95th Academy Awards: 2023 Oscar Predictions Post

It’s that time of year again!! The Oscars are here and I think I speak for everyone on the planet when I say…nobody gives a fuck!

It is a testament to how far the film industry and art of cinema has fallen in recent years that I find myself neither excited nor angered over this year’s Oscar nominations. No, my overwhelming sentiment regarding movies in general and the Oscars in particular is numbing indifference. I just don’t care anymore.

You see, my cinephile spirit has simply been broken under the weight of our cultures repeated cinematic failures. I’m one of those foolish people who demands excellence from cinema and refuses to soften my standards in order to indulge a commitment to mediocrity. This has resulted in my being a rather brutal cinematic curmudgeon for the past three years, which have been the worst three years of my movie-watching lifetime.  

Other critics have been all too eager to conform to the current times and adjust (lower) their standards. This is how we get fawning reviews of inconceivably atrocious shit like The Fabelmans and Top Gun: Maverick. Those movies are true embarrassments and it speaks to our decadent age – which is indicative of an empire in steep decay and decline, that they are held up as wondrous cinematic achievements.

To be clear, this past year was better than the previous year, but that’s sort of like being proud that you’re the tallest midget in the freak show.

What is so unnerving about the recent decline in cinema is that it was just four short years ago, in 2019, when cinema seemed to be in tremendous shape. That year we had a truly phenomenal film, Parasite, win Best Picture, beating out an array of interesting and well-made movies for the honor. Among them The Irishman, Joker, Ford v Ferrari, 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Any one of those film would be the run-away Best Picture winner this year.

But since the heights of 2019 we’ve been inundated with garbage. The low point being when Coda, an absolutely ridiculous, Hall Mark Channel level movie, won Best Picture last year.

The problem is not that bad movies win Oscars, that’s been going on time immemorial. No, the problem is that there’s no movies to get angry over for not having been recognized or honored. When Coda won last year, I just shrugged because I had no dog in the fight.

P.T. Anderson had a film, Licorice Pizza, competing against Coda, and he is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers so it would’ve been nice if he won but truthfully, Licorice Pizza wasn’t any good and I wasn’t going to pretend it was…so I didn’t care.

The same is true this year. There’s no movie that I think stands out that it would be a crime if it was overlooked.

Yes, I liked All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin, but I just liked them, not loved them. They are flawed but “enjoyable” movies, so I’m not going into Oscar night yearning for their recognition.

The ugly truth is that I am so indifferent to the Oscars this year, and have become so disenchanted with cinema, that I’m not even going to watch the ceremony, which will be a first for me in my adulthood. The reality is that I have much better things to do, sleep definitely among them, than watch a delusional industry give shitty movies awards for excellence.

That said, I will still fill out my Oscar picks and compete in my Oscar pool, which I have won for a record 34 years in a row. Will I continue my astonishing streak? Probably, but not because I have any clue who will win the awards but more because my competitors care even less than me so they have no clue.

Ok…so there’s my sad tale of disillusionment and disenchantment. Now let’s get on to my Oscar picks and put this terrible year in movies behind once and for all.

BEST PICTURE

Tar – A very flawed but fascinating character study that features the best scene of the year but also the worst third act.

The Fabelmans – An utter embarrassment of a movie. Is the cinematic equivalent of Spielberg soiling himself in public.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – A mildly interesting, pretty trite popcorn movie that has no business being nominated, nevermind the odds-on favorite.

All Quiet on the Western Front – A visually stirring anti-war epic when we need an anti-war epic most. Is the best made movie of the bunch.

Women Talking – This is a bad movie.

Triangle of Sadness – An ambitious and audacious social satire that is actually smarter than it appears at first glance.

Avatar the Way of Water – a big, blue billion-dollar behemoth that is almost instantly forgettable.

Top Gun Maverick – People’s love for this pile of poop astonishes me. It’s like people know it’s awful yet love it for its awfulness.

Elvis – An absurd piece of junk.

Banshees of Inisherin – A flawed but fascinating study of Irish masculinity.

This seems pretty set in stone…but I guess there’s a miniscule chance of an upset, which if it occurs would be All Quiet winning or maybe, maybe Tar.

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front/Banshees of Inisherin

Will Win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

BEST ACTOR

Austin Butler – Elvis – The kid is good as Elvis, really good. But it feels more like a lived-in imitation than a piece of acting.

Brendan Fraser – The Whale – The dirty little secret is that Fraser isn’t acting particularly well under that fat suit.

Colin Farrell – Banshees of Inisherin – Farrell has matured into a terrific actor and his work here is intricate and detailed.

Paul Mescal – Aftersun – I don’t get the hype over this kid.

Bill Nighy – Living – Nighy is great in general but I’ve not seen this movie.

This is one of the more up in the air awards of the night. A lot of people have Fraser winning but I just think there’s a ground swell for Austin Butler.

Should Win: Colin Farrell

Will Win: Austin Butler

BEST ACTRESS

Cate Blanchett – Tar – Blanchett is the best actress of her generation and absolutely crushes it in this movie.

Michelle Yeoh – EEAAO – She’s…fine.

Ana de Armas – Blonde – Starring in torture porn is tough work, but the reality is that Ana de Armas shouldn’t have been playing Marylin.

Andrea Riseborough – To Leslie – I like Andrea Riseborough but like the rest of the human race I’ve not seen this movie.

Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans – Williams is an at times pleasant actress but she is truly atrocious in The Fabelmans. This is bad. Really bad.

It seems the tide has turned against Blanchett and in favor of Yeoh. What can you do?

Should Win: Cate Blanchett

Will Win: Michelle Yeoh

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Brendan Gleeson – Banshees of Inisherin – Gleeson is an outstanding actor and he is terrific in this.

Barry Keoghan – Banshees – Keoghan is a little uneven in this role but he does bring it all together in the second best scene in the year in cinema.

Brian Tyree Henry – Causeway – This is a joke. This movie stunk and Henry wasn’t very good in it.

Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans – A bloated cameo of dubious quality.

Ke Huy Quan – EEAAO – I never thought Quan could be as good as he is in this movie. A really remarkable performance.

Should Win: Gleeson, Keoghan, Quan

Will Win: Quan

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Angela Bassett – Wakanda Forever – I don’t get it. This movie stinks and she is not good in it.

Hong Chau – The Whale – Another head-shaker…Chau was much better in The Menu than in this.

Kerry Condon – Banshees of Inisherin – A terrific and layered performance that perfectly captures the hell of Irish womanhood.

Jamie Lee Curtis – EEAAO – I actually really liked Curtis in this role.

Stephanie Hsu – EEAAO – I thought Hsu was ok.

It seemed like Angela Bassett was going to run away with it but the tide has turned in Jamie Lee’s favor.

Should Win: Kerry Condon

Will Win: Jamie Lee Curtis

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Banshees of Insherin – Terrific screenplay.

EEAAO – The film’s underlying philosophy is trite but it’s a sprawling story that eventually works.

The Fabelmans – This is junk. A dreadful script makes a dreadful movie.

Tar – A great forst two acts are scuttled by a rushed and unearned third act.

Triangle of Sadness – This script is fantastic.

This is sort of interesting as The Fabelmans may win because the Academy wants to reward Spielberg for his truly shitty autobiography. That said, I still think that EEAAO wins.

Should Win: Banshees of Inisherin

Will Win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

 ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

All Quiet on the Western Front – Not perfect but overall well executed.

Glass Onion – identical twins? Oh please. This script is dogshit.

Living – Haven’t seen it.

Top Gun Maverick – This is a joke.

Women Talking – Brutal.

The academy want to reward a woman and Sarah Polley fits the bill with her egregiously awful Woman Talking script.

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: Women Talking

BEST DIRECTOR

Martin McDonagh – Banshees of Inisherin – Nice to see McDonagh bounce back from the shit that was Three Billboards.

The Daniels – EEAAO – Not great but they somewhat pulled off an ambitious idea.

Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans – This movie stinks so bad it shocked me that Spielberg released it.

Todd Field – Tar – Well directed but loses its grip in the third act.

Ruben Ostland – Triangle of Sadness – Shockingly well directed movie that in lesser hands would’ve been an absolute mess.

Should Win: Martin McDonagh

Will Win: The Daniels

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM

All Quiet on the Western Front

Argentina, 1985

Close

EO

The Quiet Girl

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Puss in Boots

The Sea Beast

Seeing Red

Should Win: Pinocchio

Will Win: Pinocchio – This is a terrific movie, one of the best of the year.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

All That Breathes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Fire of Love

A House Made of Splinters

Navalny

Will Win: Navalny – Just feels like the academy will want to signal its virtue by thumbing their nose at the supposed Hitler du jour Vladimir Putin. How brave.

DOCUMENTARY SHORT

The Elephant Whisperers

Haulout

How Do You Measure a Year

The Martha Mitchell Effect

Stranger at the Gate

Will Win: Elephant Whisperers

LIVE ACTION SHORT

An irish Goodbye

Ivalu

Le pupille

Night Ride

The Red Suitcase

WILL WIN: Le pupille

ANIMATED SHORT

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

The Flying Sailor

Ice Merchants

My Year of Dicks

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Will Win: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

ORIGINAL SCORE

All Quiet on the Western Front

Babylon

The Banshees of Inisherin

EEAAO

The Fabelmans

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front – The score of this film is crucial in setting the ominous and unsettling mood.

ORIGINAL SONG

Applause – Tell it Like a Woman

Hold My Hand - Top Gun Maverick

Lift Me Up - Wakanda Forever

Naatu Naatu - RRR

This is Life - EEAAO

Will Win: Naatu Naatu

PRODUCTION DESIGN

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar The Way of Water

Babylon

Elvis

The Fabelmans

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: Elvis – This is the type of movie that the Oscars reward.

BEST SOUND

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar the Way of Water

The Batman

Elvis

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: Top Gun Maverick – This feels like the Academy throwing this fan favorite a bone.

 CINEMATOGRAPHY

All Quiet on the Western Front

Bardo

Elvis

Empire of Light

Tar

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front – Easily the best cinematography of the year.

COSTUME DESIGN

Babylon

Wakanda Forever

Elvis

EEAAO

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

Will Win: Elvis – There’s a chance that Wakanda Forever or Babylon win, but it seems like Elvis will do well in these types of categories.

MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLE

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Batman

Wakanda Forever

Elvis

The Whale

Will Win: Elvis – Wakanda Forever is a real possibility but again, Elvis is adored for stuff like this.

FILM EDITING

Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

EEAAO

Tar

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: EEAAO – I actually thought the editing (or lack thereof) was one of the worst parts of EEAAO, but what the hell do I know?

VISUAL EFFECTS

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar The Way of Water

The Batman

Wakanda Forever

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: Avatar the Way of Water – This is a bone thrown to big Jim Cameron for his money printing machine.

And thus concludes my Oscar picks. God willing every Oscar winner gets slapped on stage this year. If that happens then I promise I’ll actually watch the show next year. A man can dream.

©2023

Empire of Light: A Review - Empire Strikes Out

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a cavalcade of top-notch talent working on this film the end result is little more than a muddled mess of a movie.

Empire of Light, written and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes, attempts to tell the story of Hillary, a middle-aged woman struggling with mental illness who works at a seaside British cinema in 1980.

Empire of Light is the fourth, and thankfully final, film in what I call the Masturbatorial Manifesto Movie Quadrilogy of 2022. The other members of this awful foursome who made autobiographical, virtue signaling, ego/nostalgia driven films are Alejandro Inarritu with Bardo, James Gray with Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg with The Fabelmans. All of these films are navel-gazing, self-serving stories about their directors past lives, social justice issues and the magic of cinema.

Of these four films, Empire of Light, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, is the most astounding, but not because it’s good…it certainly isn’t, in fact it’s downright dreadful. No, Empire of Light is astounding because it brought together a remarkable collection of talented individuals and all they could collectively produce was this really, really lousy movie.

For example, the film boasts not only Oscar winner Sam Mendes as writer/director, but also Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins, as well as Oscar winning musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, not to mention Oscar winning actors Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. This very impressive group combined to make a most unimpressive movie.

The problems with Empire of Light are numerous but the most egregious of them is the script by Mendes, which is all over the map. Mendes obviously wanted to make a movie about his real-life mother’s struggle with mental illness, which he did, but, like his predecessors Inarritu, Gray and Spielberg, he also wanted to cram in as much politically-correct social commentary as he could about a variety of topics, the most obvious of which in this case are sexism and racism.

Sexism and racism are perfectly fine and often remarkably compelling topics to feature in a film but in Empire of Light they feel artificially added-on and inorganic and this distracts from what could have been a very interesting character study with the sublime Olivia Colman at its center.

Instead, we get a scattered, paper-thin story about a mentally-ill white woman who is sexually exploited by her boss and who learns that racism exists in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1980. How revelatory.

The racial angle in the film is so vapid and panders so aggressively as to be offensive. This racism narrative was so heavy-handed, so after-school special level unsophisticated, and so lacking in any nuance that it made me roll my eyes on numerous occasions to the point of near seizure.

Equally forced and lifeless is the love story between Hillary and her young black co-worker Stephen (Michael Ward). Ms. Colman is a marvelous actress and quite lovely but Michael Ward is a considerably younger and very handsome man and the pairing is never remotely believable nor well-explained. The two also lack chemistry and their relationship devoid of dynamism and this heightens the sense of their tryst being unbelievable, if not inconceivable.

Mendes, whose famous films include American Beauty, Road to Perdition and 1917, is a filmmaker I’ve never particularly enjoyed as I find him to be a middlebrow moviemaker masquerading as an arthouse auteur. Mendes comes from the theatre world and his movies often reflect that limitation as his scripts are too verbose and his stories too obvious, flat and literal.

On Empire of Light, Mendes gets lost in the throes of a victimhood narrative and social justice fantasy and ends up losing the vitality of what should be, but isn’t, the main thrust of the story, Hillary’s struggles.

Speaking of Hillary, Olivia Colman, who may be the best actress working right now, does excellent work in the role but is time and again undercut by the asinine script. Colman’s finest hour comes when Hillary loses grip on her mental health and dissolves into a raging madness that is visceral and combustible. But beyond that, Colman is too often stuck in an anemic narrative maze of Mendes’ making.

I’m a newcomer to Michael Ward, who plays Stephen, and found him to be a compelling and very pleasant screen presence, but he too is hamstrung by the clunky script and incessantly vapid cultural politics. Too often Stephen feels like little more than a black prop in a white woman’s journey to enlightenment on racial issues.

Colin Firth has a smaller role as the cinema’s manager Donald, and he does all the Colin Firth things you’d expect him to do, but he, like every other character in the film, never feels like a real person.

It must be said that the film is beautifully photographed, not surprising considering Roger Deakins is the cinematographer, but for all of Deakins’s coloring and camera wizardry, the film cannot be elevated.

As for Reznor and Ross’s soundtrack, it’s very reminiscent of their other stellar work but here it surprisingly underwhelms and feels a bit too derivative.

As a whole the film feels stridently antiseptic, allergic to drama, and relentlessly generic. For instance, the movie is set in the 1980’s and yet it never exploits that setting and fails to much look or feel like the 1980’s. It’s also set in a cinema and it fails to exploit that potentially dramatic setting as well as movies are never featured prominently or used effectively as a dramatic device. Truth be told the whole exercise is so devoid of any genuine place, people or purpose that it just feels very weird, dramatically disconnected and like a terrible waste of an opportunity.

Which brings us back again to Mendes’ script, which is also disconnected and disjointed to the point that it seems like nothing but a collection of random scenes and not a fully formed story.

The truth is that making a good movie, never mind a great one, is unconscionably difficult, and the fact that Oscar winning talents like Sam Mendes, Roger Deakins, Trent Reznor, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth all got together and made a piece of junk like Empire of Light, is proof of that. That Alejandro Inarritu, James Gray and Steven Spielberg all tried to make similar movies this past year and all fell flat on their faces too only further reinforces that fact.

Having seen all four of this year’s autobiographical ego/nostalgia movies, the most difficult thing to do is decide which one is the worst as they’re all truly terrible in their own special ways. Deciding which of these insipid movies is best is simply a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

In conclusion, Empire of Light is a messy, middling, misfire of a movie that you should skip entirely, just like Bardo, Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans.

Hopefully these navel-gazing, nostalgia-addicted auteurs have gotten their mindless Masturbatorial Manifesto Movies out of their systems so that we never have to see this type of shamelessly awful garbage again. These filmmakers are simply too good to waste their talents making such dull, derivative, sanctimonious, self-serving detritus as this.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin

On this spoiler-filled episode, Barry and I get our Irish up and declare our blood feud as we discuss Martin McDonagh's Academy Award Best Picture nominee The Banshees of Inisherin. Topics discussed include the joy of confidently made quality films, the glorious cast and the impressive recent rise of Colin Farrell, and the undeniable darkside of Irishness. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin

Thanks for listening!

©2023

The Whale: A Review - The Whale Beaches Itself on its Hyper-Theatricality

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. You’d be better off stuffing your pie-hole with guliver-expanding, artery-clogging garbage for two hours than watching this hyper-theatrical dud.

The Whale, written by Samuel D. Hunter (based upon his play of the same name) and directed by Darren Aronofsky, tells the story of Charlie, a morbidly obese online English professor suffering from congestive heart failure. The film stars Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards for his work as Charlie, with supporting turns from Hong Chau, Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton.

The Whale is a comeback movie of sorts for both Brendan Fraser, whose career careened into oblivion as he aged out of being the handsome guy some years back, and Darren Aronofsky, who was once one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation but who has stumbled in his last two cinematic outings with the abysmal duds Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).

The result of the comeback bid is a mixed bag as The Whale is a major disappointment of a film, and the blame for that lies squarely with Aronofsky and with Samuel Hunter’s script, but on the bright side, Brendan Fraser may just have rejuvenated his career with his sad sack, fat suit wearing performance in the movie.

I must say, I didn’t find anything cinematically redeeming in The Whale, not even Fraser’s performance, but I think Fraser has presented himself as a likeable person on the marketing and awards circuit and that may lead to future substantial work for him. Whether he’s up to the task in that work is certainly open for debate.

The Whale is a movie that yearns to be prestige but which is so theatrically written and executed that it feels like a very sub-par stage play from an overly confident, first-time playwrite you’d regret paying to see in some off-off-off Broadway hole in the wall.

The setting for the film is almost exclusively the dim confines of Charlie’s apartment. The action consists of his visitors, from his nurse Liz (Hing Chau), to a missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) to his long-lost daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), coming and going.

Due to Hunter’s cringe dialogue and Aronofsky’s stagey and/or laissez-faire direction, all of these actors give mannered and contrived performances. None of the characters they portray feel like real people, but rather like caricatures used solely as plot devices.

Sadie Sink is an actress I think has a very promising future, but her work as Ellie is so heightened and performative as to be distracting and laughable.

Hong Chau fares better than Sink but she too misses the mark with her incomprehensible Liz.

And Ty Simpkins’ character Thomas makes no sense and is a dramatic disaster, which is mostly due to the bad script but also aided by Simpkins’ tepid performance.

But the main failure on The Whale is Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky’s direction is so awkward, clumsy and inept as to be disheartening. If I saw one more scene where a character walked to the door, then stopped and turned around and made some declaration…or walked to the door, opened it, stepped out, then stopped, turned around and made some declaration…or if I saw one more scene where a character crossed “the stage” and the camera counter-crossed…I was going to binge eat carbs until I spontaneously combusted.

In addition to that artless, theatrical staging, Aronofsky’s choice to confine most, but not all, of the action in Charlie’s apartment, but not limit the film’s perspective to just Charlie, is a grating and self-defeating one.

For this type of black box, arthouse movie to succeed, in needed to be a laser focused character study examining Charlie and his experiences alone. Instead, Aronofsky gives us side stories and scenes between undeveloped characters that feel like filler and dramatic distractions. These side-scenes drain any dramatic momentum the sorry story ever generated.

Aronofsky is a filmmaker I’ve long rooted for and admired. After seeing his first two films, Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), I thought he really had a chance to be a special artist.

Even his third film, The Fountain (2006), which was a more ambitious project but which ultimately failed, contained much promise and kept my hope alive.

His fourth and fifth films, The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), seemed to indicate he had found his artistic groove and creative style with small budget, gritty character studies starring big name actors.

But then he went with a big budget project, Noah (2014), with Russell Crowe starring in the biblical epic. The result was a mammoth misfire both creatively and financially.

His follow up film was Mother! (2017), an ambitious and audacious meditation on humanity/horror story that was simultaneously too tightly and too loosely woven. Mother!, which was one of the more disorienting and aggravating movies in recent memory, was rightfully panned and flopped at the box office despite starring Jennifer Lawrence, who was maybe the biggest movie star in the world at the time.

And now we have The Whale. What is so disheartening about The Whale is not that it’s a misfire, but that it’s so poorly made as to be shocking. Aronofsky’s promising career has become as bloated and artistically unhealthy as the morbidly obese, compulsive eater Charlie. It’s difficult to imagine Aronofsky righting the ship after three cinematic disasters in a row, but who knows? I certainly hope he does, but I’m not optimistic.

As for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, he is…fine. Fraser has the requisite sad eyes to engender pity beneath his enormous fat suit, but beyond that he doesn’t really bring much to the table.

The thing that is lost amongst the recent Fraser renaissance, is that he was never a good actor to begin with. His claim to fame is playing empty-headed lugs and second-rate action-hero roles. He isn’t exactly Olivier, and this fact makes me think his sympathy-fueled comeback will be short-lived.

That said, he has a legit chance to win a Best Actor Oscar, and that should at least help him to make a living in the next couple of years. Does he deserve the award? Frankly…no. But most people who win Oscars don’t deserve them either…what can you do?

In conclusion, The Whale is another in an expanding list of recent sub-par Darren Aronofsky films as well as another in a gargantuan line of awful movies from 2022. I watched this movie so you don’t have to…and trust me, you really don’t have to.

©2023

Women Talking: A Review - Women Talking Has Nothing Interesting To Say

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly written script and ham-handed direction are the lowlights in this movie more interested in promoting its agenda than cultivating its drama.

The past year, a most dismal one in terms of cinema (and most everything else), gifted us two films with the least tantalizing titles since Freddie Got Fingered and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, with She Said and Women Talking.

Those titles conjure in the mind visions of nagging, navel-gazing shrews waxing rhapsodic about their sacred victimhood and pugilistically and pedantically pontificating about the inherent toxicity of masculinity. Not surprisingly, both films fervently live up to that expectation.

But that’s not all She Said and Women Talking have in common. Both were written, directed and star women. Both movies feature top-notch actresses. Both tell stories from a rigidly female perspective about abuse at the hands of men. Both movies are unabashed “agenda” films which emphasize ideology above artistry. And both films are Oscar-bait geared toward a very limited audience consisting of devout members of the #MeToo/neo-feminist cult who unquestioningly adore the film’s trite cultural/political ideology.

Unfortunately, what the two films also have in common is that regardless of their cultural/political messaging, they are truly abysmal cinematic works. To be fair, Women Talking is the better of the two movies, but that isn’t saying much as She Said is a cataclysmically awful movie.

Women Talking, which is written and directed by Sarah Polley and is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, tells the story of the women in an isolated Mennonite community secretly meeting to discuss the sexual abuse they’ve all endured over the years at the hands of the community’s men, and what to do about it.

The women believe their three options are to do nothing, stay and fight or leave the community en masse. They argue the pros and cons of each position and then vote. The vote ends up in a tie…so we are subjected to even more debate.

The film, which is nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and is not yet available on a streaming service, stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jesse Buckley and Frances McDormand among many others, and each of them play characters that are supposed to embody various feminine archetypes in this struggle.

Rooney Mara’s Ona, is a wise waif, gentle and spiritual. Claire Foy’s Salome is a mama bear. Jessie Buckley’s Mariche is the battered realist fueled by frustration and ferocity. Frances McDormand’s Janz is the withered veteran too old and bitter to envision a better future.

All of these women are terrific actresses, and yet, none of them give even remotely decent performances or are in the least believable in this film due to the extremely sub-par script, the result of which is that you don’t care about any of these characters.

The dialogue is painfully contrived, and feels like it’s nothing but a collection of ‘look-at-me-acting’ audition speeches totally devoid of genuine intent or believable context.

Another issue is that these characters, all of whom are illiterate, are somehow able to talk with the philosophical fluency of second-year Women’s Studies majors at Bryn Mawr, which makes suspension of disbelief a monumental hurdle to overcome.

None of the characters are dramatically consistent either as they fluctuate between their beliefs like Kardashians shopping for shoes. There’s also no actual confrontation or conflagration during this important debate, just staged, rather showy but decidedly flaccid speeches followed by petulant walking away or a clamoring of voices silenced by one sole voice rising above the din. I guess this is supposed to show that women aren’t aggressive and therefore are superior to men, but all it really shows is that drama is dead with no genuine conflict.

It's also rather odd considering the film is about a group of women in a religious community, that the notions of God and religion are conspicuously absent most of the time and on the rare occasion they are mentioned are quickly brushed aside. The religious aspect of this debate among the women should be the most powerful and imposing element, but writer/director Sarah Polley, who is an atheist, imposes her notion of religion as entirely irrelevant onto the proceedings.  

Director Polley is a critical darling for a variety of reasons, but her work on Women Talking exposes her as quite the cinematic charlatan. Critics fawned over her films Away from Her (2006)and Take This Waltz (2011) despite both films being second and third-rate, self-indulgent exercises. Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell (2012) is a much more interesting piece of work but it too is also saddled with a relentless self-indulgence that reduces its power.

The main criticism voiced by the few critics who dare speak against Women Talking is that it’s visually not vibrant. It’s true that Luc Montpellier’s cinematography uses a desaturated and very muted visual style some find ugly, but I thought it was beautiful in its own stark way. And I actually found this visual approach to be the most interesting thing about the film because it was a coherent choice to reflect the setting and sub-text of the drama.

That said, this movie pushes the boundaries of reality with a plot point that includes one of the longest “golden hours” (which means the time after the sun sets but the sky is still bright enough to shoot a movie) in living memory.

As for Polley’s script and her direction, it is egregiously theatrical in style and is so lacking in subtlety and so heavy-handed that it ultimately feels like nothing more than a cheap agenda movie that only cares about its politics and not its drama.

A major example of this is that there is a trans character inserted into the film that is completely superfluous and does nothing but distract from the drama and narrative. This character, a female to male trans person, is so traumatized by the sexual abuse she suffers that she becomes not only a man named Melvin, but mute to boot. Although that sounds like a joke, I’m not kidding. What makes it even funnier than a trans man who is mute by choice is that Melvin is only mute with adults, but speaks freely with kids…and then with adults when necessary. Look, if you’re gonna have a mute trans man in a movie, for drama’s sake you got to commit to the muteness full-time, not have them be half-mute or mute by convenience. The preceding is a sentence I never in my wildest dreams imagined I’d ever write…welcome to post-modern America.  

Another example of the film’s skewed storytelling and perspective is that there is one single, solitary man in the whole movie, and his name is August and he is played by Ben Whishaw. August is such a weepy, whiny, weak-kneed eunuch as to be astounding if not embarrassing. August isn’t just anti-toxic-masculinity, he is allergic to all masculinity to the point of absurdist comedy. That August’s presence is just another piece of political theatre meant to satiate the man-hating in the audience by showing them that even anti-toxic men are repulsive, is obvious.

The irony of this man-hating is that Melvin, the trans-man, is not considered to be a “real-man” and is lumped in with the women by all the women, which no doubt will infuriate some of the more strident of the politically-correct, JK Rowling-hating, realism-averse viewers…such is the peril of incessant box-checking when making a movie.

What is so grating is that the endless, mindless, feminist pablum spewed in this movie isn’t insightful, it isn’t revelatory and it isn’t dramatically compelling. It is contrived, manufactured, phony cultural posing that might have been topical and/or interesting in 1992…maybe.

This type of sub-par, propagandistic liberal/feminist agenda movie is no different than those atrocious bullshit conservative agenda movies like the ridiculous Kirk Cameron “Jesus is Real!” pieces of garbage, or 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, or the shitty Chris Kyle hagiography American Sniper.

These are all bad movies and just because you like their politics doesn’t make them good. Of course, critics and the Academy Awards agree with the politics of Women Talking so they turn a blind eye to the poor writing, directing and acting and mute their criticism in order to signal their virtue and tribal affiliation. I am under no such obligation. I made my bones savaging shitty movies from across the political spectrum, and Women Talking is a shitty movie that thinks it’s brave and courageous for placing a well-worn flag on top of a secured hill in friendly territory in the forever culture war.

The bottom line is that Women Talking, or as I prefer to call it The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Mennonite Sisterhood or The Mennonite Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, is a dramatically dull, dreadfully amateurish movie that feels like every suburban high school stage play defiantly put on by the school’s drama-nerd girl group. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a shallow, adolescent, emotionalist, feminist rant from a fragile fool who thinks they’re a courageous hero because they wear an “I’m with Her” oversized t-shirt with Lululemon leggings.

The truth is that Women Talking should’ve taken trans Melvin’s approach and just stopped talking because it had absolutely nothing interesting or original to say.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 93: The Fabelmans

On this episode, Barry and I put on see-through nightgowns and dance poorly in the glow of a campfire and car headlights as we break down Steven Spielberg's Oscar nominated, autobiographical movie The Fabelmans. Topics discussed include the perils of autobiography, the Oscars and the abysmal year in movies, and Spielberg's shocking cinematic decline.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 93: The Fabelmans

Thanks for listening!

©2023

The Fabelmans: A Review - The Naked Truth Is That Emperor Spielberg Has No Clothes

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terrible, self-indulgent, truly awful film that features poor performances, an abysmal script, and dreadful direction.

This past year has been a boon for self-indulgent film directors and a bane for movie audiences, as auteurs have shat out a bevy of sub-par autobiographical movies about their childhoods and the magic of cinema.

First there was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s atrocious Bardo, followed quickly by James Gray’s artistically anemic Armageddon Time, and then there was Sam Mendes’ universally panned Empire of Light (which, to be fair, is less blatantly autobiographical), and finally there is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

I’ve seen all of the above except for Empire of Light. What has been alarming is that each of these films I have seen has gotten progressively worse than the one I saw before it. Armageddon Time is shlocky, politically correct garbage, but Bardo is simply an astonishing cinematic atrocity. Bardo is supremely awful, but it’s at least visually and narratively ambitious if not audacious, which is in stark contrast to Spielberg’s newest flatulent film The Fabelmans.

The Fabelmans describes itself as a coming-of-age drama, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, that chronicles aspiring filmmaker Sam Fabelman (a stand in for Spielberg), a precocious young man in love with moviemaking, as he navigates his childhood and teen years growing up with a scientific father, Burt, and an artistic mother, Mitzi.

The Fabelmans is easily the worst of the Spielberg’s late-stage movies, which is quite an accomplishment considering the garbage he’s churned out over the last twenty years or so. This film is, quite frankly, so bad as to be an utter embarrassment. I watched a screener of the movie with my wife and we laughed out loud numerous times AT the movie, but never with it. The movie is such an amateurish, after-school special level production that we literally stopped it on multiple occasions and turned to each other and asked “what the fuck?”

At one point in the film, aspiring director Sam Fabelman is watching the footage of a movie he’s shot with his Boy Scout troop, and he shakes his head and mutters to himself in disappointment, “Fake. Totally fake.” Too bad Spielberg didn’t have the same discerning eye at 76 that he did when he was 14 as The Fabelmans rings so egregiously phony that I actually pondered “how could Spielberg watch this and agree to release it?”

There are so many scenes and sequences in this movie that are simply mindboggling for how appallingly awful they are. Just when you think the worst scene is behind you a new cinematic and dramatic atrocity steps in to take its place.

There’s the dinner scene which is staged and acted like the worst high school play you’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. Then there’s the masturbatorial scenes where audiences of Boy Scouts and family are overly amazed to the point of ecstasy at Sam Fabelman’s “brilliant” movies that aren’t brilliant. And then there’s the ultimate cringe worthy scene where Mitzi Fabelman does her best Corky St. Clair “Penny for your Thoughts” from Waiting for Guffman imitation as she “dances” in a see-through nightgown in front of a campfire and car headlights while on a camping trip.

Then there’s the scene where Sam edits the footage of this camping trip and discovers a family “secret”, which is shot like it’s from a bad pre-teen show on Disney Channel. Then there’s the scene where family friend Benny gives a camera to Sam as a going away present, which is staged with all the grace of monkeys having a shit fight at the zoo. Then there’s the scenes of gay, neo-Nazi, Schindler’s List wannabe, anti-Semites who bully Sam in high school which all feel like they’re from the worst episode of Happy Days you’ve ever seen. And on and on and on.

There is literally only one scene in the entire film which crackles with any life or dynamism, and that’s the last scene of the movie. This exuberant scene only goes to remind how badly mismanaged the dismal and dull preceding two-hours and thirty-minutes truly were.

Spielberg has always been addled by his addiction to a saccharine sentimentality, and The Fabelmans is no exception, except here the sentimentality is, to reference another Christopher Guest movie, turned all the way up to 11. Unfortunately, this sentimentality has blinded Spielberg to the stark lack of craftsmanship across the board in this movie.

John Williams score and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are banal, underwhelming and shockingly second-rate. Tony Kushner’s (and Spielberg’s) script is so inelegant and so lacking in cohesiveness and humanity, as to be cinematic malpractice.

Speaking of cinematic malpractice, there’s a scene in the film where Judd Hirsch, who compellingly plays a sort of crazy-genius grand-uncle, is spewing contrived pieces of wisdom to young Sammy Fabelman, and yet throughout the scene you can see his mic pack bulging through his wife beater t-shirt. This is a $40 million movie, not some $1,200 student film…how the hell does that level of shoddiness make it to the screen?

The performances are just as abominable as the rest of the work on the film.

Michelle Williams is an actress I like, but her Mitzi, featuring a haircut from hell, is one of the most hollow, disingenuous and grating pieces of acting I’ve witnessed in recent years. Everything is so mannered and so contrived that it feels like watching a toddler ham it up in grandma’s clothes to entertain the family after rowdy Thanksgiving dinner.

Paul Dano is an actor I greatly admire, but his performance in The Fabelmans is so vacuous and devoid of any inner life or intention as to be remarkable. Dano is dead-eyed as he mechanically utters his lines like he’s auditioning for a job at either a wax museum or a mausoleum.

And just when you thought the acting couldn’t get any worse…Seth Rogan shows up. Good lord. Seth Rogan is to acting what a dirty diaper is to ambience.

On top of all the bad acting, every character is extremely unlikable (the same is true in Armageddon Time and Bardo…why are director’s families so repulsive?). Early in the film, Mitzi, for some incoherent reason, drives the family towards a tornado and all I could do was hope that they would all be thrown miles away and end up a red stain on the dashboard. Once that didn’t happen, I was left praying for a pack of coyotes to come along and maul them all in their sleep, or a gas leak or a septic tank explosion, to take them out and put me out of my misery.

There’s also a very strange and frankly very ugly strain of anti-Christian sentiment that rears its head about two thirds of the way through the film. I’m not someone who ever cares about this sort of thing but Spielberg goes out of his way to demean and belittle a Christian character in the movie, and explicitly mock her religion. The treatment of this girl and her Christianity is nasty and mean-spirited and totally out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. It’s the equivalent of what the gay Neo-Nazi anti-Semites do to the Sam Fabelman character when they call him ‘Bagelman’ and demand he apologize for killing Christ. In other words, it isn’t clever or insightful or amusing, it’s just vicious and small-minded. That Spielberg, who is allegedly a man of faith (he’s made quite a show of his connection to Judaism over the years), would demean, disparage and denigrate the lone character of a differing faith in his film and gleefully embrace this repellent but culturally acceptable prejudice, speaks volumes about his lack of character.

The Fabelmans has been a major box office flop, as it has only made $25 million against a $40 million budget. But Spielberg didn’t make this movie to make money, he made it to win an Oscar….and he might just succeed.

It's a testament to Spielberg’s iron grip on Hollywood that this movie, this dreadful, no-good, really bad movie, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Spielberg’s power over Hollywood and the lack of intellectual integrity among critics, also accounts for why the movie is adored by most critics (92% critical score Rotten Tomatoes). But don’t be fooled by the vacuous opinions of these sycophants and philistines.

The reality is that the once great Emperor Spielberg, who gave us cinematic marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, has no clothes.

The naked truth for all to see but few will admit, is that The Fabelmans is an embarrassing and humiliating failure of a film. To claim otherwise is either dishonest, delusional, or both.

©2023

Avatar: The Way of Water - A Review - Blue is the Dullest Color

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An underwhelming, unneeded sequel that is just as forgettable as the original. It’s time to close Pandora’s box.

One need to look no further than the box office and Oscar ballot to understand why we are doomed as a nation, a civilization, and a species.

In the last year, two movies dominated that speak volumes about the monumental moronity of the masses. First there was Top Gun: Maverick, a hellaciously stupid, completely unnecessary, thirty-five years too late, second-rate sequel to the gay-themed, feature film Pentagon commercial that was the original Top Gun (1986). Maverick has made over a billion dollars since it premiered in May of 2022 and just got nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.  

And there’s also Avatar: The Way of Water, a ten-years too late sequel to a movie everyone saw but nobody remembers – Avatar (2011). The Way of Water is a three-hour and fifteen-minute middling monstrosity that has made over two billion dollars at the box office and also been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

After going to the movie theatre to see Maverick like a sucker, I promised myself I wouldn’t do the same for The Way of Water. I figured if writer/director James Cameron wanted to vomit out retreads of his immensely uninteresting Avatar world onto to audiences for the rest of his career, he could do it without my twenty bucks.

But since I am a tremendous big shot in Hollywood, I recently got a screener of The Way of Water and in service to you dear reader, I decided to watch it and review it.

To give context to my thoughts on The Way of Water, let me just briefly recap my feelings on the original Avatar. Basically, I thought it was an instantly forgettable, painfully dull venture that was dreadfully written and looked like a high-end videogame. I never watched it again after seeing it in the theatre, and never thought about it and never had any interest in a sequel.

Which brings us to…the sequel.

Avatar: The Way of Water is even more dreadfully written, even more forgettable and an even more dull movie than the original. It is a putrid and puerile piece of pissant moviemaking that serves no purpose whatsoever.

Unlike say the money printing machines that are the Star Wars or Marvel movies, Avatar has no compelling underlying mythology that can enrich and elevate its pedestrian story. Instead the film franchise attempts to satiate the viewer’s need for psychologically rich archetypes and mythology with vapid, vacuous, trite and insipid American cultural politics.

Speaking of the story, the plot of The Way of Water is as flaccid as the one in the original Avatar. On the planet Pandora (not to be confused with the music streaming service), Jake Sully, a former disabled human Marine and current Na’vi leader, husband and father, must protect his Na’vi family from the evil of human militarism and colonialism.

Sully’s old Marine unit was wiped out in the original Avatar – don’t worry I didn’t remember that either, but all are back now with their consciousness implanted into newly lab-grown Na’vi. So all those old, completely forgettable characters you didn’t remember from the original are back!!

In order to protect his family, which consists of his wife, two teenage boys, one teenage girl, and a younger kid whose gender I cannot for the life of me remember, Sully takes them away from the Omatikaya - forest Na’vi, and to the Metkayina - water Na’vi.

The movie is mostly a teen angst drama revolving around the struggles of the Sully kids to fit in with the water Na’vi, surrounded by predictable battle scenes between good guys and bad guys.

Here’s the thing, The Way of Water is like every bad teenage angst movie ever made, but cliched characters speaking bad dialogue don’t magically become interesting just because their skin is blue. And make no mistake, teenagers are no less annoying when they’re blue either.

The movie at one point feels like Blue Rebel Without a Cause, with Sully’s middle son Lo’ak as bargain basement James Dean and a four eyed whale as Sal Mineo’s Plato.

The movie has lots of scenes of laughing at people trying to learn new skills, like when the Metkayina teens mock the Sully kids for struggling to learn how-to-live in water, and when Spider – a human child raised by the Na’vi, laughs at the reincarnated Marine Colonel now trying to live in his new Na’vi body. Everybody laughs except for those watching.

Speaking of Spider, he’s like every dreadlock wearing white kid who thinks he’s black, as well as every skateboarding douchebag who thinks he’s interesting and tough. To say that Spider is the most annoying and embarrassing character to hit the big screen in ages would be a massive understatement.

As for the women in The Way of Water…they are all Na’vi and they are all repellant, hyper-emotionalist shrews of the highest order. If I wanted to spend hours on end with grating hags, I would’ve stayed married to my first, second or fourth wife (FYI…my third wife, Barbarella, was an angel…who unfortunately died from injuries sustained in a freak pole dancing accident - RIP).

The cast of The Way of Water, which include Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet and Stephen Lang are tough to judge because they’re basically animated blue beings. No one sounds very believable or anything, but acting in CGI isn’t exactly easy.

Edie Falco, plays General Ardmore, one of the few actual human characters, and as much as I love Edie Falco and respect her as an actress, she is actively awful in this movie.

Jack Champion, who plays Spider, is just atrocious as well.

As for the most important part of The Way of Water…how it looks…I have to say that it looks…fine. Granted, I didn’t see it on the big screen and watched a digital screener on my rather big tv, so my opinion on the visuals is to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt. I will say this though, a movie having nothing going for it except that it looks like a fantastically high-end video game, is not a very strong argument that it’s a good movie.

The bottom line is that Avatar: The Way of Water is a very long, very boring and banal, very derivative and dull cinematic venture. James Cameron has made some great, and I mean great, movies. Both Terminator films are absolutely fantastic, and Aliens (1986), True Lies and even The Abyss, are flawed but exceedingly well-made, entertaining films. That said, Cameron will no doubt make a bazillion dollars with his Avatar franchise, but he won’t make anything artistically or cinematically worthwhile, which is a shame and feels like a waste of his talents.

Which brings me to my final point. Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, are two movies that aren’t original and aren’t good, and yet they’ve dominated the culture for the last year. The fact that there are people out there who think these movies are awesome is a strong indicator that America is a country and empire is steep and steady decline.

Culture is the canary in the coalmine, and with Maverick and The Way of Water, that poor son of a bitch of a bird is down in the darkness, flat on his back in the muck and the mire, wheezing his last bitter breath.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 92 - Oscar Nominations

On this episode Barry and I share our thoughts on this year's Oscar nominations. Topics discussed include the sorry state of the Oscars which reflects the sorry state of cinema, and the underwhelming nominations in an underwhelming year. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 92 - Oscar Nominations

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Bardo, False Chroncile of a Handful of Truths: A Review - Inarritu's Head Up Inarritu's Ass

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent…not to mention pretentious, piece of crap.

In case you’d forgotten, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has won two Best Director Academy Awards – for Birdman and The Revenant, which puts him in some very rarified air. To put into context, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have one Best Directing Oscar each, and Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman have none.

I readily admit that I enjoyed Birdman (2014) and thought it was clever, and in hindsight its critique of superhero culture was spot-on and before its time, but I also thought the film badly bungled its ending.

I thought The Revenant (2015) was a flawed film but was deeper than it appeared on the surface and became much more interesting when seen through Jungian dream analysis rather than through the pop culture lens.

Except for those two films, Inarritu’s filmography is littered with some truly abysmal and pretentious pieces of work. For example, Inarritu’s 2006 shlockfest Babel may be the worst ‘taken seriously’ movie of the 21st Century…and its main competition is another Inarritu movie, 2003’s 21 Grams.

Which brings us to Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, Inarritu’s newest cinematic venture, which is currently streaming on Netflix.

Bardo, which was a Netflix production and hit the streaming service October 27th, was written and directed by Inarritu and stars Daniel Giminez Cacho and Griselda Siciliani.

The movie, which describes itself as an epic black comedy-drama, is a fictional, pseudo-autobiographical story that chronicles Silverio Gama – a sort of stand in for Inarritu himself, as he navigates his life as a big-time journalist and documentarian who immigrated from Mexico to the U.S.

Gama wrestles with his career success, his critics, his artistry, his family, his grief, and his past, as well as the past of Mexico and his guilt over having left the country of his birth. Of course, these are all the same things with which Inarritu grapples.

Bardo, which runs two hours and forty minutes, is another in a bevy of films this year made by auteurs examining their own lives in feature films. For example, I recently reviewed Armageddon Time, James Gray’s dismal autobiographical effort, and I’ve yet to see Spielberg’s The Fabelmans or Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light.

I will say this about The Fabelmans and Empire of Light…it is absolutely impossible for them to be worse than Bardo. Bardo is bad-o. Really bad-o. Like excruciatingly bad-o. Like so bad it makes the awful Armageddon Time feel like Citizen Kane.

Bardo, which has a grueling two-hour and forty-minute run time, is somewhat remarkable as it’s simultaneously self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, self-righteous, and self-indulgent.

The problem with Bardo is not cinematic incompetence on the part of Inarritu. If Inarritu is anything it’s competent. He knows how to shoot a film and make beautiful images – and he’s aided in this effort by cinematographer Darius Khondji (who…curiously, also shot Armageddon Time – poor bastard). What Inarritu doesn’t know how to do is turn off his ego and turn down his adolescent maudlin impulses in order to tell a coherent and compelling story.

Bardo is supposed to be infused with magical realism but is devoid of magic and allergic to realism. In their stead Inarritu injects an extraordinary lack of subtlety and pronounced heavy-handedness as well as a steaming hot serving of middlebrow bourgeois bullshit philosophy.

This movie is, without exaggeration, literally a director bitching about how persecuted he is by critics, how envied he is by jealous less successful people, and imagining how devastated everyone will be when he dies. This is more akin to something a petulant teenager would dream up as they cry in their bedroom after their parents refused to buy them a sports car for their sixteenth birthday than something an adult filmmaker should put in a feature.

To give you an indication of what an absolute shitshow Bardo is, consider this…the film features a graphic scene where a baby is literally pushed back into a vagina, and another scene where Gama’s adult face is CGI’d onto a little kid as he has a discussion with his father in a sort of dream like sequence. Did I mention it was heavy-handed? Yikes!

In addition to all of that self-serving navel gazing, Inarritu also throws colonialism and anti-Mexican racism shit against the wall to see if any of it sticks…and none of it does.

Then there’s the virtuoso filmmaking stuff, like the extended, one-shot dance scene, which I was supposed to be impressed by but which I wasn’t impressed by.

What’s astonishing about Bardo is that Inarritu has made himself the hero of the story but only succeeds in exposing himself as being relentlessly unlikable. The Inarritu character Gama is one of the most punchable people to have graced the silver screen this year, and maybe this decade.

Even the film’s more interesting visual sequences, like when people start dropping dead in Mexico City, is derivative. I saw the same sequence done better in a Radiohead music video nearly thirty years ago.

Speaking of derivative, it seems to me that with Bardo Inarritu was trying to copy/emulate his fellow Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron’s film Roma (2018), and maybe even Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups (2015). Roma is a brilliant, magical realist, autobiographical story about growing up in Mexico, and Knight of Cups is, in my opinion, a dreamlike masterpiece about navigating the hell of Hollywood and moviemaking.

The problem though is that Inarritu is no Cuaron and no Malick. He lacks their deftness, their depth and their profundity. Inarritu is an artistic poseur. A pretentious pretender who thinks cinematically pouting and preening is equivalent to being profound.

What is bothersome about Inarritu’s failure on Bardo is that we are witnessing the end of the auteur era at Netflix. The streaming giant in recent years made the decision to throw money at auteurs and let them do what they want. In the case of Cuaron, David Fincher and Martin Scorsese, that decision was cinematically fruitful as it gave us Roma, Mank and The Irishman. This year the two auteurs blessed by Netflix’s desire for prestige were Noah Baumbach and Inarritu, and they delivered the excrement filled dump-trucks that were White Noise and Bardo. It should not be a shock that Netflix announced this year that they will no longer throw money at auteurs…thanks Baumbach and Inarritu.

The bottom line is that Bardo may finally expose Inarritu for the philosophically trite filmmaking fraud that he is. His elevation to the heights of Hollywood success is more a testament to the buffoonery of the movie business than to the artistic genius of Inarritu.

Whatever one may think of Inarritu as a filmmaker, there is simply no denying that Bardo is an artistic catastrophe of epic proportions. This movie is nothing but a vacuous, vapid and vain exercise in cinematic masturbation. Avoid it at all costs.

©2023

Armageddon Time: A Review - Portrait of the Artist as a Stupid and Boring Child

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.  A sanctimonious, self-pitying and tedious tale of childhood turmoil in 1980’s New York. Move along, absolutely nothing worthwhile to see here.

There has been a spate of semi-autobiographical films this year where filmmakers navel-gaze and examine not only their childhood and how they ended up behind the camera, but also the “magic of cinema”.

There’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Bardo, Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, to a lesser degree Sam Mendes’ Empire of Light, and finally James Gray’s Armageddon Time.

Of these four I’ve only seen Bardo (I’ve yet to publish my review) and now Armageddon Time, but I can report that thus far this genre of film is proving itself to be a calamitous cavalcade of cinematic crap.

Armageddon Time, which was released in October to dismal box office returns, is not only directed but also written by James Gray. While I respect James Gray as a visual artist, his movies have always been more miss than hit for me. I find his films, which include Little Odessa, The Yard, We Own the Night, Two Lovers, The Immigrant, and Lost City of Z, to be beautiful and tantalizing but mostly noble failures that never quite coalesce. The notable exception being 2019’s Ad Astra, which I thought was a truly stunning and insightful piece of work. Unfortunately, Armageddon Time is anything but stunning and insightful. I would in fact, put Armageddon Time at the very bottom of the list when judging Gray’s filmography.  

The autobiographical movie tells the story of Paul Graff (a stand in for Gray) and his tumultuous Autumn of 1980 when he attends sixth grade in a public school in Queens, New York. Paul’s family is working-class Jewish with plumber father Irving (Jeremy Strong), PTA mother Esther (Anne Hathaway), and annoying older brother, Ted, who attends a tawny private school. Paul also has his maternal grandparents, most notably his immigrant grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), with whom he is particularly close.

Paul befriends a black student in his class, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), when they are both punished by their obnoxious teacher Mr. Turkeltaub. Johnny is being raised in poverty by his dementia-addled grandmother, and is doing sixth-grade for the second time. Mr. Turkeltaub has a particular dislike for Johnny and is harsher on him than on Paul.

The story goes from there as Paul and Johnny get into all sorts of trouble at school, and Paul navigates the consequences back home.

Armageddon Time, which is currently available on Video-on-Demand (I paid $5.99), is an interminably slow, sluggish, self-indulgent and self-pitying exercise in virtue signaling that rings hollow, phony and false on nearly every level.

The acting, with the notable exception of the magnificent Anthony Hopkins, is abysmal. Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong give cringe-worthy, Borscht Belt level performances as Paul’s parents.

The child actors, Banks Repeta as Paul and Jaylin Webb as Johnny, are tough to take, and certainly make the hour and fifty-five-minute runtime feel at least twice that long. Repeta’s Paul is completely unlikable and being in his presence for the length of the film is a struggle. To be fair to Repeta and Webb, their characters are so poorly written that asking them to fill them out seems unfair. Webb in particular is given short-shrift, as Johnny is reduced to the sort of one-dimensional, sad-sack, black martyr/messiah stereotype that is both dreadfully dull and diabolically dehumanizing.

Hopkins is the only actor who gives a grounded performance and generates a character that seems like a real person. His Aaron is like a supernova shining brilliantly as it enters its final stage of life. Hopkins ability to elevate material, and to give poorly written characters a deep and compelling inner-life, is remarkable.

One of the biggest problems with Armageddon Time is that its politics, which are decidedly neo-liberal and Manichean, are relentlessly heavy-handed, trite and vacuous, not to mention omnipresent.

For example, there’s a whole secondary story line involving…God help us… the Trump family, with the loathsome Fred Trump (the Donald’s father) front and center, that is so ridiculously ham-fisted that every time it rears its ugly head it feels like the Evel Knievel over Snake Canyon of shark jumps.

The film’s racial politics are equally bromidic, as they’re so paternalistic and condescending as to be offensive. Ultimately the film and its racial politics ends up being little more than a testament to the fact that an artist’s white guilt is an insidious, narcissistic cancer that generates egregiously insipid and vapid art.

The movie is so patronizing and supercilious it’s like a multi-million-dollar colonial style home in a tawny, minority-free neighborhood that has a “Black Lives Matter” sign in its impeccably-landscaped-by-underpaid-Mexican-illegal-immigrants front lawn.

Gray is Jewish, which is why it’s so confusing that he makes viewers feel like a bored parish priest listening to his confession about other people’s impure racial thoughts.

James Gray went to USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, one of the most prestigious and elitist film schools in the world, made his first feature at age 25, and has had a stellar career working with great actors despite rarely having a hit, it seems that he got everything he ever wanted…so the question becomes…why all the masturbatorial bitching?

The reality is that the artist is never as interesting as his art, or as interesting as he thinks he is…which is why Armageddon Time feels more like a misguided tantrum from a spoiled child grown old than a piece of introspective cinematic art from an artist trying to understand himself.

The bottom line is that Armageddon Time is so sanctimonious and self-pitying, not to mention boring, banal and bland, that it will make you yearn for an actual Armageddon to put you out of your misery. Save your time and your money and skip this tedious tale.

©2023

She Said: A Review - Agenda is No Subsitute for Drama

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This absolutely awful, dreadfully dull, banal bore of a film is a muddled misfire.

I missed seeing She Said, the story of how New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey exposed the Harvey Weinstein scandal, when it premiered in theatres this past November. I wasn’t the only one not to see it as the movie was a major flop, bringing in only $12 million on a $32 million budget.

But She Said, which is based on the book of the same name and stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan, is now available to stream on Peacock and I just had the great displeasure of watching it.

This dreadfully dull movie is directed by a hapless Maria Schrader and written by an even more hapless Rebecca Lenkiewicz, and is a sort of procedural journalism drama minus the drama….and storytelling, and craftsmanship and skill.

She Said is what happens when a movie is all agenda and no drama or cinematic skill. It’s expected in this day and age that people – the “right-thinking people” anyway, will love this type of movie just because it exists and because it holds the correct cultural/political opinion.

Just so viewers know what the correct opinion is, the film gives them a totally ham-fisted scene early on where the two female reporters and their female editor go to a bar in the middle of the day to talk about the story they’re developing. At the bar a drunk thirty-something white frat bro tries to hit on them and Carey Mulligan’s Twohey defiantly stands up to him and shouts him down. You go girl!! The dude then stumbles away muttering about “frigid bitches”. Then Mulligan’s Twohey apologizes to the women she’s with, Kazan’s steely-eyed Kantor retorts, “don’t apologize.” So brave.

This scene is so bizarre, contrived and hackneyed it’s actually unintentionally hysterical. I mean, the scene opens with the waitress bringing over menus and placing them in front of the women and saying, “these are the menus!” That sort of clumsy, amateurish dialogue and blocking is omnipresent throughout She Said.

As for the drunk white thirty something frat bro, that day drinking, horny character is so obscenely absurd as to be ridiculous. But what makes that scene even more funny is that later in the film Twohey and Kantor strut down the street in New York in a long shot and they approach and then walk past two construction workers chatting next to a construction site. I fully expected a cat-calling scene and another Twohey “and then everyone clapped” superhero moment of standing up to predatory men, but then I noticed the construction workers weren’t white guys but minorities and I knew Twohey and Kantor were safe. And sure enough…they walk by unmolested! The lesson, as always, is that only white men are misogynists and sexual predators.

Critics of course are among that desperate-to-be-approved-of group who respond to this sort of vapid virtue signaling (because they do it so much themselves), and so they have written positively about the film because they know they’re supposed to. The paradigm in these situations becomes ‘if you dislike this movie then you love Harvey Weinstein!’, and critics on the whole are much too spineless to actually speak the truth about this movie and risk being seen as ‘bad people’.

She Said isn’t even really a movie, it’s a two-hour and ten-minute #MeToo virtue signal by the New York Times and the female filmmakers meant to extract money from ideologically enthralled fools in the audience and awards from similarly comported morons in Hollywood.

Journalism movies are no easy task. For every All the President’s Men and Spotlight, there’s something abysmal and trite like Spielberg’s The Post, but She Said makes The Post look like Citizen Kane.  

All of those journalism movies had the same obstacle to overcome as She Said, which is that audiences all know how it turns out in the end. We know The Washington Post nails Nixon Watergate, and that the Boston Globe publishes the sex abuse scandal articles, and in this case that The New York Times publishes and Weinstein gets busted.

But nothing is revealed in this movie that we didn’t already know about what the deplorable and disgusting rapist, brute and bully Weinstein was up to, and even the re-telling of known facts is so poorly pieced together as to be laughable. Hell, the biggest obstacle/villain in this movie is Ronan Farrow who might break the story before Twohey and Kantor. And the fact that Weinstein’s Israeli “security team” was out committing crimes and intimidating witnesses and journalists is something She Said refuses to ever admit or acknowledge, is a pretty damning decision in terms of credibility.

In Spotlight, director Tom McCarthy, who isn’t exactly Orson Welles, uses some cinematic and dramatic flair when he crafts his story. For example, in one scene, three characters, two reporters and their editor, simply discuss the story they’re trying to crack, but they do it in a dimly lit basement library which smells because of a dead rat. The characters all comment on how dark and stinky it is and that is great sub-text because it informs both the scene and the overarching narrative of the movie. That scene construction is pretty simple, but nothing like that exists in She Said. Instead, She Said is a litany of women walking and talking on phones.

Another huge issue with the film is that it never clearly lays out the puzzle pieces the reporters must put together in order to “win” – which in this case means getting the story published, resulting in a terribly muddled and unsatisfying movie that have no pulse and no dynamism.

The cast of this film is a collection of very good actresses, but none of them do quality work in it.

I think very highly of Carey Mulligan, but her work as Meghan Twohey is embarrassing it’s so awful. Mulligan’s chesty American accent is tinny and her supposed profound girl power glares and glances laughable.

Zoe Kazan too is a terrific actress but she is as dead-eyed and dull in her role as Jodi Kantor as I’ve ever seen. At one point Kazan’s Kantor comes to life, which is when she bursts into tears when she learns a victim will go on the record against Weinstein. How professional!

Weinstein is not shown from the front in the film (although we hear his voice and see him from behind) because the filmmakers didn’t want to “center” him but preferred to “center” his victims, but the victims aren’t “centered” either. We learn next to nothing about anybody in this movie, and we certainly don’t care about anybody.

Actress Ashley Judd, one of Weinstein’s victims, plays herself in the movie and I understand why that happened, but that choice is undermined when other celebrities, like Gwyneth Paltrow, do not appear even though we hear their voices (I don’t know if it’s Gwyneth’s real voice or not).

The structure of the movie is nonsensical as well. We get flashbacks to a young Irish girl stumbling upon a movie set and later running down the street crying, and we get Meghan Twohey’s pregnancy and post-partum depression (spoiler alert - men are the cause of post-partum depression!!), before we ever get into the story, but none of this is cinematically coherent or narratively comprehensible.

Let me be as clear as I can about this…Harvey Weinstein and his ilk…like Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose and Les Moonves and all the rest of the predatory douchebags who have long populated Hollywood and every other industry, should get the Vlad the Impaler treatment and have their eyes plucked out by ravens as they bleed to death out of their assholes.

Let me also clearly state that She Said is an absolutely awful, dreadfully dull, banal bore of a film that is a total waste of not only two hours and ten-minutes but also of a fascinating and important story.

She Said should’ve done for the Weinstein scandal what All the President’s Men did for Watergate and Spotlight did for the Catholic Church sex scandal. But due to abysmally poor directing, writing and acting, the movie is a gigantic failure. I guess all I can say is better luck next time. Maybe if they ever make a Ronan Farrow biopic – now that’s a compelling story, they’ll get a writer and director who have half a clue. Maybe, just maybe, they won’t fuck that one up. Oh, who am I kidding…they’ll definitely fuck that one up too.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 91 - The Menu

On this episode, Barry and I indulge in a seven-course discussion about the dark horror/comedy The Menu, starring Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy. Topics debated include the difficulty of making foodie movies and their deliciousness when they're well-done, the endangered adult-oriented mid-budget movie, and the glory of pizza with peanut butter cups. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 91 - The Menu

Thank you for listening!

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 90 - Amsterdam

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

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 90 - Amsterdam

Thanks for listening!

©2023

White Noise: A Review - Sound and Fury Signifying Nothing

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the all-star cast…hoo-boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022

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

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022