head off, either one, you decide. They have short-tempers and long memories and they don’t hold grudges, they ARE grudges.

The Banshees of Inisherin understands all of that and all of the darkness in the Irishman’s heart, and that’s why it’s both amusing and gloriously insightful that this movie feels like a prequel to some epic grudge inspired feud that will burn the fictional island of Inisherin to the ground in the years and decades to come…which is a wonderfully Irish thing to do.

The Banshees of Inisherin is possibly the best movie of the year, but to be clear, it isn’t a great movie. It’s good, and interesting, and insightful, but it isn’t great. But in the current cinematic drought in which we suffer, I guess I’ll have to drink from the well of the pretty good while I dream of greatness past.

If you’re Irish or of Irish descent, you’ll probably recognize yourself in The Banshees of Inisherin. But regardless of your connection to the Emerald Isle, be forewarned, The Banshees of Inisherin is a subtle but dark…very dark…comedy. If that’s not your thing, then this is won’t be your thing.

©2022

Sr. : A Documentary Review - Robert Downey Jr. on Robert Downey Sr.

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A charming and surprisingly poignant documentary about a famous son examining the life of his enigmatic father.

Sr. is the new Netflix documentary that explores the complex relationship between mega movie-star Robert Downey Jr. and his film maker father Robert Downey Sr.

The film, directed by documentarian Chris Smith, who has made such notable docs as American Movie, Tiger King and 100 Foot Wave, premiered on Netflix December 2nd.

As everyone knows, Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most successful and wealthiest movie stars of the current age. His work as Iron Man was the lynchpin for the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s astonishingly successful run from 2008 to 2019.

Jr.’s father, Robert Downey Sr., is less well-known outside of Hollywood than his famous progeny, but is a legend in his own right among those in the know in the movie business.

Downey Sr. was an independent, unorthodox, somewhat avant-garde filmmaker in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. Sr.’s films never found any mainstream success but did develop a cult following, which included such notable directors as Paul Thomas Anderson.

I readily admit that Sr.’s films never held the least bit of appeal for me. In fact, I find Robert Downey Sr.’s movies to be…well…mostly trash, and I’ve never understood their low rent appeal. But to each his own. That said, Sr. may not have been a gifted movie maker but he was, as evidenced by the closer examination of him by this documentary, unquestionably an artist at heart…maybe not a particularly skilled artist, but an artist nonetheless. This is evident in how he sees the world through an artist’s eyes and finds brilliance and meaning in the mundane…like when he marvels over ducks in a small city pond or is thrilled when a skateboarder nearly runs him over.

Downey Sr. was a paragon of the 1960’s, so much so that he became a victim of his own appetites. In the 1970’s, Sr. became addicted to cocaine and he passed on that unfortunate trait to his son, Robert Downey Jr., whom he introduced to pot at a very young age.

Thankfully, Downey Sr. got sober in the 1980’s, but this was right when Downey Jr.’s addiction was going meteoric. Downey Jr.’s substance abuse issues raged for years and nearly killed both his career and his self. This tension over Downey Jr.’s troubled past and Downey Sr.’s complicity in instigating it, is the subtle, unspoken center of Sr. as Robert Downey Jr. gently searches for answers while his father’s health deteriorates.  

Robert Downey Jr. grew up on camera, getting his first gig working in his father’s film when he was fresh out of diapers, and his default position is one of performance, and so it is in Sr. But Downey Jr.’s performative instinct is so second nature that it actually feels quite genuine when captured in the documentary, and comes across as both endearing and vulnerable.

A movie star making a documentary about his father could have been nothing but a narcissistic, maudlin venture, and while there is certainly something somewhat narcissistic about the festivities in Sr., the film is so laced with a tender and yearning humanity that it becomes engaging, captivating and ultimately deeply moving despite its famous subjects.

Robert Downey Jr. is revealed in Sr. to be a kind-hearted, fragile kid grown up who tenderly loves his dad and wants to find both satisfactory answers for the demons from his past but also peace and acceptance from his dying father.

Downey Sr., to his credit, accepts responsibility for his poor parenting choices and the burden he placed upon his son, and he doesn’t so much avoid answering tough questions as he simply runs out of adequate things to say and the energy to say them.

Downey Jr. doesn’t get the answers he yearns for in Sr., and neither do viewers, but there is a poignancy in his gentle search and in his father’s good-nature that is profound.

Both Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Downey Sr. are preternaturally charming and relentlessly likeable men, and their charm and charisma transform Sr. from a run-of-the-mill movie star tribute to their dad into an entertaining, and remarkably moving chronicle of a son’s bearing witness to the end of his enigmatic father’s life.

If you’re not a fan of Robert Downey Sr.’s movies, or even of Robert Downey Jr’s movies, there is still a lot to appreciate and to relate to in this poignant documentary, especially if you’re a son who has lost a father and been left with more questions than answers.

©2022

Tar: A Review - Beware of Women in Pantsuits Behaving Badly

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: Cate Blanchett gives a phenomenal performance, but it might not be enough to elevate this movie above its massive third act failures.

Lydia, oh Lydia, have you heard about Lydia? Lydia the conductor lady.

The Lydia in question is the self-destructive, megalomaniacal, world-renowned, superstar conductor/composer Lydia Tar, the fictional lead character played by Cate Blanchett in the new movie Tar.

The film chronicles Tar’s balancing act atop the classical music world as she navigates her darker nature as well as cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. That Tar is a lesbian woman in a male-dominated field who abuses her power, is either a clever or cowardly twist on the story…but more on that later.

Tar is the first film for acclaimed director Todd Field in sixteen years, unfortunately, it fails to live up to all of its intriguing and tantalizing possibilities, but it does feature moments of brilliance that are deliriously enticing and highlight the art of cinema at its best.

For example, the very best scene in any movie this year is a ten-minute tour-de-force from early on in Tar. The scene, which has no cuts, revolves around Lydia Tar, one of the greatest living conductor/composers in the world, teaching a conducting class at Julliard. In the class, she interacts with a sheepishly overwhelmed but defiant “pan-gendered, BIPOC” student who mindlessly regurgitates the current cultural buffoonery regarding the “evils” of the canon of white European “cis” males…like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This student doesn’t like Bach because he was a “misogynist” who fathered twenty children, and therefore refuses to study him or examine his work.

Tar tries a variety of tactics to get this young student to abandon their myopic, identity-fueled, anti-intellectual position but to no avail. Then out of frustration, or fury, she drops her considerable intellectual hammer on him and exposes his personal idiocy for all to see. Then, in typical modern fashion, the “pan-gender, BIPOC” student does not engage Tar in debate or defend himself, but just storms off in a huff.

Watching this scene, which features a bravura performance from Blanchett, brilliant writing and deft camera choreography, was pure joy. So much so that I’ve gone back and watched just this single scene more than five times since I finished the film…it’s that good.

Part of what makes that scene so compelling is that Blanchett is simply one of the great actors and she’s on the top of her game in Tar.

Blanchett’s performance is mesmerizing because it’s so complex and layered. Blanchett is performing as Tar, who is someone who is constantly performing. Lydia Tar wears a mask incessantly in order to maintain the cult of artistic greatness she has built up around herself. Blanchett’s ability to maintain Tar’s deception and self-deception, is a testament to her expansive talent and enormous skill.

I’ve no doubt that Blanchett will be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and most likely will win it, and deservedly so, and that single, extended scene of her teaching at Julliard should be required viewing for any actors or actresses or aspiring actors or actresses.

But as glorious as that Julliard scene is, it’s also a sign of how far the film falls in its third act. I won’t give details to avoid spoilers, but this scene is visually referenced later in the movie in such a ham-handed, cheap, ‘Lifetime Movie of the Week’ way that it truly tarnishes and diminishes the entire film.

The first third of Tar is a truly engaging and phenomenal piece of arthouse moviemaking that skillfully pulls you in. But the final third is so rushed, and filled with a bevy of unearned narrative and character developments, that it scuttles the entire venture.

For example, the nadir for Lydia Tar comes in the third act when she humiliates herself in public (once again I won’t give details to avoid spoilers), but this scene is so poorly conceived and executed as to be absurd. It’s the height of unintentional comedy and the depths of cinematic malpractice.

The film’s devolution away from reality into hyper-drama, which includes the previously mentioned exploitation of the Julliard scene, as well as the over-the-top dramedy of Tar’s ultimate breakdown, destroy its cinematic and dramatic credibility. Ultimately, this renders the film an overly long, dramatically inert enterprise that is conspicuously devoid of artistic satisfaction.

One of the more intriguing themes of Tar is the notion of the cult of the great artist. Tar may or may not be supremely talented, but she deftly builds around herself this persona of great artistry and masterfully navigates the political landscape of the music world to make it manifest.

In this way Tar is reminiscent of her creator, writer/director Todd Field. Field was a middling actor before he became a director, and his great claim to fame was playing the supporting role of Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s last movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick died before that movie came out in 1999, but two years later Todd Field’s first feature film, In the Bedroom premiered. The marketing around Field and In the Bedroom dealt a lot with the notion that Field learned filmmaking at the foot of Kubrick, like he was Kubrick’s protégé or something. This narrative was untrue but it was clever, after all Field did act in a Kubrick film and Kubrick was no longer around to refute the notion of being his mentor.

I thought In the Bedroom was massively overrated and it seemed to me that critics, and the Oscars, loved the film and Field because they were, by extension, paying homage to the late, great Kubrick.

By constructing this Kubrick creation myth around his directing career, Field had successfully built a brand critics would support going forward. To be clear, Field is not some fraud, he did get his MFA from AFI after all, which is so small feat. And his movies, both In the Bedroom and Little Children, are not bad movies, but they also aren’t remarkable in any way. The point being that Field and his films simply are not worthy of the critical love they’ve received.

It's this theme of the cult of the great artist that I found to be the most alluring in Tar because it rings the most-true, as I’ve seen it up close and personal in its various stages in London, New York and Hollywood.

Other themes, like the cancel culture/#MeToo stuff, actually feel a little too cute by half. What I mean by that is that telling an abuse of power/sexual predation story but putting a lesbian woman as its protagonist is self-defeating and an act of artistic cowardice.

Audiences love Cate Blanchett and are willing to give her character a benefit of the doubt. Certain audiences, like the target audience of coastal elites who will be more likely to see Tar, are reflexively forgiving of “minorities”, like a gay woman in a male dominated field, Like Tar. This makes Lydia Tar, no matter her faults and failings, very redeemable in their eyes.

These audiences in turn would be automatically repulsed by a man who did the same things as Tar, because in their belief system and in our culture’s eyes, men are, simply put, irredeemable.

Because of this, it seems to me the more difficult, but ultimately more worthy and satisfying story to tell, is that of a man abusing his power like Tar, and trying to make that deemed irredeemable, redeemable.

For example, I couldn’t help but think that, as great as she is, if Cate Blanchett’s Tar were a man played by say…Robert Downey Jr., this film would’ve been infinitely more interesting, and much more controversial, which in turn would’ve led it to be at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.

No one is talking about Tar now. Normal people haven’t and won’t see it, and the talk shows and all the rest of the media world aren’t buzzing with debates over its merits or failings, its morality or immorality.

If Robert Downey Jr. was playing Tar, a charming yet arrogant musical genius (is anyone better at being arrogant and charming?) while Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson’s rape trials were on-going, people would have very strong opinions about it and not be afraid to share them.

But instead, we get a sort of soft peddling of a woman abusing her power, which feels like the equivalent of dipping a toe into the swamp that is sexual exploitation, instead of taking a deep dive.

To be clear, there’s a bunch of stuff I liked in Tar. Blanchett’s performance, Florian Hoffmeister’s subtle but powerful cinematography and Hildur Guonadottir’s score are worth the price of admission.

But unfortunately, the movie’s third act failings and its reluctance to get its hands too dirty on the #MeToo manure pile, neuter its artistic and narrative power and render it ultimately a rather unsatisfying and frustrating cinematic experience.

Regular audiences more at home at the cineplex, will be bored to tears by Tar’s deliberate arthouse pacing and its more symbolic storytelling devices.

Afficionados of the arthouse should give Tar a try, but I recommend if they wait until it hits streaming, as shelling out big bucks, either at the theatre or on Video on Demand, will feel like a bad decision in hindsight.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

On this episode, Barry and I don our coat and tails, grab a baton and orchestrate a discussion about Tar, the new Todd Field movie starring Cate Blanchett. Topics discussed include the ghost of Stanley Kubrick, the brilliance of Blanchett, self-marketing and the cult of the great artist, and the pain of a promising start followed by a failed finale. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 85 - Thirteen Lives

On this episode, Barry and I get trapped in a cave and watch Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives, now streaming on Amazon. Topics discussed include the raging mediocrity of company man Ron Howard, the dangers of spelunking and the joys of anesthesia.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 85 - Thirteen Lives

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 84 - My Policeman

On this episode, Barry and I don our gay apparel and head to 1950's Brighton to partake in the British version of Brokeback Mountain titled My Policeman, starring Harry Styles. Topics discussed include the sin of being derivative AND dull, the failed Harry Styles experiment, and is Kris Kristofferson alive or dead?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 84 - My Policeman

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Wonder: A Review - If You Hate the Irish, You'll Love This Film

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Some solid performances and beautiful cinematography are tainted by the film’s Hollywood narrative and truly ugly anti-Irish ideology.

The Wonder, directed by Sebastian Lelio and written by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue based on Donoghue’s novel of the same name, is a new Netflix film that tells the story of an English nurse sent to a rural Irish town in 1862 to investigate the supposed miracle of a young girl who hasn’t eaten in four months.

The nurse, Elizabeth “Lib” Wright (Florence Pugh), must struggle against patriarchal forces, local custom, and deeply-ingrained religious belief to try and find the truth about what exactly is happening to Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Kassidy), the allegedly miraculous young girl.

The Wonder has a lot of things going for it in attempting to keep me interested. First of all, the film stars Florence Pugh, an actress of great talent and skill who thus far has never failed to impress me. Even in the recent cinematic disaster that was Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh delivered a worthy performance. No small feat in such a bad movie.

Secondly, my grandfather grew up in an impossibly tiny, rural village in County Mayo in the West of Ireland which was very close to the town of Knock. Knock, for those who don’t know, is a religious shrine and place of pilgrimage because in 1879 apparitions of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist all appeared to a group of villagers.

The Catholic Church has long since put its stamp of approval on the Knock incident and such notables as Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa and arguably the most Holy and most notable Catholic of all, me, have visited the shrine.

The Wonder reminds of the mystery at Knock because of the question of religious validity at the heart of its narrative as well as the rural and somewhat foreboding and forbidding nature of the setting.

All of this is to say that The Wonder had me intrigued simply from its premise, but unfortunately it makes certain choices, some odd, some predictable, some rather vicious and ignorant, that greatly diminishes its value.

For example, the film opens with the shot of a movie soundstage accompanied by a voice-over telling viewers “This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. And so we invite you to believe in this one.”

The camera then turns its attention to a movie set populated by actors, and through voice-over the narrator sets the scene telling us that its 1862 and English nurse Elizabeth Wright is headed to Ireland and the story begins…but not without a small comment that speaks volumes about the film’s ugly ideology – but more on that later.

I found this attempt at an unorthodox artistic opening to be painfully patronizing and distracting as it needlessly creates a hurdle to suspending disbelief while speaking down to its audience. The detached narrator later resurfaces in the film but not enough for it to be profound or to make any sort of narrative or artistic sense.

Once the actual story begins, we are treated to two positive things, firstly, Florence Pugh once again proves her worth as she gives a very solid performance as the lead “Lib”.

The rest of the cast all do solid work as well, with Brian F. O’Byrne, Ciaran Hinds, and Toby Jones doing dutiful work in supporting roles. Kila Lord Cassidy is also good as the young girl in question, Anna.

In addition to the acting, the film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Ari Wegner, who makes the most of the Irish setting and the candlelit era. Wegner scored an Oscar nomination for her work on The Power of the Dog last year and I wouldn’t be surprised if she snags another this year with The Wonder.

The problem though is that the window dressing of Wegner’s crisp and luscious cinematography and Pugh’s pointed performance are overshadowed by the smug, deplorable politics of the film and the pedestrian nature of its narrative, which ultimately spirals into preposterousness and banality.  

I’ll refrain from going too much further into the plot of The Wonder so as to avoid spoilers and conserve the viewing experience for those interested, but I will say that the Hollywood nature of the narrative ultimately fails to live up to the artistry of Pugh and Wegner.

The surface politics of the film are predictably trite with the usual misandry and anti-religious (more accurately anti-Catholic) sentiments of our vacuous era front and center. Pugh’s “Lib”, like every female protagonist nowadays, struggles against the all-powerful patriarchy which infects the entirety of the world with its singular evil. Yawn.

To give an indication of the film’s intellectual vapidity and political crudeness, “Lib” is the female “liberator” – how subtle - trying to free a young woman, Anna, from the grips of backwards Irish-Catholicism and bring her to a progressive utopia. Eye roll.

As formulaic as the ‘patriarchy as villain’ storyline is, the thing that really repulses is the unabashed anti-Irishness of the film.

Now for that small but revealing voice-over comment I referred to earlier. It was made by the narrator at the tail end of the unorthodox opening to the film. The narrator explains that “Lib” is an Englishwoman traveling to Ireland while the potato famine of the previous decade is tapering off, and then we are told with a seemingly straight face that “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation.” Ummm…No shit. “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation” BECAUSE THE ENGLISH WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT DEVASTATION!

What makes it even worse is that the narrative of the film is such that it doesn’t just minimize The Great Hunger, which killed a million Irish and displaced twice as many, its sub-text is that the famine was the fault of the Irish – to the point of being their choice. I mean, this is a story about a girl who doesn’t eat – and thus may be starving herself for ulterior motives. That’s pretty explicitly saying the Irish are liars responsible for their own starvation – which is obviously historically wholly inaccurate.

Imagine if a film about Jews in Europe in 1948 opened with a voice-over stating that in regards to the Holocaust “Jews hold Nazis responsible for that devastation” and then dramatized how Jews were actually the ones who caused the Holocaust, and the protagonist is a Nazi sent to liberate a Jew from other Jews. Or a film about former slaves in the American South in the wake of the Civil War describing slavery with “blacks hold white southerners responsible for that devastation”, and then dramatized that blacks were actually responsible for slavery and a white Southerner is the intelligent protagonist trying to free a black man from stupid and backward black people.

People in our current culture of outrage would be apoplectic at such an insidious and insipid twisting of history being imposed on those two groups that are officially-approved as victims. But with the Irish no one bats an eye at their attempted extermination first being downplayed and then actually blamed on them.

The Netflix show The Crown is currently getting some heat because Queen Elizabeth II recently died and they aren’t being adequately respectful to her or something, but The Wonder minimizes and Brit-washes the genocide of the Irish, and then blames the Irish for it, and no one says a word. Yes, let’s respect the Queen, symbol of British colonialism that murdered millions not just in Ireland but across the globe, and let’s portray these victims of the British Empire, like the Irish, as the true brutal monsters who brought the horrors upon themselves. Insane.

The Wonder maintains this aggressive anti-Irish attitude throughout, portraying the Irish as a cruel, backwards, barbaric and utterly savage people with Lib being the English voice of reason/saviour.

The film, not surprisingly, does the same with Catholicism. Of course, audiences are so conditioned to hate the Catholic Church in modern film (and culture) that I doubt anyone will care. And to be clear, it’s not like the Catholic Church over the years hasn’t dutifully earned the scorn it receives. It’s just that singling out a specific religion as an abominable institution, while whitewashing the evils of the British Empire, is a bit much and feels ever so slightly hypocritical.

Director Sebastian Lelio, a Chilean, may very well be ignorant of the history of Ireland, the British responsibility for the genocide of The Great Hunger and for centuries of violence and oppression across the globe. But if you’re going to make a movie about Ireland you might want to read up a bit on the place and the people. Lelio’s ignorance is on him. And if it isn’t ignorance, and if he really thinks this way, then that says more about his moral and ethical depravity than it does about the Irish and Catholicism.

The film’s co-writer Emma Donoghue, who authored the book it’s based upon, is an Irish woman. Her take on Ireland, the Great Hunger, and the relationship with the English is stunning for its imbecility. Donoghue’s Irish self-loathing is no doubt fueled by her having grown up a lesbian in Ireland, which at the time was a robust Catholic country. I assume that wasn’t easy, but hating Catholicism for its sins is still no excuse to ignore history and reflexively lick English boots.

It's fascinating to see Lelio and Donoghue’s hierarchy of beliefs play out in real time in their movie. I’ve no doubt both are devout liberals and believe they are profoundly expressing those beliefs with this story. But their blind spot is that they’ve placed anti-Catholicism, and by extension anti-Irishness, higher on their hierarchy than anti-British colonialism, which is both astonishing and revealing. This choice speaks to the current tortured state of the bourgeois, capitalism-addicted liberal mind and its accompanying depraved and trans-actional morals and ethics.

Despite the rancid ideology of the film, The Wonder is bursting with cinematic possibilities, but unfortunately the potential complexity of the premise is scuttled on the rocks of simplicity due to acute artistic vacuity and story-telling conventionality.

To the film’s credit, it did keep me captivated for a good portion of its 103-minute run time, but ultimately left me deeply dramatically and narratively unsatisfied at the end. In addition, it’s aggressive anti-Irishness left me aggravated and agitated.

The Irish have been through a lot through the years, from conquest to occupation to subjugation to discrimination to genocide to civil war to terrorism and all the rest. We’ve survived it all, and goodness knows we’ll survive some rather forgettable anti-Irish movie streaming on Netflix too.

©2022

My Policeman: A Review - Welcome to Blokeback

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly acted and executed, knock-off Brokeback Mountain for Brits.

My Policeman, directed by Michael Grandage with a screenplay written by Ron Nyswaner based on the 2012 book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, tells the story two gay men, their forbidden love and the woman stuck between them in 1950’s Brighton, England.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, stars Brit-pop superstar Harry Styles as the aforementioned gay policeman, as well as Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Linus Roache, Gina McKee and, since it’s a gay British movie, Rupert Everett is legally required to appear…and he dutifully does.

My Policeman is not a good movie for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it’s so painfully derivative – it’s basically Brokeback Mountain for Brits but without the cinematic skill or quality acting.

In fact, My Policeman was such a dull slog I spent much of my time watching it thinking of cheeky British tabloid headlines to describe it. The best I could come up with was “BUM-LOVING BRITISH BOBBIE GOES FULL BLOKEBACK!” Yes, I agree…I AM clever.

Back in the early 90’s Kurt Cobain sang the lyric “what else can I say? Everyone is gay!”, and if you watch tv and movies nowadays you’d think he was right. It seems every tv show and movie now prominently features a gay character, and every commercial has either an interracial couple, a gay couple or an interracial gay couple.

Despite gays and lesbians being roughly 5% of the population, gayness is so omnipresent in our culture that last week I was watching a hockey game and a commercial for some HIV drug that featured a cavalcade of gay men in various forms of homosexual embrace ran approximately a dozen times. I couldn’t help but think of another song when I saw this ad, which was “Everyone has AIDS” from Team America: World Police. This begs the question…who exactly do they think is watching hockey nowadays?

The reality is that you can’t take two steps in our culture without tripping over some movie, tv show or commercial that is all about gayness. For example, just last week I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway, and in it, for no explicable reason whatsoever, Lawrence’s character was a lesbian. The thing that made this character choice so odd was that her lesbianism actually worked to defuse the drama, rather than heighten it. Oh well.

Just recently there was a much-hyped gay rom-com, Bros, and even kid-friendly pop culture fair like Star Wars and Marvel movies now feature gay characters. Hell, there was even gayness in the most recent Toy Story movie…you’ll be glad to know I’ll be refraining from making any Woody jokes.

This is all to say that in our aggressively progressive culture that in the last forty years in general and last ten years in particular, has changed at hyper-speed, being gay is no longer a big deal. Nobody in our very modern times cares if, to quote Spartacus, you prefer to “eat oysters or snails”. Which is why it’s so bizarre that while gays sit comfortably on the throne of pop-culture they’re so adamant to wear the crown of victimhood as they do so.

The recurring theme of popular gay films and tv shows in recent years, from The Imitation Game to Call Me by Your Name to My Policeman and of course the granddaddy of them all, Brokeback Mountain, is oppression. Another thing these films all share is that they must go back in time to find said gay oppression because it doesn’t exist in the modern Western world.

This recurring theme, a sort of sad-sack, woe-is-me, self-pitying, martyr-making view of homosexuality by homosexuals, is a sign of deep-seated insecurity from a gay community that is reflexively uncomfortable with its astounding cultural success, and has, in my mind, become a very tired trope used to avoid seeking deeper meaning and purpose, not to mention artistry, in gay film and tv.

Brokeback Mountain was a stunning piece of cinema, but what made it so astonishing is that it basically obliterated the need for this gay oppression storyline to ever be examined again, as it did it to perfection.

Unfortunately, My Policeman shamelessly mimics Brokeback Mountain. It even, rather blatantly, references Brokeback twice. Once when young Patrick Hazelwood (played by David Dawson) mentions that men often go on “fishing trips” together, wink-wink, and also when he recounts how his gay lover was beaten to death by thugs, which is exactly how Jack Twist came to his demise in Brokeback Mountain.

Patrick Hazelwood is the Brit Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) of My Policeman, as he’s the “gayer” of the two men and the one who is unable to control his “urges” which society deems depraved. Harry Styles and Linus Roache play young and old Tom Burgess respectively, and Tom is to My Policeman what Heath Ledger’s Ennis is to Brokeback Mountain.

The similarities don’t stop there as Emma Corrin plays young Marion Taylor, and Gina McKee plays the older version of the character, and Marion is basically a more educated version of Michelle Williams’ Alma character from Brokeback Mountain.

You get the point, My Policeman is literally a very, very cheap British rip-off of Brokeback Mountain.  

Unfortunately, Harry Styles is no Heath Ledger. I am sad to report, since I was so sure it was going to happen for him, but movie stardom is not in the cards for Harry Styles. Styles is a wooden, dead-eyed actor who brings absolutely nothing to the screen. It seems as though Styles has either gotten too little or too much acting coaching at this point as he’s lost whatever charisma he had in the first place.

Yes, he does have his legion of loyal teen girl fans, and no doubt a bevy of gay male fans too, and they all might appreciate handsome and hunky Harry’s homosexual hump-fest in My Policeman, but his acting is, pardon the pun, hard to take.

Emma Corrin does decent work with a pitifully under-written character, Marion. Corrin was brilliant in The Crown as Princess Diana and here she shows the same dexterity and commitment. She certainly has the makings of a solid actress and one can only hope she gets better material to work with next time.

David Dawson is supposed to be some sort of irresistible gay Svengali in the film but he lacks the presence of…ironically…a young Rupert Everett, to pull it off. This leads to Dawson and Styles seeming mismatched as a gay couple due to their decided lack of chemistry.

The older versions of the characters, Gina McKee as Marion, Linus Roache as Tom and Rupert Everett as Patrick, appear lost in another movie entirely. The “older” storyline is almost entirely incomprehensible and illogical. These characters behave in completely nonsensical ways and the entire premise of the venture seems lost in some sort of dementia fog.

Director Michael Grandage, comes from the theatre and it shows, as the film lacks any and all visual style and is utterly incapable of showing instead of telling.

I’ve not read the book My Policeman, and it will come as no surprise that I never intend to, but I can only assume it’s as trite and cliché-ridden as the screenplay for this movie by Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner, it will not shock you in the least, also wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia…which reminds me again, “Everybody has AIDS!”

The bottom line is that My Policeman, and frankly most gay-themed movies, are stuck in a rut of unoriginality where vapid cultural messaging is more important than profundity or dramatic meaning.

At the moment it seems that gay culture bursting out of the closet in recent decades has stripped it of its dramatic and artistic power…and My Policeman is damning evidence of that.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

On this episode, Barry and I hop on one leg down to New Orleans to talk all things Causeway, the new Jennifer Lawrence movie now streaming on Apple TV +. Topics discussed include my shameless name-dropping, J-Law's lost mojo, and the basic fundamentals of film-making missing from this movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

On this episode Barry and I man the trenches and do battle as we discuss the new Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front. Topics discussed include Barry's unhealthy obsession with Spartacus, the troubling paucity of anti-war movies and the powerful dichotomy of cinematic beauty and wartime brutality.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Thanks for listening!

©2022