7th Annual Mickey Awards™®: 2020 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: Ever prone to narcissistic indulgence, expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 5 hours and 48 minutes.

Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin…

After what seems like an endless year, the pinnacle of cinematic achievement, the Mickey Awards™®, is finally upon us.

The Mickeys™® and its shadow award the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, are always the final awards of the awards season, but since everything was pushed back due to covid, we are in the unprecedented situation of giving out awards in May. I realize this seems odd, and while the Mickey™® committee considered giving out our awards sooner, we decided to stick to tradition so as to not make the other awards (looking at you Oscar) even more irrelevant than they already are.

To be blunt, 2020 was not an a good year for movies. While there were certainly some good movies, none of them were great. This is especially apparent when contrasted with the stellar output of movies in 2019, which featured a murderer’s row of cinematic heavyweights.

On the bright side, at least some smaller movies got the spotlight this year, I just wish those movies could have been more convincing in making a case for others to join me in the cult of the arthouse.

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

Winners of Mickey™® Awards receive an appropriately socially distanced meal at Fatburger and/or Shake Shack…on me! And yes, you can order a shake for your beverage! And the sterling conversation with me is included with the meal! You’re welcome.

Now that all that is out of the way…buckle up…IT’S MICKEY™® TIME!!

Best Cinematography

The nominees are…

Mank - Eric Messerschmidt : Gloriously shot film that utilized a luscious black and white and also featured a visual aesthetic that was an homage to its famous subject matter.

Nomadland - Joshua James Richards: Used gorgeous shots of vast, sparse and beautiful landscapes to set an intriguing mood and propel the story.

The Vast of Night - M.I. Litten-Menz : On a shoe string budget this movie looks like a big budget project and its intricate camera movements were astoundingly complex.

THE WINNER IS…. Mank. Messerschmidt won the Oscar with his crisp bleck and white cinematography but now he reaches the ultimate summit of cinematic excellence with his first Mickey award.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The nominees are…

Nomadland - Chloe Zhao: A solid integration of the original subject matter into a loosely coherent mood piece.

The Father - Florian Zeller: A fantastic adaptation of his own stage play that actually elevates the material instead of denigrating it, which is a rarity.

THE WINNER IS… The Father: The Father is an absolutely phenomenal script and Zeller justly deserves his first Mickey Award.

Best Original Screenplay

The nominees are…

Mank - Jack Fincher: An unruly behemoth of a story that is wrestled and transformed into a brutally insightful political statement. Astoundingly impressive piece of screenwriting.

Another Round - Thomas Vinterberg: A story about a mid-life crisis and death that focuses on life and manages to make its day drinking protagonist sympathetic and compelling.

Sound of Metal - Darius Marder: On the surface this is the most predictable and mundane of ideas…but Marder turns convention on its head and discovers profundity.

THE WINNER IS… Sound of Metal: From the mundane to the magical and the predictable to the profound, Darius Marder so fleshed out this story as to never write a cliche or false note. A well-deserved Mickey Award is his reward for excellence.

Best Supporting Actress

The nominees are…

Sierra McCormick - Vast of Night: A nobody from nowhere, McCormick absolutely crushed a role that was mind-bogglingly complicated and did it with enormous aplomb and magnetism.

Olivia Colman - The Father: The most intricate work of Colman’s career, she fills every scene and every shot with unstated meaning and anguish.

Amanda Seyfried - Mank: Who knew that Amanda Seyfried could be so good? As Hollywood starlet Marion Davies she looks amazing and matches her beauty with a nuanced and inspired performance.

Maria Bakalova - Borat: An absolutely balls to the wall performance that only she could pull off.

THE WINNER IS… Sierra McCormick: There’s an extended scene in The Vast of Night where nothing happens except McCormick talks and listens on a telephone…it is utterly mesmerizing, and is a testament to her talent, skill and craft.

Best Supporting Actor

The nominees are…

Daniel Kaluuya - Judas and the Black Messiah: Kaluuya is deliriously magnetic as Chairman Fred Hampton and completely owns the role and the film. It isn’t quite Denzel as Malcolm X, but it is still electrifying to behold.

Bo Burnham - Promising Young Woman: Burnham is fantastic in the darkly comedic/rom-com portion of this movie, and his chemistry with Mulligan is believable and charming.

Kingsley Ben-Adir - One Night in Miami: Ben-Adir masterfully avoids imitation and mimicry as he re-creates Malcolm X as less a cocksure firebrand and more an insecure outsider yearning for acceptance. A truly brilliant piece of acting.

Chadwick Boseman - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Boseman has always been more movie star than great actor, but in Ma Rainey he taps into an energy and emotion that he had avoided in previous roles. This is far and away Boseman’s greatest performance.

THE WINNER IS… Daniel Kaluuya: Kaluuya is fast positioning himself as one of the best actors in the business…and his resume just got a tremendous boost with a prestigious Mickey Award.

Breakout Performance of the Year - Sierra McCormick: I had never heard of McCormick before The Vast of Night, but her unforgettable performance impressed me no end. I am willing to bet it impressed other Hollywood big wigs too…and I hope we get to see a lot more of her in movies that matter going forward.

Best Foreign Film - Another Round: Thomas Vinterberg is a great director and Another Round is a gloriously Vinterbergian film. Complex and layered yet darkly funny and philosophical, Another Round is unpredictable, satisfying and the type of movie that keeps you thinking about it and talking about for days afterward.

Best Actress

The nominees are…

Carey Mulligan - Promising Young Woman: Mulligan is one of the best actresses of her generation and she brings all her powers to bear on this absurdist and twisted dark fantasy. Impossible to imagine any other actress pulling this off.

Frances McDormand - Nomadland: McDormand gives a rare nuanced performance as Fern, the grieving wanderer searching for something out there on the fringes of society. I think McDormand is over-rated as an actress, but this is one of her very best performances.

Vanessa Kirby - Pieces of a Woman: The luminous Kirby gets down and dirty in this misfire of a movie, but her performance is powerful and poignant. I hope we see much more of this Vanessa Kirby going forward.

THE WINNER IS… Carey Mulligan: Mulligan’s versatility is extraordinary and is on full display in Promising Young Woman. In lesser hands this role is a disaster, in her skilled mitts it is artistry…and the Mickey Award is rightfully hers.

Best Actor

The nominees are…

Riz Ahmed - Sound of Metal: Ahmed is one of the best actors out there, and he brings all his talent to Sound of Metal. Ahmed has the uncanny ability to fill himself with an inner life that is vibrant and dynamic and it shows on screen. A stellar piece of acting.

Anthony Hopkins - The Father: Hopkins, ever the master of controlled fury, gives arguably his greatest performance in The Father, as he unravels the character with each passing scene.

Gary Oldman - Mank: Oldman brings a sloppy slice of life to the Hollywood legend and it makes for a combustibly cantankerous experience. Few, if any, actors would even attempt this, nevermind pull it off as well as Oldman.

Mads Mikkelson - Another Round: Mikkelson transforms throughout this film from a burdened, defeated man to a confident king, to a struggling sad sack. Mikkelson is one of the great under appreciated actors of his time, and Another Round is evidence of his brilliance.

THE WINNER IS…Anthony Hopkins: Hopkins is one of the very best actors of his generation, and his stunning work in The Father, filled with precision and specificity, has now given him the most prestigious award in cinema, The Mickey™®.

Best Ensemble - Mank - Gary Oldman is the straw that stirs Mank’s drink, but the cast is loaded with solid actors giving career best performances. Amanda Seyfried, Arliss Howard and Charles Dance in particular do stellar work that elevate the film.

Best Director

The nominees are…

David Fincher - Mank : Fincher’s fearlessness is on full display in Mank as he throws caution to the wind and makes a dizzyingly complex film that is a thumb in the eye to his corporate overlords.

Chloe Zhao - Nomadland : Zhao’s comfort with silence and space make Nomadland the film that it is, and lesser directors would have scuttled the ship.

Florian Zeller - The Father : Zeller masterfully puts his audience through the horror of dementia by relying on his exquisite script and his stellar cast. This movie was no easy task and Zeller proved himself a formidable filmmaker.

Darius Marder - Sound of Metal : Marder brought all the craft of old school movie making to Sound of Metal. A fundamentally brilliant bit of directing that drew the most out of his cast and his crew.

Thomas Vinterberg - Another Round : Vinterberg is one of the most interesting directors around, and Another Round is him at his most accessibly artistic.

Andrew Patterson - The Vast of Night: Patterson’s feature debut is stunning for its confidence and technical audacity. I truly cannot wait to see what he does next.

THE WINNER IS…Darius Marder : Marder’s artistic courage, commitment and deft directing touch brought his profoundly unique vision to life on Sound of Metal…and now he’s got a Mickey Award!

Best Documentary - Can’t Get You Out of My Head : Director Adam Curtis is the best documentarian in the business and has been for nearly two decades. His newest project is a six part series that debuted on BBC in February. Like Curtis’ other revelatory series Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares and HyperNormalization, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is brilliant for taking a sprawling subject matter and profoundly transforming it into the psychological and personal. it is currently available on Youtube, and though it may feel impenetrable at first, I highly recommend you watch every episode.

Best Picture

9. One Night in Miami - Four excellent performances propel this stagey drama and make it a worthwhile watch.

8. Promising Young Woman - Director Emerald Fennell wraps a disturbing revenge fantasy in a bubblegum aesthetic, and though it is flawed it possesses an intriguing cinematic power.

7. Judas and the Black Messiah - An uneven but captivating film that highlights two fantastic performances from Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

6. The Vast of Night - This is a little movie with big ideas and it nearly pulls them all off. A staggering piece of technical filmmaking that boasts an intricate and detailed performance from Sierra McCormick.

5. Nomadland - An arthouse meditation on the dark side of the American dream that somehow manages to be decidedly corporate friendly. Despite its shallow philosophy, the film is well-made and well-acted and very well shot.

4. Another Round - A compelling Danish drama that is gloriously acted and exceedingly well directed. This movie not only has a sense of humor but a deep sense of the profound.

3. Mank - Mank got lost in the shuffle this year, and although it isn’t a perfect movie, it is a very good one. Filled with solid performances and Fincher’s brilliance, Mank gets better upon each re-watch.

2. The Father - I expected little from The Father, and got a whole hell of a lot. This movie is like a horror film as it traps viewers inside the experience of dementia, and it makes you pray you never suffer that fate. An exquisitely jarring cinematic experience.

1. Sound of Metal - A pretty basic movie and idea that is phenomenally well-directed and acted. A quiet movie that finds profundity in the silence.

Most Important Film of the Year: Nomadland

Nomadland is the most important film of the year…but not in a good way. What makes Nomadland so important is that is symbolizes an artistic acquiescence to corporate power and reinforces working class impotence.

As I’ve written before, it is shocking that Nomadland is a story about people who are victims of American capitalism but the movie entirely ignores that reality, and in fact bends over backwards to portray the corporate behemoths (like Amazon) that cause the suffering we see in the film, as the good guys. The film might as well have been produced by Gordon Gekko or the Koch brothers.

It isn’t an accident that Amazon were so happy to let Nomadland shoot in their workplace and create the impression that working there is a wonderful experience where they treat you well, you make new friends and you make good money. Of course, the reality is much, much different.

The thing that is so horrifying is that Hollywood, and most importantly - the artists in Hollywood, refused to speak up against Nomadland’’s deception and Amazon’s evil. The film, its director and lead actress won a bevy of awards and yet not once in their acceptance speeches did they hold Amazon to task for their poor treatment of workers or anti-union practices or even speak up about those left behind by American capitalism.

Just think, Sally Field once iconically held up a “Union” sign in Norma Rae, and now Frances McDormand shits in a bucket while swearing that anti-union Amazon is a terrific place to work. What a sign of the very bad times.

Last time McDormand won an Oscar, the brassy actress shouted and touted diversity and inclusion…but this time around she was as quiet as a church mouse in regards to Amazon and unionization and its poor treatment of working people. Funny how McDormand was so courageous when it costs her nothing but so cowardly when biting the hand that feeds would be the right thing to do. Class act that McDormand…loud when she can self-aggrandize but silent when it matters.

Nomadland and the universal and uncritical love for it, signals an end to artists pushing back against corporate hegemony, and instead genuflecting to corporate power. This new era feels Orwellian, as the only thing that matters now is identity politics. If Nomadland hadn’t been written and directed by a “woman of color”, I doubt it would’ve received so much critical love, or avoided the Amazon controversy.

And so…this is why corporate America is attached at the hip with woke politics, it is a means to a dastardly end. Corporate America can be as evil as it wants and can exploit its workers all it wants, just as long as it spouts woke platitudes about diversity and inclusion and “black lives mattering” or whatever other politically correct smokescreen it wants to use…and as Nomadland proves, this distractionary measure will work…and cinema, art and humanity will all suffer.

On that very down note….thus concludes an uninspired Mickey™® awards for an uninspired year of movies!! Congratulations to all the winners and to all of my readers for surviving this decidedly heinous year. Keep an eye out for the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards…which will be coming soon to celebrate the very worst in cinema and culture!

Here’s to a better 2021! See you next year!

©2021

The Oscar Train Wreck

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 20 seconds

My biggest question regarding last night’s egregiously bungled and boring Oscar telecast is…if an awards show collapses but no one is watching, does it make a sound?

Interest in the Oscars has been in steep decline for years now, and after suffering through the entire three hour and twenty-minute show last night I can dutifully report that the 93rd Academy Awards came in with a whimper and left with a whimper too.

The night’s climactic moment was a dud as the show ran long, as usual, and then rushed to announce Best Actor, which everyone thought would be an emotional moment as it was expected to go to the late Chadwick Boseman. The award instead went to went to Anthony Hopkins. Uh-oh.

Hopkins is most deserving of the award, but his victory will no doubt spur more cries of “racism” from the usual woke suspects. Adding to the discomfort was the fact that Hopkins wasn’t present at the show, and so the telecast ended basically with everybody standing around looking at one another like they were waiting for a train.

Speaking of which, the show was held at Los Angeles’ Union Station – which is a train station, which is apropos since the show was an absolute train-wreck.

Union Station is known as a hub for hordes of homeless in Los Angeles, and I’m sure that as much as homeless people have defecated in that public space over the years they’ve never made a stink as odious as Oscar’s producer Steven Soderbergh did last night.

Soderbergh put his stamp on the show as he shot it like a movie, with more handheld cameras than static shots, and by mixing up the order of awards. For instance, contrary to previous Oscar ceremonies Best Director came early in the proceedings and Best Picture wasn’t the last award.

Of course, the Oscars are going to be the Oscars, so the show was filled with the usual rambling speeches, self-righteous political pandering, and the airing of racial grievances, but what it didn’t have was any clips of the nominated work. Want to see the nominated cinematography, acting, costumes, hair and makeup or production designs? Not on Soderbergh’s watch!

Instead Soderbergh had presenters share inane “fun factoids” about each nominee like a kindergarten teacher handing out Valentine’s Day cards in class. This was accompanied by a roving camera desperately whirling around searching the room for these unfamous nominees like a toddler lost in a train station frantically looking for its parents.

The lowlight in the evening of lowlights was a “music game” where nominees guessed if a song played by DJ Questlove (who replaced the traditional orchestra) was an Oscar winning song. This hapless and ham-handed bit deteriorated into Glenn Close pretending she knew the song “Da Butt” and then humiliating herself by getting up and doing “Da Butt” dance. If Glenn Close ever had a relationship with dignity, it ended in a ferocious divorce last night.

The entire endless evening felt like one long extended version of Glenn Close doing “Da Butt”, and conjured all the gravitas of a junior high school drama club awards night.

The Oscars did make history though regarding diversity with “artists of color” winning two of the four acting categories and Chloe Zhao being the first woman of color ever to win Best Director and Best Picture.

So maybe #OscarsSoWhite has transformed into #OscarsSoWhat*? Unfortunately, I’m sure the Academy would prefer even the righteous anger of racial resentment to the overwhelming apathy that hangs over the festivities like a toxic cloud of poisonous gas.

Even the stars who came out to aid Soderbergh in his time of need, like Halle Berry and Harrison Ford, looked disinterested. The usually luminous Berry looked like she had slept at Union Station or was suffering a hellacious flu when she presented an award, while Ford just seemed like he was baked off his ass as he mumbled through a presentation.

Soderbergh did not limit the award winners in the length of their speeches, which led to some unnecessary verbosity, but also to some moments of profundity. Director Thomas Vinterberg’s speech after winning Best International Feature Film for Another Round, was painfully poignant as he spoke about the tragic death of his daughter Ida during filming.

In contrast, Frances McDormand’s grating short speeches managed to remind everyone she’s the most annoying person in all of Hollywood, which is an achievement even greater than her three Best Actress Oscars.

As shrill and grating as she is, McDormand’s movie Nomadland was the biggest winner of the night as it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress.

The biggest losers of the night though were any poor bastards like me who stayed up to watch, and of course, the Academy Awards themselves.

If last night’s abysmal Oscar ceremony proves anything it is that the Academy Awards are on the fast track to irrelevancy, and even though the show ran late, that train left Union Station right on time.  

*Joke courtesy of Leo - Da Irish Poet!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Epsidoe 34 - Oscars Predictions

On this episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I get all dressed up and go to the Oscars. Tune in to listen to our Oscar predictions, Oscar dream scenarios and Oscar nightmares, as well as lamentations for the sorry state of the movie industry.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 34 - Oscar Predictions

Thanks for listening!

©2021

93rd Academy Awards: The 2021 Oscar Prediction Post

Estimated Reading Time: 3 hours 47 minutes 22 seconds

The Academy Awards are once again upon us and the biggest question about them is…does anyone give a rat’s ass?

As the show’s dwindling ratings prove, interest in the once mighty Oscars has been in steep decline in recent years. It would seem the perfect storm of a plethora of streaming service tv shows and reduced attention spans, as well as a paucity of genuine movie stars and a plenitude of identity politics has wounded, maybe fatally, the once iconic awards.

As a denizen of Hollywood, I’ve never experienced an awards season that has generated so little interest. It appears that even though, due to streaming services, movies are more available to more people than ever before, they seem to have never mattered less.

Part of the reason for that is that, for a vareity of reasons - not the least of which was Covid, 2020 was just a cinematically lackluster year. A handful of good movies came out this year, but no truly great ones, and certainly no films that ignited the public’s passions.

With that said, the reality is that it is my sworn and solemn obligation to share with you my Oscar picks. Please remember that these picks are NOT TO BE USED FOR GAMBLING PURPOSES!!

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Who will win: Yuh-Jung Youn (Minari) - Not a fan of this movie or this performance, but it checks a diversity box Academy members want to celebrate. I personally think Amanda Seyfried (Mank), Olivia Colman (The Father) and Maria Bakalove (Borat) are considerably more deserving. There’s an outside chance Bakalove pulls the upset…but don’t bet on it.

Who should win: Seyfried or Colman.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Who will win: Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) - This is a slam dunk, and deservedly so. While I liked Paul Raci (Sound of Metal) and LaKeith Stanfield (Judas and the Black Messiah), Kaluuya crushes his role as Fred Hampton.

Who should win: Kaluuya

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Who will win: Promising Young Woman - Emerald Fennel : This is one of the few interesting categories. I think Fennel wins because the Academy is desperate to to appease the woke wolves at its door, and Fennel is a woman so she qualifies. There’s a pretty good chance that they give the award to Aaron Sorkin for his atrocious The Trial of the Chicago 7. That movie is dreadful and the script a joke, but it taps into the whole self-righteousness of the moment. That said…I think Fennel gets the nod.

Who should win: Sound of Metal - Darius Marder

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Who will win: Nomadland - Chloe Zhao: I think Zhao and Nomadland are the big winners come Oscar night…but if Florian Zeller wins this award (which I think he should) for his adaptation of The Father, it could be a monkey wrench into the Nomadland dominance.

Who should win: The Father - Florian Zeller

ANIMATED FEATURE

Who will win: Soul. This is a no-brainer. I liked Soul and it is certainly an antidote to our tumultuous times. Also…the Pixar machine is unstoppable.

Who should win: Soul I guess.

PRODUCTION DESIGN

Who will win: Mank - I think Mank finally gets on the board here. if it loses this category it may very well get shut out of all awards. The big competition will come from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Who should won: Mank.

COSTUME DESIGN

Who will win: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - I think Ma Rainey and its popular costume crew win here for a variety of non-merit based reasons. If Mank wins, which it could, that is a big deal and could portend a mini-Mank run in some behind the camera categories.

Who should win: Mank.

MAKEUP AND HAIR

Who will win: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Same as above.

Who should win: Mank.

EDITING

Who will win: Sound of Metal - There’s a chance that Trial of the Chicago 7 could win (God help us), but I think Sound of Metal pulls it off. If Nomadland win then look out, that is a sign it will win a huge amount of hardware on Oscar night.

Who should win: Sound of Metal

SOUND

Who should win: Sound of Metal - Outside chance that Mank or Soul win, but that seems very unlikely. if Mank wins it is another sign of a big night for that movie…but that seems unlikely.

Who should win: Sound of Metal

VISUAL EFFECTS

Who will win: Tenet - This seems like it’s going to happen.

Who should win: I’ll be honest…I don’t know.

SCORE

Who will win: Soul - Jon Batiste, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: This seems like a slam dunk too. An outside chance Terence Blanchard wins for his bombastic score to the equally awful Da 5 Bloods.

Who should win: Soul.

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Who will win: My Octopus Teacher - I’m not sure why but people love this movie and I think the votes for potential winners Collective, Crip Camp and Time get split and the octopus wins.

Who should win: No idea.

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Who will win: Another Round - I think this beats out Qou Vadis, Aida by a nose.

Who should win: Another Round.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Who will win: Nomadland - This is a bellwether award…if everything goes to plan then Nomadland should win and clean up at the Oscars. If Mank wins…its gonna be an interesting night because that signals Mank has a ground swell of support and Nomadland is floundering.

Who should win: Mank. Nomadland is extremely well shot by Joshua James Richards, no doubt about it, but my tastes run slightly more towards Erik Messerschmidt and Mank.

BEST ACTOR

Who will win: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) - This is set in stone. With Boseman’s tragic death and the narrative around the award, it would be an absolute shocker of the highest order if anyone else won. The only other potential winner is Anthony Hopkins for The Father…but that ain’t happening.

Who should win: Anthony Hopkins. Boseman is very good in Ma Rainey…but Hopkins is on another level in The Father.

BEST ACTRESS

Who will win: Viola Davis - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom : This is one of the very few interesting categories. Frances McDormand is the front runner but I think that the fact that she won recently (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) and a win here would put her in Meryl Streep territory with 3 Oscar wins, the Academy will look to feed the diversity beast by awarding Davis for her sub-par performance in that dreadful movie.

Who should win: Carey Mulligan - Promising Young Woman : I thought Mulligan was better than everybody else.

BEST DIRECTOR

Who will win: Chloe Zhao - Nomadland : This too is a slam dunk. No way Fincher or Vinterberg pull of an upset. Just impossible.

Who should win: Fincher, Vinterberg or Zhao. Three different directors making very different films all did solid work.

BEST PICTURE

Who will win: Nomadland - This is happening. There is no stopping the Nomadland juggernaut. If Mank or (GOD HELP US ALL) The Trial of the Chicago 7 win, that is a sure sign of the apocalypse.

Who should win: Mank or Sound of Metal. They won’t win but I think they should. Nomadland is a good movie, but I thought these two were a little better.

Here’s the rest of the categories of which I have no opinion just a guess…

ORIGINAL SONG- One Night in Miami

LIVE ACTION SHORT - Two Distant Strangers

DOCUMENTARY SHORT - Concerto is Conversation

©2021

Exterminate All the Brutes: A Documentary Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A pretentious disappointment.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it feels like to be stuck on a four-hour flight sitting next to a rambling, drunken college student who just read their first book about colonialism, genocide and white supremacy and mistakenly thinks they have some profound insights, have I got a documentary series for you…

Exterminate all the Brutes is the new unconventional, four-part docu-series from filmmaker Raoul Peck now available on HBO and HBO Max that explores the vast history of colonialism, genocide and white supremacy from a non-white and non-European perspective.

The documentary is based on the books Exterminate all the Brutes (Sven Lindqvist), An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) and Silencing the Past (Michel-Rolph Trouillot), and chaotically mixes documentary footage, home movies, popular films, animation, and fictional scripted scenes to create a sort of experimental, impressionistic cinematic essay instead of a straight forward documentary.

Exterminate All the Brutes, a phrase which comes from Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness, highlights the greatest hits of horror in the history of humanity and is divided into four parts titled, “The Disturbing Confidence of Ignorance”, “Who the F*ck is Columbus?”, “Killing at a Distance”, and “The Bright Colors of Fascism”.

From Europeans explorers, to the plundering of Africa and the slave trade, to the eradication of the Native American population, to Hitler, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima, the documentary leaves no stone of brutality, barbarity and white supremacy left unturned.

The series attempts to tie together the genocide of the American Indians, slavery and the Holocaust in order to expose the unique evil of white supremacy and its impact on modern Western civilization.

The writer and director Raoul Peck, who’s documentary on James Baldwin, I am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017, should be applauded for his ambition on Exterminate All the Brutes, but certainly not his execution. Ultimately, in his attempt to create a profound, personalized poem, Peck instead produces a painfully pretentious polemic.

The series is not so much thorough as it cluttered, and while it has a specific topic, it is devoid of a distinct thesis. I would probably agree with Peck’s argument regarding colonialism if I could actually discern what exactly it was. As a result of this lack of a detailed thesis, the documentary comes across as a distracted, incoherent, stream of consciousness diatribe fueled by an adolescent, if not infantile, intellectualism. It feels more like a tantrum resulting from deep frustration and helplessness than a dissertation born out of intense study.

Peck’s journey into the heart of darkness of colonialism, slavery and genocide may very well be a noble venture but it is also egregiously narcissistic. Peck not only tells you what he knows but endlessly recites how and from whom he came to know it.

Peck also vents his rage at individuals he dislikes, like Donald Trump, and groups he despises, like the Scots-Irish…boy does he have a bug up his ass about the Scots-Irish.

Peck’s anger also distorts his argument as he makes contradictory statements regarding his flawed premise. For instance, he brushes aside the “Guns, Germs and Steel” hypothesis and calls early Europeans backward and uncivilized, but then describes that Europeans came to dominate African peoples simply because they were able to create advanced technology and weapons that Africans could not.  

The greatest flaw of the documentary though, and there are many, is that as it guides viewers through the history of white European atrocities, it never breaks new ground or reveals unearthed truths. Anyone with half a brain in their head is aware of the horrors of colonialism, slavery and genocide by now. The fact that the U.S. was born on the back of African slaves and the genocide of American Indians isn’t exactly breaking news. But as Peck himself states in the film, “it is not knowledge that we lack”, which begs the question…if we don’t lack knowledge then what is the purpose of this four-hour monstrous mess of a docu-series?

Peck is also his own worst enemy as a storyteller as he narrates the series and his voice-over is, without exaggeration, the worst in the history of the spoken word. Never has someone talked so much (and so inaudibly) and said so little. Peck’s droning, garbled voice isn’t helped by the insipid platitudes he mutters like “neutrality is not an option” and “there are no alternative facts”.

That sort of overwrought emotionalism and intellectual vapidity is the life-blood of Exterminate All the Brutes. This is most evident in the cringe-inducing and laughably ludicrous scripted dramatic scenes haphazardly inserted throughout the series.

Actor Josh Hartnett is tasked with playing the embodiment of white supremacy and white privilege throughout history in the series of amateurish scenes, and his performance entails shooting a lot of brown people in the head and looking menacingly at the ones he hasn’t killed.

These scenes, and the scenes from Peck’s earlier dramatic films also shown, reveal the director to be a middling-at-best filmmaker, and Exterminate All the Brutes seems to be a case of an artist and pseudo-intellectual biting off considerably more than he could ever possibly chew.

In conclusion, I watched Exterminate All the Brutes so that you don’t have to. And trust me…you don’t have to…you really don’t have to.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Coded Bias: Documentary Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. The film tackles a fascinating topic but is too narrow and shallow to be of much use.

Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya, explores how artificial intelligence algorithms propagate racial and gender bias.

Big tech totalitarianism is one of the most important issues of our time, and I’m on board with any film highlighting the inherent perils of over reliance on insidious technologies. But Coded Bias, while being somewhat informative, ultimately falls flat because its focus on race and gender is much too narrow.

The film sets out to show how artificial intelligence dehumanizes people and encodes racial bias into the job, college, mortgage and loan application process as well as the criminal justice system, but this misses the techno-tyranny forest for the trees and is akin to complaining about a lack of art by people of color on the walls of the Titanic.

MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini opens the movie by recounting how she discovered racial bias in facial recognition software and then documents her attempts to combat it with her collection of activists named the Algorithm Justice League (AJL).

Buolamwini makes for a compelling protagonist on this journey into the Orwellian hellscape of artificial intelligence due to her superior knowledge of the subject matter and magnetic personality.

Equally compelling is the disturbing information about the totalitarian use of algorithms by the Chinese government to control their populace through a social credit system and the U.K.’s baby steps down the same authoritarian path as it implements its own flawed facial recognition program.

Americans are under the same invasive surveillance and are imprisoned by a similar social credit system, the only difference being that they are unaware of it and it’s being done by big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

But these issues are painfully complex and Coded Bias is often at cross-purposes with itself when confronting them. For instance, the film highlights the Chinese and U.K. government’s draconian use of technology, but then spotlights activists demanding the American government assert itself more aggressively regarding oversight.  

The same is true when Buolamwini takes her racial bias study to IBM to show them that their facial recognition tech fails to adequately work on black faces. In response, the company fixes the problem, which results in…more black people being able to be put in facial recognition databases. This pyrrhic victory makes the AJL seem like controlled opposition.

In this way the AJL is reminiscent of Black Lives Matter, in that they’re really a grievance delivery system designed to divide people and distract them from the much bigger issue. The race and gender obsessed AJL, just like BLM, makes enemies of potential allies by refusing to see all victims as equal.

For example, the conservatives and “conspiracy theorists” that have been de-platformed by algorithms from Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube are not considered worthy victims of tech totalitarianism by the AJL (and are never mentioned in the movie), but these ‘deplorables’ could be powerful allies in the fight to rein in the Sauron of Silicon Valley.

In one scene Republican Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is aghast at the power and pervasiveness of the FBI’s extra-judicial facial recognition program. The AJL no doubt loath Jordan (an easy thing to do), but he could be an effective asset in attempting the Herculean task of restraining the tech behemoth.

In contrast to Jordan, in the same congressional hearing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignores deeper concerns and instead theatrically focuses her ire at the majority “demographic group” that writes the code for artificial intelligence…white males.

The arch-villains of big tech expanding their surveillance capabilities without the slightest thought to ethics or human rights makes the possibility and probability of a dystopian corporate and draconian governmental future (and present) extremely high, but the film and the AJL are simply incapable of moving beyond their slavish devotion to identity politics and their own biases against white men to focus on that truly horrifying bigger picture.

The reality is that artificial intelligence doesn’t just dehumanize black people, it dehumanizes all people, and any movement that fails to put that fact front and center is deserving of distrust if not disdain.

If the AJL were serious about stopping techno-tyranny they’d be fighting vociferously to restore every person’s right to privacy and freedom of speech, especially if that speech is ugly and hateful, and for the right of people to own their personal information and data, and to stop tech companies from collecting and selling that data, and to either shatter the tech monopolies into a million pieces or transform them into public utilities. But they aren’t serious and they don’t aggressively address any of those issues.

Coded Bias ends by recounting the true story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier in 1983 who defied technology during a missile scare and refused to launch a nuclear counter attack against the U.S. The film states that if the artificial intelligence of a Strangelovian “doomsday machine” were in charge, and not Petrov’s humanity, then the world would have been obliterated. This nod to individualism is a nice sentiment but rings hollow after 90 minutes of relentless identity politics. It’s also somewhat amusing since the heroic Petrov is a member of the dreaded white male demographic.

In keeping with the Dr. Strangelove metaphor, Coded Bias and the activists it spotlights unfortunately aren’t truly interested in fighting against big tech’s artificial intelligence “doomsday machine”, they just want to make sure the war room is diverse and inclusive enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. Not a great film by any stretch, and not as good as the original Borat, but it has some cringe-induced laughs and a gloriously balls to the wall performance from Maria Bakalova.

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm, directed by Jason Woliner and written by Sacha Baron Cohen and a cavalcade of others, is the sequel to the 2006 mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan. The new film once again documents intrepid foreign tv personality Borat as he journeys through America. The film stars Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat with a supporting turn from Maria Bakalova as Borat’s daughter.

Sacha Baron Cohen came to prominence in 2002 with Da Ali G Show , which showcased his distinct brand of cringe comedy . Cohen’s dim-witted Ali G convinced regular and famous people alike into taking his buffoonery seriously and it made for some hysterical moments.

Da Ali G Show also featured two other Cohen characters, Bruno, a gay Austrian fashionista, and the aforementioned Borat.

Cohen brought Borat to the big screen and reaped a box office bonanza in 2006 with Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakstan, instantly becoming a cultural icon and meme generator. Cohen followed up that success with Bruno in 2009, which wasn’t as big a hit as Borat but still was a massive box office success.

Since 2009 Cohen has gone away from his signature mockumentary style cringe comedy and has tried to find success in more orthodox movies, both comedy and drama. That success has been somewhat elusive, in part because Cohen is so identified as being Borat. For instance, it is difficult to watch him star in the serious Netflix drama The Spy because you keep expecting him to do something inappropriate and say “niiiice!” Although things might be changing for Cohen as he was just nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his work, which I thought was atrociously bad, in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Regardless of all that, I was surprised that Cohen came out with a new Borat movie now. It seemed like both the Borat cultural moment had passed and that dredging it up would only further hamper Cohen’s attempt at becoming a “legitimate” actor.

So when Borat Subsequent MovieFilm premiered on Amazon Prime in October of 2020, I made no effort to watch it. After months of putting it off I have finally taken the plunge.

Borat Subsequent MovieFilm is not as good as the original Borat…but it will certainly satisfy those who have a taste for Sacha Baron Cohen’s particular brand of comedy.

The movie is a shameless piece of anti-Trump propaganda (which is probably why it is nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar - which is absurd), but just because it is propaganda doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. The movie is, at times, uproariously funny. The most remarkable thing about it though is that Sacha Baron Cohen is totally outshined in lunacy by his fearless co-star Maria Bakalova. Bakalova, who plays Borat’s maligned daughter Tutar Sagdiyev, is ferociously funny as she sheds all inhibitions and even leaves her famous co-star looking a bit shell-shocked.

Bakalova is nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance, which is unbelievable not because she is undeserving but because the subject matter of the film is so outrageous. What sets Bakalova apart is her unabashed courage at diving into the most absurd and often repulsive scenes. The father-daughter dance at the Dallas debutante ball is so horrifying as to be gloriously amazing, and if she wins the Oscar I hope she recreates that dance when receiving her statuette.

In terms of the propaganda power of the movie, it seems more cathartic than persuasive. I mean, if you loved Trump and watched the movie it wouldn’t change your mind. Liberals will adore the movie’s political perspective and will no doubt only have their beliefs further reinforced, which isn’t necessarily a healthy thing, but this is life in 21st Century America. With all that said, I must admit that the movie felt very dated me just five months post-election.

Oddly, some of the things that Cohen uses to attempt to show Trumpists as morons and monsters actually does the reverse but he and his target audience are probably too enraptured by their own self-righteousness to be aware enough to recognize it. For instance, Borat stays with two Trumper/MAGA hat wearing men during the pandemic and uses that opportunity to show how bigoted, close-minded and hateful they are…but all that is undermined by the fact that these supposed bigots actually took a foreigner in during a pandemic and are patient and respectful towards him and go to great lengths to help him out.

Of course it should be stated that it is doubtful any of the stuff filmed in the movie is actually real. Cohen’s mockumentary style is easily manipulated and “real” moments are few and far between. But with that said, the biggest scene in the movie, and the one that got the most attention, involves Rudy Giuliani in a hotel room with a young woman. As a former New Yorker who lived there under his reign and absolutely hates Giuliani with the fury of a thousand suns, I have to say that the “gotcha” moment in this scene feels contrived and cheap. Giuliani is certainly a liar, creep and scumbag, but to imply he was playing with himself or whipping his miniscule, aggressively impotent tiny pecker out is pretty hyperbolic.

The bottom line is that Sacha Baron Cohen’s outrageous comedic style is an acquired taste, and to be frank, I have acquired it. I didn’t love Borat Subsequent MovieFilm, but it did make me laugh out loud a bunch of times, and that ain’t nothing. The film is worth watching for the laughs and to enjoy watching Maria Bakalova devour every scene she inhabits.

If you like Da Ali G Show, Borat and Bruno, you’ll like Borat Subsequent MovieFilm…but if Cohen’s style is not your cup of tea, I recommend you don’t even attempt to take a sip of this raunchy, rancid and ridiculous brew.

©2021

Q: Into the Storm - Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

The new HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm is just like QAnon in that it is vapid entertainment selling itself as truth

The documentary mini-series seeks to uncover the identity of Q instead of asking the more intriguing question of why the QAnon conspiracy appeals to so many.

Q: Into the Storm is the new HBO documentary miniseries that explores the QAnon conspiracy theory and the collection of people mixed up in it.

The first two episodes of the six-part series, produced and directed by Cullen Hoback, premiered on HBO and HBO Max Sunday night. The final four episodes will air over the next two Sundays.

QAnon, in case you are blissfully unaware, is a conspiracy theory revolving around statements made online by an anonymous person or group of persons called “Q”. QAnon believers think Q is a high-ranking insider who is working against a cabal of deep state power players involved in all sorts of nefarious activities up to and including cannibalism and pedophilia.

According to Q, Trump was meant to bring forth the revolutionary “storm” that would round up and eliminate all the baddies in the world.

On its surface, and as Q: Into the Storm reveals - beneath its surface too, QAnon is an embarrassingly inane exercise in intellectual dwarfism and infantile emotionalism.

Although, to be fair, as both a denizen of Hollywood and a lifelong Catholic, I can attest that powerful people conspiring to sexually prey upon children and cover it up isn’t exactly far-fetched. Throw in Jeffrey Epstein, with his elite client list and the rather improbable story surrounding his supposed suicide, and the notion of a cabal of sexual deviants ruling the world is certainly much less insane than the mainstream media would have us believe.

One can simply watch the documentary Who Took Johnny or read the The Franklin Cover-up (or try to watch the documentary Conspiracy of Silence), and the scales will quickly fall from their eyes regarding the uncomfortable truth about the levels of depravity in our world.

A major problem with Q: Into the Storm though is that fails to address this obvious context when contemplating the unasked question of why would people fall for this QAnon nonsense in the first place?

Belief in Q may be ludicrous but considering the context within which it came to be, it isn’t illogical. The elite media and the political establishment lie, brazenly and constantly about subjects both big and small, so embracing a conspiracy theory that recognizes that often avoided but obvious truth has a logic to it. But Q: Into the Storm never acknowledges that context, and that ultimately erodes the documentary’s credibility.

The main narrative device of the documentary is that it follows filmmaker Hoback as he delves into a sordid and strange cast of characters in search of who the real “Q” might be.

The first two episodes are like a walking tour of the Island of Misfit Toys, as the QAnon ecosystem is riddled with delusional desperados, one more bizarre than the next.

The documentary’s deepest dives in the first two episodes are into the history and drama behind QAnon’s various internet homes and the personalities, like Fredrick Brennan and Jim and Ron Watkins, that run them.

What is so disorienting about the documentary is that it portrays QAnon as this odious and ominous entity in the world yet sets a very whimsical tone for Hoback’s goofy global jaunt to find Q.

The mainstream media refer to QAnon as a cult, and they point to the riot, or as the establishment calls it - the “insurrection”, at the Capitol January 6th as evidence of how dangerous this belief system truly is.

The elite media’s fear and loathing of QAnon is so extreme that some critics are aghast that Q: Into the Storm had the temerity to actually let QAnon believers speak on camera, believing that putting a spotlight on the movement may spread the deadly infection of QAnon disinformation further. 

In the documentary QAnon is described as “part interactive game, part religion and part international movement”, and I think that is an accurate assessment, I also think it is an apt description of more establishment approved cults like Black Lives Matter and its unfalsifiable philosophy of Critical Race Theory.

Just as the delusional religion of QAnon led to the clown convention at the Capitol on Jan. 6th, the equally delusional religion of Black Lives Matter was the reason for our summer of “mostly peaceful protests” filled with rampant violence, looting and arson.

The reality is that QAnon is certainly an absurd conspiracy, but it is no more absurd than the ridiculous conspiracies the establishment adamantly propagates.

For example, are Q’s declarations any more crazy than Rachel Maddow’s nightly cavalcade of speculative anti-Russian conspiracy rants?

Are the QAnon kooks any more idiotic than the Maddow morons, Russiagate fantasists and the BLM brigade of buffoons?

No, they’re not. The reality is that these QAnon/BLM/Russiagate dupes, dopes and dipshits are all drinking the same brew of desperation, delusion and disinformation, just from different mugs.

QAnon, BLM and Russiagate exist as wish fulfillment apparatuses that tell their slavishly clueless congregations exactly what they want to hear and then leave it to the faithful to contort themselves in spectacular ways to assiduously make those fantasies into their reality.

The reality regarding Q: Into the Storm is that it thus far fails to be a worthy documentary mini-series because just like QAnon, it is merely vapid entertainment selling itself as a vehicle to truth, and ultimately is an exercise in confirmation bias meant to distract, not enlighten.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and murder stories, it is the state-sanctioned violence we ignore that is most corrosive

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has me questioning my choices in entertainment, but it’s the brutal actions of my government over the years that have done more to create a society desensitized to the value of life.

In the wake of the grisly murder of 33 year-old Sarah Everard in London earlier this month, there has been much debate about how to make women feel safer.

For example, the rather radical idea of a 6 p.m. curfew for men has been discussed. Considering that men stuck at home will just marinate in our morally twisted media which features a plethora of programming that highlights men killing women…that might not make women feel any safer.

Having just finished watching the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but wonder if the prevalence of such gruesome subject matter in our culture cheapens the sanctity of life and thereby inspires killers.

Our culture’s fascination with violent death can often intentionally or unintentionally transform into a celebration of people who kill. In our fame-obsessed, reality-tv world, being famous and infamous are now virtually synonymous, and it doesn’t matter how you get the spotlight, just that you do. By lavishing our attention on murdering monsters we often turn them into celebrities.

I’m not immune to the lurid appeal of a serial killer story, but it feels like a chicken and egg debate pondering if I watched the documentaries on the Night Stalker and the Yorkshire Ripper because Netflix made them or did Netflix make them because they knew I’d watch them?

The most interesting serial killer narratives are the ones that explore not so much the serial killers but our obsession with them.

For example, Zodiac is one of David Fincher’s best movies as it tells the true story of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who turns into an obsessive Zodiac Killer researcher. Fincher mining our fear of becoming obsessed with the Zodiac Killer rather than our fear of the Zodiac Killer is what makes the film so captivating.

Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter dives even deeper into that theme as it follows two FBI agents as they interview serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz and Charles Manson in order to try and understand how they think. Ultimately, the brilliance of the show is that it mirrors its audience by being obsessed with the minds of serial killers.

But does immersing oneself in the crimes and mindset of a killer do damage to our individual or collective psyche?

It is much too simplistic to argue tv shows and movies about serial killers transform men into murderers.

It’s more accurate to say that the moral guardrails of our culture, most notably religion, have so decayed and been so diminished, that there seems no counter-balance to the darker things that naturally intrigue us. In other words in our fallen world there is no flicker of illumination to give us respite from the relentless darkness.

These serial killer narratives once felt cathartic and even psychologically healthy when contained within a culture with clear moral and ethical boundaries that acknowledged the precious nature of life. Now that these moral and ethical boundaries have blurred, and the religious foundation for them has been removed or revealed to be fraudulent, these serial killer stories now feel much less cathartic and much more toxic.

The result of this is, as killer John Doe tells us in Fincher’s iconic Seven, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it is common, trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”

This is true of our culture as news and entertainment are inundated with murder, mayhem and depravity morning, noon and night.

Whether it’s scenes of attacks on Asians, or cops brutalizing civilians, or “mostly peaceful” violent protests, or documentaries on The Night Stalker or Nazis, we are perpetually force-fed a toxic media stew leaving our bellies bloated with bile and barbarity.

It is unimaginable that the culture’s consistent mantra of “if it bleeds it leads” is healthy, as it destabilizes the weak-minded, desensitizes us to the value of life and dehumanizes all of us.

Nearly a decade before the flag-waving pornography of the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign, Oliver Stone’s under appreciated Natural Born Killers (1994) skillfully explored this idea of a violent culture creating murderers and a malignant media transforming them into celebrities.

It is not surprising that a culture that made media sensations of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, celebrated more “respectable” serial killers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they unleashed their carnage.

It seems to me that the media’s glorification of the industrial scale, state sanctioned, military industrial complex murder machine does more to damage our collective psyche and diminish our sense of the preciousness of life than stories about lone murderers.  

I’m less worried about the psychological effects of a serial killer documentary than I am about America’s ambivalence regarding their war crimes committed in Yemen.

I’m less worried about Seven inspiring a lunatic than I am about the U.S. and U.K. killing people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

I’m less worried about Ted Bundy’s body count than I am about the body count of Bush, Blair, Obama, Trump and Biden.

The murder of Sarah Everard is a tragic symptom of the disease of indifference to the sanctity of life that ravages our culture. But the majority of blood on our collective hands is not just a result of watching too many serial killer movies but from turning a blind eye to the violence done in our name to innocent people across the globe.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Woody Allen: Pervert, Pedophile and Shitty Director

Allen v. Farrow is the compelling new HBO docu-series thatexposes Woody Allen’s disgustingly depraved dirty laundry.

The first episode of the four part series lays the damning groundwork that shows Woody Allen is a sick and twisted individual.

Allen v. Farrow is the explosive four part HBO documentary series that explores the claims that four-time Academy Award winner Woody Allen molested his and Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter Dylan when she was a small child.

The first episode of the series premiered on Sunday night on HBO and the streaming service HBO Max and it is very captivating viewing.

If you are looking for a documentary to disabuse yourself of the notion that Woody Allen is a twisted individual and a child molester, then Allen v. Farrow is not the documentary series for you.

The series thus far has masterfully laid a damning foundation for the case against Woody Allen, who did not cooperate with the filmmakers. Allen comes across in the admittedly one-sided docu-series as a creepy, controlling and narcissistic person who has an inappropriately affectionate and unnatural attachment to the young Dylan.

The first episode uses interviews with Dylan, her brother Ronan and mother Mia Farrow, as well as various eyewitness accounts from family friends to build as compelling argument for Allen’s guilt.

The case against Allen is, of course, complicated by the fact that Dylan’s mother, Mia Farrow, is a woman scorned by Woody Allen, so she might be inclined, out of spite, to project onto him a malevolence that isn’t really there. But the major caveat to that notion is one of the most revelatory and damning pieces of evidence against Woody Allen…namely that he was cheating on Mia WITH HER ADOPTED DAUGHTER SOON-YI!

Allen, 85, and Soon-Yi, now his wife, have dismissed the docuseries as a “hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”. In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter magazine, the disgraced director and his wife said filmmakers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick “had no interest in the truth,” and accused them of “collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers,” and giving Allen only a “matter of days” to respond to the allegations.

But let’s face facts, even if Dylan Farrow never made allegations of sexual molestation against Woody Allen, he should still be labeled a pervert. The idea that Allen thought it was normal and natural to start a sexual relationship with his barely out-of-her-teens, de facto stepdaughter speaks volumes to his depravity and degeneracy.

It is striking that Woody Allen’s shameless debauchery in regards to Soon-Yi, and the damning allegations made by Dylan, never slowed down his career.

Allen’s uninterrupted career success is revelatory regarding the levels of sycophancy in Hollywood. Remarkably, Allen has made a film a year since 1992, getting some of Hollywood’s biggest stars to work with him.

Cate Blanchett, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson, Sally Hawkins, Mira Sorvino, Adrian Brody, Colin Ferrell, Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder among many others have worked with Woody post Soon-Yi revelations and Dylan accusations.

The appeal of Woody Allen to Hollywood stars is that working with him greatly increases the chance at an Oscar…which is pretty damning of both the ambitious actors and actresses who’ve worked with him and also the Academy Awards and their decidedly bad taste in movies.

I have never understood Woody Allen’s appeal. I’m one of the rarest of creatures in that I am the most devout of cinephiles yet I’ve always found Woody Allen’s films to be utterly pedestrian affairs at best.

Even before the allegations of child sexual abuse made by Dylan Farrow and the Soon Yi relationship became public in 1992, I thought Woody Allen was a pedantic, vapid, vacuous and pompous cinematic poseur.

Many people often say to me that they love Woody Allen films, most especially Annie Hall, but I always feel like they’re saying that because they think they’re supposed to say it. Saying you love Woody Allen films is like some secret handshake that signals that you’re an intellectual or something.

Allen’s feminine, nebbishy and effete, ‘man without a chest’ persona and the elite, upper-crust New York he inhabited, were anathema to me, a working class Irish Catholic kid from Brooklyn. I recognized my New York and my New York family when I watched Scorsese, most notably Goodfellas, not Woody Allen.

Woody Allen is the Adam Sandler of coastal elites and critics only adore him because they look like him and are just as chestless, feminine, effete and nebbishy as he is.

In an attempt to try and “get” Woody Allen, I watched his entire filmography over again about 7 years ago. It did nothing to dissuade me from my negative opinion of his middling, and frankly middlebrow, movie making, and did much to further convince me of his deviancy.

The most obviously uncomfortable piece of cinematic evidence against Allen is the 1979 movie Manhattan, where he, a 42-year-old, dates a 17-year-old girl, an uncomfortable bit of foreshadowing to the Soon-Yi situation.

As someone who prefers to separate the artist’s personal life from their art, and who prefers skepticism to #MeToo-ism, Woody Allen is the exception to my rule.

Watching Allen v. Farrow may be jarring to someone who is a fan of Woody Allen, but by now if people are defending Woody Allen they are so delusional and morally pliable as to be ridiculous.

It is important to note though that it’s possible to both think Woody Allen is a monster that molested his daughter but also enjoy his films. For instance, I am capable of watching and liking Roman Polanski movies knowing full well his history of sexual deviancy. Chinatown is still unquestionably one of the best films ever made regardless of Polanski’s crimes.

The biggest difference between Polanski and Allen though is that Polanski is a brilliant artist who was imprisoned and went into self-imposed exile for his crime, while Woody Allen is a pretentious hack who has never been held to account for his repugnant misdeeds.

In conclusion, Allen v. Farrow is a compelling piece of documentary television. I’m looking forward to watching the next three episodes, and to never watching those insipid Woody Allen films ever again.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amend: The Fight for America: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

‘Amend: The Fight for America’, Netflix’s new painfully woke docu-series, is only interested in indoctrinating, not educating

The series is a ludicrous exercise in politically correct performance art that is allergic to intellectual seriousness or nuance.

Amend: The Fight for America, is the new Netflix docu-series hosted by Will Smith that examines the history and impact of the 14th Amendment, which addresses citizenship rights and equal protection under the law.

The series is broken down into six episodes. The first three episodes cover the 14th Amendment in relation to the black struggle for equality from slavery to Black Lives Matter, while episodes 4, 5 and 6 focus on the women’s movement, marriage equality/gay rights and immigrant rights respectively.

The docu-series is a high-end public service announcement featuring stars such as Pedro Pascal, Mahershala Ali and Joseph Gordon Levitt, and is obviously meant as a teaching guide for children and teenagers.

One of the big problems with Amend though, and there are many of them, is that it presents itself as a serious work of history, but is really just a blatant work of advocacy.

There is nothing wrong with advocating, but doing it under the guise of teaching history, makes Amend an insidious piece of propaganda.

As propaganda it is very slick as it has all the trappings of a serious historical documentary, but it’s violently allergic to nuance. The series’ shameless embrace of woke identity politics is never countenanced with even a rudimentary glimpse of oppositional ideas and beliefs except to label them as obviously and irredeemably evil.

For instance, in the episode about women’s rights and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), anti-abortion beliefs are only seen as tools of misogyny and the patriarchy, and the potentially rich and fascinating topic of the clash of 14th Amendment rights of the unborn child versus those of the pregnant woman is never broached.

The series’ intellectual petulance is also highlighted in this episode when one of the talking heads is incapable of even saying famed ERA opposition leader Phyllis Schlafly’s name. She stumbles over it numerous times and then finally gives up only to be quickly replaced by another talking head who simply calls Ms. Schlafly, “Mean Phyllis”. Apparently in an attempt to appeal to grade school children the docu-series decided to act like a grade school child.

Preferring this slavishly woke, blindly Manichean perspective on every issue guts the project of any intellectual seriousness, and its relentlessly self-righteous snickering at opposing arguments cheapens the project and transforms it from being potentially laudable to ridiculously laughable.

Speaking of laughable, Amend’s credibility is further damaged by “comedian” Larry Wilmore. Wilmore, a producer on the series, keeps showing up to mug for the camera for no discernible reason and is so tonally out of place as to be painful. Wilmore’s “comedy” is always impotent and grating, but in Amend his shtick is even more insipidly limp and irritating due to the supposedly serious context.

The docu-series is obsessed with narratives and messaging, as it repeatedly talks about the evil of  “messages of fear and hate” from small-minded bigots used to rile the masses. Trump is repeatedly conjured in this context to accentuate the point.  This is curious since the series espouses its own message of fear and hate by continually denigrating “white men” and ringing the alarm bells over the boogey man of  “white supremacy” which is supposedly lurking under every bed and around every corner.

This anti-white attitude is evident when the over 300,000 white men who died to free the slaves in the Civil War are studiously ignored, but the black soldiers who fought are celebrated. It’s also evident when minority actors Pedro Pascal and Graham Greene play Lincoln and Ohio Senator John Bingham, the principle founder of the 14th Amendment, respectively yet white actor Joseph Gordon Leavitt plays the villainous, N-word spouting Andrew Johnson.

Another telling moment that spotlights the series’ manipulative mendacity and deceptive intentions is when activist Britney Packnett Cunningham recounts her experiences as a protestor in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the 2014 shooting of black man Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. 

Video and photos of protestors fill the screen as Ms. Cunningham states “the call on the streets was ‘hands up don’t shoot’ because what we were being told was that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air when Darren Wilson shot him”.

This is an intentionally misleading statement as Ms. Cunningham, who is featured throughout the series as some kind of expert, knows it isn’t true and that she is perpetuating the false narrative surrounding Brown’s shooting, that’s why she couches it with “we were being told”. Brown didn’t have his hands up when Wilson shot him and yet Ms. Cunningham and Amend prefer that lie because it fits their narrative instead of the truth that destroys it. (Watch an infinitely more insightful documentary, What Killed Michael Brown? for the truth.)

If you like deceptive docu-series that indoctrinate instead of educate, and enjoy watching solemn faced actors babbling about “inclusivity” while pushing so hard to conjure non-existent gravitas it seems like they could soil themselves at any moment…then Amend is definitely for you.

After suffering though all six hours of Amend: The Fight for America, my biggest takeaway is that we need a new constitutional amendment to protect me from the torture of watching the vapid Will Smith mimic sincerity while spouting woke talking points as if they’re holy decrees from God on high. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Glitch in the Matrix Documentary: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2.5 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. The film touches upon a fascinating subject but gives it short shrift. It isn’t worth paying to see but if you wait a while and catch it on streaming for free it might spark an interest and you can search out other more profound material on the subject matter.

Do we live in a computer simulation? The new documentary ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ asks the question – but fails to give a serious answer.

In our manufactured and manipulated age, which elevates subjective experience over objective reality, simulation theory certainly seems possible, if not probable.

In a spooky bit of synchronicity, in the same week the New York Times published an article where “experts” called for a Reality Czar, a documentary was released that questions the nature of reality.

The documentary, A Glitch in the Matrix, which is directed by Rodney Ascher and available on Video on Demand, examines simulation theory, which is the theory that our entire reality is an artificial computer simulation, sort of like a giant video game.

Simulation theory seems like a science fiction fever dream, and with a 1970’s talk on the subject by esteemed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick providing the narrative structure for the documentary, and the film’s title being a line from the movie The Matrix, the documentary doesn’t disabuse viewers of that notion.

The question of our reality being an illusion is more substantial than sci-fi musings though, as its been pondered by philosophers through the ages. Plato’s “The Cave” and DesCartes “Evil Demon” are two prime examples, and intelligent modern men like philosopher Nick Bostrom and entrepreneur Elon Musk, are also proponents.

What makes a simulation theory discussion so timely is that our collective sense of an objective reality is currently so tenuous due to our culture’s continuous elevation of subjective experience in its place.

With mainstream media devolving into a manipulation machine promoting tribal echo chambers, and social media splintering us further by acting as a reinforcement mechanism for subjective experience, finding a consensus in order to adequately agree on an objective reality seems nearly impossible.

For instance, Democrats are convinced that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election while Trump voters are positive that Biden and the political establishment stole the 2020 election.

Each group can cite their preferred media to make their case and targeted social media will buttress their beliefs, and so it becomes their “reality”. Like a simulated reality, it is contrived and manufactured, and meant to trigger emotion, short circuit reason, and reinforce a malignant myopia.

Another example of subjective experience trumping objective reality in our culture is identity and transgenderism.

In its most rudimentary form, the argument trans advocates make is based on getting others to conform to their subjective experience at the expense of a consensus objective reality.

For example, a person born with male genitalia who claims that they were born in the wrong body and now identify as a woman. That may certainly be their subjective experience and they are entitled to it, but that is not objective reality.

The trouble arises when trans advocates demand that other people unquestionably embrace the trans person’s subjective experience at the expense of acknowledging objective reality.

The issue of identity and transgenderism would seem to be right up simulation theory’s alley, as the ability to change genders is akin to changing avatars in the video game of life, but unfortunately, this relevant topic is never addressed in the documentary.

Instead the filmmaker cloaks, without comment, four subjects in computer-generated identities as they recount the experiences that led them to believe in simulation theory. Some of these stories are compelling, while others sound like the result of emotional trauma or psychological issues.

And unlike the Mandela Effect, where a large group of people have a collective memory of an event that did not happen, the subjective experiences of these four individuals does not greatly reinforce belief in the possibility of simulation theory, but rather diminishes it.

About two thirds of the way through the film takes a turn that is intellectually, philosophically and tonally incongruous, when Joshua Cook recounts his experiences.

Cook was a troubled teen who watched The Matrix multiple times a day. Bullied at home and school, he found an identity in The Matrix and wearing the film’s signature black trench coat.

Eventually Cook snapped and murdered his parents, and his defense lawyers concocted the “Matrix defense”, which claims Cook thought he was living in the movie’s reality, in order to argue his case.

Bringing Cook’s heinous crime up in a documentary that is supposed to be seriously contemplating simulation theory is a befuddling decision, as it surreptitiously and nefariously portrays the investigation of alternative philosophical theories as being not just frivolous but inherently dangerous.

It’s all the more ludicrous because Cook was diagnosed with schizophrenia, meaning that simulation theory wasn’t his problem, mental illness was.

By spotlighting Cook the film is ultimately arguing that simulation theory should be avoided because the mentally ill may behave badly if they come into contact with it. That isn’t exactly a sturdy intellectual foundation upon which to build a compelling philosophical argument or create a captivating piece of documentary cinema.

The problem with A Glitch in the Matrix is that it would rather wade in the shallow waters with stories like Joshua Cook rather than further explore the oceans of intrigue in which serious thinkers like Philip K. Dick, Nick Bostrom and Elon Musk swim.

A Glitch in the Matrix could have been a really good documentary as simulation theory is a fascinating topic that is very relevant to our troubled times, but by choosing the salacious over the intellectually serious, the film does its subject, and its viewers, a terrible disservice.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Royal Family Documentary: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Not enough of value to see here to make it worth your time.

Royal Family, the 1969 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary that chronicled a year in the life of Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family, which the Queen banned in 1972 for “cheapening” the royals by removing their mystique, recently resurfaced on YouTube and caused much consternation at Buckingham Palace.

Both Buckingham Palace and the BBC wanted the film to remain under wraps and so Youtube removed it for copyright infringement. Prior to the leak on Youtube, the documentary had also been brought back into the public’s attention this past year by the hit Netflix show The Crown, which dramatized the making of the film and the reaction to it.

Being the ever-intrepid film critic that I am, I tracked the royally blacklisted film down and gave it a gander, and I’m wondering what the Queen is all bent out of shape about.

The film doesn’t “cheapen” the royal family…the thing that has cheapened the royal family has been their sordid, low-rent behavior these past 50 years.

The film’s most shocking and most genuine scene, comes at the end, where Queen Elizabeth II recounts to her family how difficult it was to keep a straight face when meeting the U.S. Ambassador because he looked like “a gorilla”.

I suppose the Queen calling the U.S. Ambassador a gorilla could be seen as a big deal in 1969, but after the last 50 years of royal chicanery, it barely registers as a blip on the radar screen.

For instance, “Gorilla-gate” pales in comparison to Prince Charles being exposed as a spineless (and lacking another piece of vital male anatomy) coward for his treatment of his wife Diana, his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles and his ugly divorce.

It also pales in comparison to the Prince Andrew-Fergie fiasco and the recent revelations regarding Prince Andrew’s pernicious sexual predation. 

And it isn’t nearly as bad as Prince Harry’s falling for the malignant malcontent Meghan Markle, and then the ensuing embarrassment of Megxit.

While the film closes with the mild chuckle of “Gorilla-gate”, what precedes that is an hour and a half of the most horrifically monotonous and mundane documentation of royal minutiae imaginable.

The most striking thing about the documentary is, like the royal family itself, how painfully dull, contrived, manufactured and repetitive it is.

The film aggressively tries to paint the royals as a “working family” whose family business happens to be being royalty. It incessantly refers to the Queen ‘going back to work’ or even while on holiday, and she seems to be perpetually on holiday, still being ‘on-duty’. What that duty is exactly is never quite clear.

Some of the most unintentionally funny scenes are of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip pretending to do paperwork. Like bad actors they poorly improvise scenes where they blankly look at papers and inanely talk to aides about it…and it’s hysterical. This happened so often it felt like the movie should’ve been titled “The Banality of Busy Work”.

The two of them are also perpetually looking at a bevy of newspapers, but like illiterate extras on a big-budget movie set, they don’t seem to actually read any of them, just scan them looking for pictures of themselves.

To be fair, the Queen does almost come across as human a few times, but the biggest takeaway regarding her is that if dead-eyed, mindless small talk were Olympic sprinting she would be Usain Bolt.

Not surprisingly since he is a pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license, Prince Philip comes across as a complete pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license.

As for Prince Charles, the documentary opens with a scene of him, then in his early twenties, water-skiing shirtless. The sight of the pasty Charles, a black hole of anti-charisma, as the allegedly athletic man out on the water in his swim togs isn’t exactly reminiscent of Sean Connery as James Bond as much as Mr. Bean as James Bland.

In a later scene the cartoonishly goofy-looking Charles plays Cello with his youngest brother and it made me think of the in-bred, mental defective hillbilly from Deliverance playing banjo.

The purpose of Royal Family was to humanize the royals and make them relatable to show they’re just like the rest of us. That premise doesn’t fair so well when the Queen goes through her stunning jewelry collection marveling at the glorious history of pillaging that has bequeathed her such impressive accoutrements. 

They also don’t seem very relatable as they castle hop from Buckingham to Balmoral to Windsor and back again, or travel the globe on their giant yacht or personal train.

The documentary isn’t so much ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ meets ‘The Real Housewives of Buckingham Palace’ as it is an episode of The Contrived Chronicles of the Cold, Clueless and Criminally Comfortable.

If you like watching spoiled, mindless mannequins smiling vacantly and waving robotically as they live lavish, unearned lives and attend endless ceremonies and pageants in 1969, then Royal Family is for you.

If you prefer robustly absurd comedy mixed with seedy melodrama and sex scandals, then you’re better off skipping Royal Family and watching the daily news coverage of the royal family instead.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

MLK/FBI: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Regurgitated, establishment friendly pablum that studiously avoids the bigger questions.

I’ve heard it said that Americans are the most propagandized people on the planet. I think that statement is quite accurate.

What makes the propaganda fed to Americans so insidious is that it’s so subtle that audiences, even the supposedly intellectual ones, are blissfully unaware of their indoctrination and conditioning.

A perfect example of this is MLK/FBI, the new documentary directed by Sam Pollard that premiered in theaters and video-on-demand on January 15th, that chronicles the FBI’s wiretapping and harassment of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.

A documentary dealing with intelligence community nefariousness and MLK, the greatest American strategist and tactician of the 20th century, has my attention.

Unfortunately, after watching MLK/FBI, I was left frustrated and infuriated because it was so obviously a docile and deferential piece of establishment friendly propaganda meant to distract and deceive viewers.

This movie is 104 minutes of flaccid history and impotent insights disguised as setting the record straight with revolutionary revelations. But there is no new information presented in the film and no new perspectives on the information already known.

The most interesting statement in the movie comes in the final ten minutes and is from MLK aide Andrew Young, who would go on to become a congressman, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and the Mayor of Atlanta.

Young says in regards to James Earl Ray, the man convicted of the assassination of MLK, “I don’t think James Earl Ray had anything to do with that, Dr. King’s assassination, so I can’t really comment on that.”

This should be where the movie starts, not where it ends.

What makes the FBI’s harassment of MLK noteworthy is that they were gathering salacious information on his private life in an attempt to assassinate his character and thus derail his morally authoritative movement.

The FBI actively tried to get members of the press to publish stories of King’s infidelity but none took the bait, and so the FBI was left with lots of ammunition but no one willing to fire it.

It was when King expanded his civil rights work and in 1968 began the Poor People’s Campaign, which set out to bring poor people of all colors together to fight for economic justice and against American militarism, that the FBI ratcheted up its anti-King work, and this is where the infamous “rape participation” allegation first is documented by the FBI.

The claim, that King watched and laughed as another pastor raped a woman, is dubious and is not thoroughly fleshed out in the film, but it reveals the FBI understood the greater threat King now posed to the ruling order with the Poor People’s Campaign, and that it was willing to push the envelop to stop him.

Other civil right’s groups and leaders faced similar escalation when they dared to cross color lines and work on behalf of all people instead of just black people.

It wasn’t until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and evolved into a more racially inclusive yet no less revolutionary figure, that he got assassinated under shadowy circumstances.

The Black Panther’s free breakfast program, open to children of all races, was deemed by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to be “the greatest internal threat to the United States”. The Black Panthers were quickly infiltrated and some, including Fred Hampton, were assassinated.

And so it was with King’s Poor People’s Campaign, which triggered the FBI to “up its game”. Coincidentally, just a few weeks later he was assassinated in Memphis.

MLK/FBI is much too “respectable” to investigate or challenge Andrew Young’s claim regarding Ray’s innocence in the assassination of King, even though Ray himself claimed he was innocent, the King family believes he is innocent and a civil court ruled he was innocent. It’s this desperation for respectability at the expense of truth that makes the film establishment propaganda.

The other tell-tale sign it’s propaganda is that the film acts like FBI and intel community deviousness and depravity are some remote experience from a dark, distant past instead of a pressing issue of our time.

This allows liberals, especially ones like Bill Maher and John Oliver who pose as anti-establishmentarians, to continue to fawn over and fellate the “heroes” of the intel community under the guise that malicious misdeeds only occurred in the past.

The FBI’s invasive surveillance of King pales in comparison to what the intel community is capable of now. What the FBI did to King the intel community is now able to do to everyone since we all carry cell phones, mini eavesdropping devices that track our every movement, contact and conversation.

The film’s flaccidity also allows liberals to continue to giddily cheer the intel community’s crackdown on nationalists, militias and Julian Assange just as conservatives once cheered Hoover’s targeting King, civil rights and anti-war groups and communists.

It also surreptitiously endorses the Black Lives Matter and allows woke advocates to deceive themselves into thinking they’re morally equivalent to Dr. King.

BLM is no Poor People’s Campaign meant to threaten the establishment order. It’s a contrived and manipulative movement meant to uphold the status quo, not disrupt it, which is why its been swiftly embraced by Washington, the media and corporate America.

In conclusion, by being a documentary that talks an awful lot but never really has anything useful to say, MLK/FBI is a deceptive piece of establishment propaganda not worthy of your time.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy - A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Although the film features some compelling talking heads, its thesis is too shallow and one note to compulsory viewing.

The new Netflix documentary ‘Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy’ pulls its conspiratorial punches in favor of the establishment friendly route of blaming racism

 The documentary lacks insight and profundity because it studiously avoids the hard questions in favor of easy answers.

Crack: Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy, directed by Stanley Nelson, recounts the rise of crack cocaine in the 1980’s and the calamitous War on Drugs unleashed in response to it.

Cocaine, corruption and conspiracy are three things I can’t get enough of, so when this documentary was released on Netflix January 11th, I dove right in. The movie certainly lives up to its name as it does chronicle cocaine and corruption, but when it tries to tackle conspiracy it stumbles noticeably.

The film opens strongly with a chapter titled “Greed is Good” that highlights the ties between the muscular American capitalism of the Reagan revolution of the 1980’s and the explosion of the drug trade in America’s inner cities. 

The drug dealer as a black market, underclass extension of the archetypal American entrepreneur, is a compelling idea, but unfortunately, the film quickly eschews such high-minded observations and devolves into purely race-based analysis.

The film’s thesis is that crack, the media and political response to it, and the War on Drugs, were a function of racism.

The documentary repeatedly makes this assertion and assumes it to be true but unfortunately never actually proves it. In fact, the movie is often at cross-purposes with itself over its race-based contention.

For instance, the film claims that due to racism, law enforcement originally didn’t police black neighborhoods and therefore let drugs flourish. When black communities demanded aggressive police action to combat crack and officials responded with increased policing of black neighborhoods, that’s deemed racism too.

The documentary is chock full of this sort of circular logic, confirmation bias and shirking of responsibility.

Another racial argument is that the government’s amenable response to the opioid crisis, which affects more white people, as opposed to its draconian response to the crack epidemic, which affected poor black neighborhoods, is proof of racism.

This ignores a fact that the film details extensively, that the crack epidemic was accompanied by massive gun violence, something that hasn’t occurred with heroin.

Drug gangs selling crack engaged in gun battles over territory that resulted in many deaths, but it wasn’t just drug users and dealers that were dying, it was civilians caught in the crossfire too. This led to much public outcry and government officials resolving to stop the bloodshed.

As Sam Quinones reports in his 2015 book Dreamland, Mexican heroin dealers in the U.S. use a very different approach than violent crack dealers. To avoid police attention, these dealers don’t carry guns or use violence, and target smaller cities with a customer friendly approach that includes phone orders and direct delivery. In essence, these dealers have become like the Big Pharma companies that pushed the scourge of opioids onto the American public with the blessing of the government and medical establishment in the first place.

The documentary ignores these facts in favor of reducing everything to simple racism.

As for the “conspiracy” in the film’s title, the movie raises but then refuses to answer whether the CIA smuggled cocaine into the U.S. from Central America (thus creating the crack epidemic) during the Iran-Contra affair.

This “conspiracy” is referenced numerous times but while never refuted, it’s also never endorsed. The furthest the film goes is to say that it’s understandable that black people believe in this conspiracy since they’ve been so victimized by the government and the war on drugs.

There is compelling evidence that the CIA did smuggle cocaine into the country and were responsible for the explosion of crack and guns in inner city neighborhoods.

Gary Webb famously wrote about this in 1996 for The Mercury News and in his 1998 book, Dark Alliance.  In response, the mainstream media quickly jumped to the defense of the CIA and pilloried Webb, essentially ending his career. Webb ended up “committing suicide” in 2004 by shooting himself twice in the head.

An Inspector-General’s report later verified much of what Webb claimed according to journalist and Webb biographer Nick Schou who wrote, "The CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade."

The CIA is ruthless and amoral, so their use of the drug trade as a social destabilizer and off the books income source shouldn’t be shocking.

Alexander Cockburn details the intelligence community’s history of llegal drug operations in his 2014 book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. According to Cockburn the CIA was testing LSD on unsuspecting civilians in San Francisco and smuggling heroin from Vietnam in the 60’s, running cocaine and guns from Central and South America in the 80’s, and restarted the opium trade in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.

The documentary dutifully ignores Webb and Cockburn’s conspiratorial context, and its cowardly agnostic approach make the film seem like controlled opposition, as it simply recycles establishment sanctioned talking points around the war on drugs and uses racism as a shield to avoid bigger questions. In other words, the movie is just another opiate for the myopic mainstream masses.

Racism and a CIA conspiracy can both be, and probably are, major contributors to the moral atrocity and social calamity that is the War on Drugs, but shouting one and tap dancing around the other turn Crack into just another documentary that would rather tell people what they want to hear, rather than tell them the whole uncomfortable truth.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Dissident: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. If you have know nothing about the Khashoggi murder, this is a decent overview, but if you are decently informed on the subject, it is not worth your time.

The Dissident details the gruesome assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi but avoids deeper questions

The documentary dutifully exposes the tyranny of the Saudi regime but hesitates when it comes to exploring their accomplices.

The Dissident is the new documentary available on video-on-demand that chronicles the Saudi Arabian government’s infamous assassination of Washington Post journalist and Saudi reform activist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.

The film, directed by Academy Award winning documentarian Bryan Fogel, tells an important story, and yet it never quite feels like an important film. It isn’t a bad documentary, but it also isn’t great, and could’ve been much better.

The Dissident goes into gruesome detail about Khashoggi’s heinous and brutal murder and ultimately blames Saudi Crown Prince and Deputy Prime Minister, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) for the crime, but if you follow the news you already know the majority of what the film details regarding the assassination, and that MBS is little more than Tony Soprano in a keffiyeh, the lead thug in the royal Saudi thugocracy.

The movie doesn’t break any new ground and what it does report is presented in such an overwrought manner that it detracts from its impact.

Fogel’s directing approach is too slick for the movie’s own good, as he overwhelms the substance with a needlessly glossy visual style.

Fogel tries to transform the Khashoggi assassination into a spy thriller and love story rather than keeping it a genuine piece of investigative journalism, which is disappointing and detrimental to the film.

Another example of the film’s stylistic problem is one of the film’s main subjects, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident living in Montreal who became friends with Khashoggi and has made a name for himself as the host of an internet show about Saudi politics. Abdulaziz comes across as a little too polished to be trustworthy, so much so that when the film opens with a scene involving him, I literally thought it was a bad dramatic re-enactment. Unfortunately, Abdulaziz appears on camera to be less an earnest activist and more a dedicated self-promoter, and the documentary suffers because of it.

Another frustration was that the film seems intentionally obtuse when it comes to broader context.

For example, the film exposes Trump as being a vile and morally corrupt figure for his egregious kowtowing to the Saudi’s in the wake of the Khashoggi murder. Trump should be shamed for his disgusting behavior, but the film fails to point out that his cowardice regarding the Saudis does not make him unique among recent American presidents.

George W. Bush infamously bent over backwards to protect the Saudis after 9-11 (15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis), even going so far as to fly Saudis out of the US when all flights were grounded, and refusing to declassify the portions of the 9-11 Report that were damaging to the Saudi government.

Obama was no better, as in 2016 he vetoed a bill allowing families of 9-11 victims to sue the Saudi government (the veto was overridden by Congress).

Another contextual problem with the film was that its biggest story was neglected while hiding in plain sight. That story is Pegasus spyware, which was used to hack Abdulaziz and directly led to the murder of Khashoggi.

Pegasus was created by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms firm that claims its diabolical product is meant to target drug dealers and terrorists. But NSO sells Pegasus to tyrannical regimes in the Middle East that use it to round up dissidents and squelch dissent.

Pegasus is a crucial topic, but The Dissident only briefly touches upon it at the hour and twenty minute mark of a two-hour film and seems willfully blind to an angle of the story that demands deeper investigation. For example, why is an Israeli company aiding tyrannical Gulf States by tracking their opposition?

The film reveals that MBS himself was directly involved in the Pegasus hacking of Jeff Bezos after Khashoggi’s murder, and following this hack the National Enquirer exposed Bezos’s extra-marital affair.

If MBS could use Pegasus to hack the tech savvy owner of Amazon and The Washington Post that is one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet…who else has he hacked? Who else has Israel hacked with Pegasus? Have Trump or other American officials been hacked by the Israel and/or Saudi Arabia using Pegasus?

Could Trump’s consistent acquiescence to the Saudis and Israel be a result of their obtaining compromising information on him through Pegasus? When the UAE and Bahrain officially recognized Israel in 2020 was it quid pro quo for Israel having sold Pegasus to them and the Saudis?

These are all the questions I had that were never addressed in The Dissident. Instead the film spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on the grief of Khashoggi’s fiancé, which is heartbreaking to be sure, and not enough on the more substantial bigger picture.

It seems that Khashoggi’s assassination is the tip of the tyrannical iceberg, and The Dissident is either unable or unwilling to dip its toe into the deeper and darker waters to find out who besides the despots in the Saudi royal family are complicit in this particular crime and in more expansive crimes against humanity across the globe.

In conclusion, if you are unaware of the particulars of the Khashoggi murder, then The Dissident is a good place to get a stylized overview, but if you’ve followed the story then you’ll need to look elsewhere for relevant insights.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Death to 2020: A Review and Commentary

In a year ripe for satire, Netflix’s predictable mockumentary ‘Death to 2020’ is proof of comedy’s calamitous demise

The film’s tepid and establishment friendly comedic takes on 2020 feel like the final nail in comedy’s coffin.

Death to 2020 is the new Netflix mockumentary that sets out to humorously sum up the nightmare that was 2020. The film, which premiered on the streaming service on December 27th, recounts the actual terrible events of the past year and has fake experts played by actors such as Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Kudrow on as talking heads to comedically comment upon them.

The makers of Death to 2020, Charles Brooker and Anabel Jones, are best known in the U.S. for their terrifically terrifying and unnervingly prescient sci-fi horror show Black Mirror. But U.K. viewers first got to know them from their more comedy-oriented projects like the “Wipe Series”.

Death to 2020 is much more like the Wipe Series than Black Mirror as it attempts to be a comedy. Unfortunately, it fails in that endeavor.

What makes Death to 2020 so irritating is that it has nothing unique to say and it doesn’t even say the same tired old stuff uniquely.

Granted, some of the jokes are mildly amusing, and some of the performances are good, Tracey Ullman as Queen Elizabeth II, Hugh Grant as a stuffy and ornery British historian and Diane Morgan as one of the top five most average people in the world, are well done. Others, such as Leslie Jones as a behavioral psychologist and Lisa Kudrow as a conservative spokeswoman, are decidedly not.

Ultimately the film has the comedic heft, impact and staying power of a snide and snarky tweet.  At best it resembles a high-end, star-studded 2020 version of one of those silly Best of the 80’s clip shows on VH1.

The biggest problem with Death to 2020 though is the problem with most comedy nowadays, in that it is such a suffocating and stultifyingly safe and painfully predictable exercise as to be frustrating and fruitless.

If you have seen a single monologue in the past year by any of the sanctimonious, self-righteous serfs to the establishment on late night tv, such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah or John Oliver, then you’ve experienced the same impotent comedy of Death to 2020. 

The tired formula of the late night comedy eunuchs, where they flaccidly recite establishment-approved witticisms devoid of insight and edge, is dutifully replicated here just in mockumentary form.

The result is, not surprisingly, that there’s not an ounce of originality or profundity found in the hour and ten-minute film that is too long by roughly an hour.

Also clearly lacking from Death to 2020 is any semblance of comedic testicular fortitude as the usual safe targets are held up for ridicule. Of course Trump is pilloried because he is a walking punchline, as is clueless Joe Biden, who, amusingly, is referred to both as a “prehistoric concierge” and a ”civil war hero”, but obviously none of that is even remotely daring.

“Karens”, conservatives and anti-lockdown activists are also the butt of many jokes, but the equally golden opportunity to lambaste the illiberal left for laughs is never taken. For instance, the comedy rich environment of the Black Lives Matter movement is not mocked, and the “protestors” looting and burning businesses in the name of George Floyd don’t get taken to task either.

But most telling is that also absent from the comedy firing line are celebrities, like the highly hysterical dopes and dullards who vomited out the repugnantly self-serving “Imagine” and “I Take Responsibility“ videos.

By ignoring these subjects Death to 2020 reveals itself to be little more than just another pandering video compliantly committed to kissing the right asses and devoutly dedicated to never biting the hand that feeds it.

As George Carlin famously once said of the powerful in America, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it!” But the establishment court jesters who made Death to 2020 either are desperate to become members or are already in the club, as their resolute refusal to challenge the status quo is a perfect representation of the sad state of comedy in 2020.

Yes, there are some notable exceptions, Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr being the most prominent, but beyond that, whether it be Stephen Colbert weeping on air like one of the buffoons he used to belittle, or Jimmy Fallon castrating himself with a cowardly apology for an allegedly offensive blackface bit from twenty years ago, or John Oliver’s pathetic pandering to wokeness, or Saturday Night Live’s fierce commitment to anti-comedy or any of the other mainstream comedians who have groveled and genuflected to those who hold the power in our culture, 2020 has been the absolute nadir for contemporary comedy.

The bottom line is that 2020 has been a most brutal year that may have changed our world forever but it is also rife with profound opportunities for humor. Unfortunately for us, 2020 may also have killed comedy, and Death to 2020 is its decidedly unoriginal and unfunny death knell.

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Although at times mildly amusing, there is nothing original or noteworthy to see here.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Documentary 'Room 2806: The Accusation' - Explores the Seedy Side of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Former Poster Boy for the Global Elite

 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 806 seconds

The docu-mini-series showcases sex, money, power, class, race and gender as it dives deep into the fetid swamp of a controversial 2011 sex assault case in a futile search for truth.

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. An at-times interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying experience.

Room 2806: The Accusation, the new four-part documentary mini-series that premiered on Netflix December 7th, tells the twisted tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the sexual assault claim brought against him in 2011.

In 2011, DSK was at the zenith of his career. As head of the IMF he had performed admirably during the 2008 financial crisis and now seemed poised to defeat unpopular incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and become the president of France.

Life was good for the darling of the Socialist Party and of the socialite set, due to his career success and his marriage to the beautiful heiress Anne Sinclair, an accomplished and connected French journalist.

Then DSK went to New York on a business trip and stayed at the posh Sofitel Hotel in room 2806, the presidential suite. This is where, on May 14, 2011, the 62-year-old had a brief sexual encounter with a32-year-old housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, right before leaving to catch a scheduled flight.

Diallo, an illiterate immigrant from Guinea, quickly made the claim to hotel security, and then the police, that she was sexually assaulted. In response, NYPD swiftly arrested Straus-Kahn at JFK airport.

And thus begins the tumultuous journey to find out the truth of what actually happened in Room 2806.

Along the way DSK is charged with sexual assault, held in the notorious Rikers Island jail, resigns from the IMF and loses any chance of becoming the French president. In addition, both DSK and Diallo have their lives upturned, backgrounds scoured and are ultimately thoroughly humiliated in the press…and yet the truth still remains elusive.

Room 2806 is like a B-movie or dime store novel in that it is filled with a series of evermore-improbable twists and turns.

Conspiracy theories, not unfounded and not satisfactorily debunked, swirl around the case as French intelligence and their connections with Sarkozy and the Sofitel’s parent company, raise serious questions as to whether DSK was set-up.

There are also shocking revelations about both DSK and Diallo, which leave the viewer dismayed and disoriented, as neither protagonist can be trusted.

The well-paced series uses May 14, 2011, the date of the alleged sexual assault, as the epicenter of the story, but bounces forward and backward in time in an attempt to give more context.

This approach initially humanizes DSK, who, at times, comes across as an impressive and sympathetic figure in this real-life melodrama.

Despite his power and wealth, which usually protect people like him, DSK’s elite social status is instead an incentive for law enforcement and the media to be vicious towards him. As DSK’s licentious proclivities, both past and future, are exposed his friends and supporters claim he’s merely a libertine and lothario rather than a rapacious sexual predator, but that is far too generous an assessment. As the film reveals, DSK is a lecherous, licentious, lascivious and depraved degenerate who is a shameless slave to his own voracious ambitions and appetites.

Unsurprisingly, Daillo is sympathetic…at first. The narrative of the hard working, single parent immigrant preyed upon by an entitled and debauched elite is a compelling one. But there is something off about her…and those feelings of unease are backed up when she’s exposed as being a much more complicated and compromised character than originally portrayed.

As ultimately unlikeable as DSK and Diallo both are, this case attracts a collection of odious secondary characters like dung beetles to a manure pile.

Shakespeare once wrote, “first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”, and this insight is certainly applicable to the DSK case. His lawyers are, not surprisingly considering his enormous wealth and status, the very best in the business. Ben Brafman is one of the most talented and notorious lawyers in New York, and for the right price he quickly slithers to DSK’s defense with fork-tongued aplomb.

Diallo has a pair of lawyers as well, neither of which seem to have a brain between them, and they bend over backwards to aggrandize and embarrass themselves in the documentary.

Then there are the self-serving activists that use the awful case as a platform from which to shout their inanities. There is a black former NYPD officer who is now a race activist who does a cheap Al Sharpton impersonation and screams that Diallo is a victim of racism – even though that is a vacuous claim and there is explicit evidence to the contrary.

Feminists plant their protest flag on the dung heap as well. Some even suggest that the DSK case was the true beginning of the #MeToo movement. This seems a historically tenuous claim, but that is expected from vapid hysterics.

The events documented in Room 2806: The Accusation leave you feeling in despair for humanity and in need of a shower. It also leaves you believing DSK, Diallo, their lawyers, the cops and the parasitical activists, are all vile creatures that truly deserve the pronounced misery of each other’s company.

Little wonder that DSK, now an embittered 71-year-old forced into the shadows, has announced plans to release his own documentary next year, claiming the “time has come for me to speak out (something he declines to do in Room 2806), Is it likely to be more illuminating? I suspect it will simply throw another forkful or two on the steaming dung heap he created in the first place.

In the final analysis, wading through the muck and mire that is the DSK case by watching Room 2806: The Accusation, is at-times, an interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying one.

 A version of this this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A must-see new documentary that eviscerates the mainstream narrative on race in America and insightfully reveals the manipulations and machinations that distort modern-day race relations.

What Killed Michael Brown? is the most important documentary of the year. The film, which is exquisitely directed by Eli Steele and gloriously written and narrated by famed conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele, takes a deep dive into the tangled web of race in America through the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014.

From the get go the movie jumps out at you, not with cinematic bombast but with a subtle brilliance. The opening title sequence uses the same distinct font as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and by so doing lets viewers know it is unabashedly challenging popular myth.

This film is a searing, scintillating and staggering examination of race in America, but make no mistake, it is not some emotionalist screed or partisan polemic, it is a thoughtful, reasoned and measured commentary.

Shelby Steele, the film’s narrator, is armed with an impressive background in civil rights, a towering intellect and a monumental mastery of language, which allows him to confidently march viewers through the maze and minefield of race without ever misplacing a step.

Steele frames the American conflict over race as a battle between “poetic truth” and “objective truth”. Poetic truth is a distorted and partisan version of truth and is used by race hustlers and charlatans like Reverend Al Sharpton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, to paint Michael Brown as an innocent victim and noble martyr for the cause.

This poetic truth conflates present with the past, which results in the tragedy of Michael Brown being transformed into a continuation of slavery’s violence and Jim Crow era lynching by depraved whites.

Through this paradigm, Michael Brown becomes all black people, and all black people become Michael Brown.George Floyd

The establishment media and racial activists embrace this poetic truth because their objective is coercion, not reason.

This version of truth does two critically destructive things, it gives blacks an identity through victimization, and it gives whites a way to assuage their racial guilt.

As Steele explains in the film, “white guilt became black power”. This dynamic set up a vicious cycle where blacks use victimhood to exploit white guilt, and whites steal agency from blacks in order to assuage said guilt. Therefore the learned helplessness of blacks feeds the self-centered, narcissistic paternalism of whites and vice versa.

As Steele insightfully declares, “humans never use race except as a means to power…never an end, always a means. “ This is contrasted by the vision of Steele’s working class, minimally educated father who grew up under Jim Crow and fervently “favored character over race as a means to power.”

As seen in Ferguson in 2014 and in recent months all across America, racial anger has become ritualized and choreographed. Grievance is claimed without evidence and protest encouraged with no good faith it will lead to anything.

Whether it be Michael Brown, George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, these deaths are seen less as tragedies and more as opportunities.

The film highlights Al Sharpton as one of the more aggressive opportunists and as the epitome of the race grievance peddler. Reverend Al’s mendacious model is now used by Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who are just as intellectually and morally dubious as their duplicitous mentor.

Unlike the extraordinarily successful and morally impeccable civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which exposed its opponents as devoid of moral authority, BLM and Sharpton are themselves morally bankrupt.

As the film points out, none of these opportunists are interested in the development of black people or communities, but in “justice”, and their definition of “justice” is amorphous, ever expanding and rooted entirely in emotionalism and greed.

Steele uses the immigrant owned convenience store in Ferguson where the Michael Brown tragedy began, as proof of the absurdity of the demand for alleged “justice”.

The mob demands the store owners shut down for three days on the anniversary of Brown’s death as well as a whole host of other demands. The owners acquiesce, but it is never enough. Once one demand is fulfilled, a new and more egregious one sprouts up…until finally the mob is clamoring for the store owners to literally give away their store to protestors.

Besides the movie’s robust intellectualism, it is also exceedingly well made, and like its soulful and melancholy jazz soundtrack, never loses its pace or rhythm.

In a bizarre twist, considering the high quality filmmaking on display, Amazon first refused to allow What Killed Michael Brown? to run on its streaming service, claiming it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”.

It’s ironic that major corporations like Amazon are now emphasizing black artists but when those artists don’t toe the establishment line on race, they are told to sit at the back of the bus.

Thankfully, after much public pressure, Amazon has now relented and is allowing the film to stream for purchase on their service. But this is not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last time that mainstream gatekeepers try to silence truth tellers.

In conclusion, What Killed Michael Brown? is mandatory viewing because it is an intellectually vibrant, finely crafted piece of work that brazenly and bravely reveals the uncomfortable reality of race in America today. SEE IT NOW!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

America's Forgotten: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. The scathing but flawed documentary is worth seeing to challenge any pre-concieved notions on the subject of illegal immigration.

New Documentary ‘America’s Forgotten’ Tells the Illegal Immigration Story the Establishment Media Ignores

America’s Forgotten is a new documentary from filmmaker Namrata Singh Gurjal that exposes the fetid swamp that is illegal immigration into the U.S.

The film has been shunned by mainstream distributors (like Netflix) but has still generated a good deal of interest because Gurjal, an Indian immigrant and registered Democrat, takes direct aim at Joe Biden and Democrats for their immigration policies which she believes lead to catastrophe for illegal immigrants and chaos in America.

The film examines the complex topic through four personal stories. These narratives focus on Gurpreet – a little Indian girl who died trying to cross the Southern border, Maria, a Mexican woman who runs a gauntlet of extortion and rape to illegally immigrate, Sabine Durden-Coulter, whose adult son Dominic – a legal immigrant from Germany- is killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk driving accident, and Jonathan Decoster, a native born former Marine who lives on the streets of Los Angeles.

These four stories show that Americans are good people but that their “misplaced compassion” toward illegal immigrants leads to policies that actually increase illegal immigration – which is extremely dangerous for both the immigrants and America.

Politically and philosophically, the film is spot on and tells a forceful story that has been shamelessly blacklisted by the establishment media.

The movie exposes the fact that the only people who benefit from illegal immigration are coyotes, cartels and corporations. The coyotes exploit illegal immigrants for money, cartels smuggle people and drugs across the porous border and corporations gleefully profit from the immigrant’s cheap labor.

Those egregiously harmed by illegal immigration are the exploited immigrants themselves and the forgotten poor and working class in America.

The film reveals that, in contrast to common perception, illegal immigrants are often not the poor, tired and hungry running from persecution in third world nations, but rather are middle class foreigners paying $5,000 to $15,000 from Central America, $50,000 from Europe or Africa, and $50,000 - $75,000 from India, to chase the dream of a pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow.

One of the most interesting parts of the film though is about the Iraq war vet, Jonathan Decoster. The movie uses Decoster to tell the story of how immigration decimates the poor and working class here in America by diverting resources, lowering wages and eliminating opportunity. Decoster’s despair turns into opioid addiction and ironically, he heads to the Mexican border to find the lowest prices for heroin.

To the film’s credit it highlights some stunning and disturbing facts, such as at least one-third of female illegal immigrants will be sexually assaulted on their journey, and that by percentage non-citizens far outpace native citizens in terms of benefits they receive despite paying far fewer taxes.

America’s Forgotten doesn’t just expose the problem of illegal immigration but offers a solution. The film contends the blueprint for a safe and fair immigration system that works for both immigrants and natives is the Bracero Program, which was a guest worker program that thrived from the 1940’s until 1965.

That type of program seems to be a logical solution to the scourge of illegal immigration that harms American workers and immigrants alike, but emotion has long ago replaced logic on this polarizing and partisan issue.

And that leads to one of the things that bothered me about America’s Forgotten…emotionalism. The mainstream media deceives Americans by emotionally manipulating them regarding the illegal immigration issue. They tug on American heartstrings and Americans predictably react with “misplaced compassion”.

Unfortunately, America’s Forgotten uses the same tactic, exploiting the grief of Ms. Durden-Coulter, the pain of Maria and the despair of Jonathan Decoster, in order to make its points. That doesn’t mean those points are invalid, it just rubs the wrong way because whenever there is a naked appeal to emotion, there is also an appeal to discard reason.

I also struggled with the film’s participatory style, which is the same style Michael Moore uses to great affect. This results in director Gurjal being the movie’s protagonist, driving the story from her personal perspective. The problem with Gurjal is that her voice, which narrates the entire story, is grating and weak, and she simply isn’t a compelling or commanding enough presence to carry this urgent story.

Another problem is that the movie is very poorly produced. There are technical glitches throughout, most notably with the sound, that make it seem like an amateur endeavor, and frustratingly that undermines the film’s strong thesis.

At the beginning and end of America’s Forgotten, a message comes on the screen informing viewers that due to fear of political reprisals, the crew has all agreed to work anonymously. The members of the sound team certainly dodged a bullet on that one.

In truth, Gurjal and her crew are wise to fear reprisals, as the powers that be in Hollywood, including the malicious middle management class, are extremely partisan and relentlessly petty. I have no doubt that Gurjal’s Hollywood career is now essentially over before it ever really had a chance to begin.

In conclusion, if you want to see the illegal immigration story the media don’t want you to see, rent America’s Forgotten (available on Vimeo, SalemNow and iScreeningRoom). I’m not sure in our polarized political era it can change any minds, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t telling a very ugly truth.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020