- Benjamin Purcell Morris
© all material on this website is written by Michael McCaffrey, is copyrighted, and may not be republished without consent
Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo
In this tension-filled episode Barry and I discuss the much anticipated Wonder Woman 1984. Highlights include shared frustrations over the movie‘s missed opportunities, multiple mispronunciations of Gal Gadot’s name and an enraged me viciously assaulting Barry over a misunderstanding.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 27 - Wonder Woman 1984
Thank you for listening and Happy New Year!!
©2021
In this episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I debate David Fincher’s polarizing new film Mank. Topics discussed include Gary Oldman’s brilliance, Fincher’s frustratingly complex genius and an obscure old movie named Citizen Kane.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 26 - Mank
Thank you for listening!
©2020
In a year ripe for satire, Netflix’s predictable mockumentary ‘Death to 2020’ is proof of comedy’s calamitous demise
The film’s tepid and establishment friendly comedic takes on 2020 feel like the final nail in comedy’s coffin.
Death to 2020 is the new Netflix mockumentary that sets out to humorously sum up the nightmare that was 2020. The film, which premiered on the streaming service on December 27th, recounts the actual terrible events of the past year and has fake experts played by actors such as Samuel L. Jackson and Lisa Kudrow on as talking heads to comedically comment upon them.
The makers of Death to 2020, Charles Brooker and Anabel Jones, are best known in the U.S. for their terrifically terrifying and unnervingly prescient sci-fi horror show Black Mirror. But U.K. viewers first got to know them from their more comedy-oriented projects like the “Wipe Series”.
Death to 2020 is much more like the Wipe Series than Black Mirror as it attempts to be a comedy. Unfortunately, it fails in that endeavor.
What makes Death to 2020 so irritating is that it has nothing unique to say and it doesn’t even say the same tired old stuff uniquely.
Granted, some of the jokes are mildly amusing, and some of the performances are good, Tracey Ullman as Queen Elizabeth II, Hugh Grant as a stuffy and ornery British historian and Diane Morgan as one of the top five most average people in the world, are well done. Others, such as Leslie Jones as a behavioral psychologist and Lisa Kudrow as a conservative spokeswoman, are decidedly not.
Ultimately the film has the comedic heft, impact and staying power of a snide and snarky tweet. At best it resembles a high-end, star-studded 2020 version of one of those silly Best of the 80’s clip shows on VH1.
The biggest problem with Death to 2020 though is the problem with most comedy nowadays, in that it is such a suffocating and stultifyingly safe and painfully predictable exercise as to be frustrating and fruitless.
If you have seen a single monologue in the past year by any of the sanctimonious, self-righteous serfs to the establishment on late night tv, such as Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah or John Oliver, then you’ve experienced the same impotent comedy of Death to 2020.
The tired formula of the late night comedy eunuchs, where they flaccidly recite establishment-approved witticisms devoid of insight and edge, is dutifully replicated here just in mockumentary form.
The result is, not surprisingly, that there’s not an ounce of originality or profundity found in the hour and ten-minute film that is too long by roughly an hour.
Also clearly lacking from Death to 2020 is any semblance of comedic testicular fortitude as the usual safe targets are held up for ridicule. Of course Trump is pilloried because he is a walking punchline, as is clueless Joe Biden, who, amusingly, is referred to both as a “prehistoric concierge” and a ”civil war hero”, but obviously none of that is even remotely daring.
“Karens”, conservatives and anti-lockdown activists are also the butt of many jokes, but the equally golden opportunity to lambaste the illiberal left for laughs is never taken. For instance, the comedy rich environment of the Black Lives Matter movement is not mocked, and the “protestors” looting and burning businesses in the name of George Floyd don’t get taken to task either.
But most telling is that also absent from the comedy firing line are celebrities, like the highly hysterical dopes and dullards who vomited out the repugnantly self-serving “Imagine” and “I Take Responsibility“ videos.
By ignoring these subjects Death to 2020 reveals itself to be little more than just another pandering video compliantly committed to kissing the right asses and devoutly dedicated to never biting the hand that feeds it.
As George Carlin famously once said of the powerful in America, “it’s a big club and you ain’t in it!” But the establishment court jesters who made Death to 2020 either are desperate to become members or are already in the club, as their resolute refusal to challenge the status quo is a perfect representation of the sad state of comedy in 2020.
Yes, there are some notable exceptions, Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr being the most prominent, but beyond that, whether it be Stephen Colbert weeping on air like one of the buffoons he used to belittle, or Jimmy Fallon castrating himself with a cowardly apology for an allegedly offensive blackface bit from twenty years ago, or John Oliver’s pathetic pandering to wokeness, or Saturday Night Live’s fierce commitment to anti-comedy or any of the other mainstream comedians who have groveled and genuflected to those who hold the power in our culture, 2020 has been the absolute nadir for contemporary comedy.
The bottom line is that 2020 has been a most brutal year that may have changed our world forever but it is also rife with profound opportunities for humor. Unfortunately for us, 2020 may also have killed comedy, and Death to 2020 is its decidedly unoriginal and unfunny death knell.
My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Although at times mildly amusing, there is nothing original or noteworthy to see here.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds
Wonder Women 1984 is the horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie no one wanted but that 2020 deserves.
On Christmas Day the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84) premiered in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film Wonder Woman.
Wonder Woman (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero origin story. The film featured a star making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time and was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.
As for Wonder Woman 1984, it is the exact opposite of Wonder Woman as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.
In Wonder Woman, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.
In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend…and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The predictably unclever lowlight of which is a 1980’s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.
Diana is no longer naïve in WW84 but the bearer of burdens, and this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited, remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.
As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point a tertiary character yells out “what the hell is going on here!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I had almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.
As for the film’s politics…if you like white male hating movies that feel like two and a half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism...Wonder Woman 1984 is the movie for you.
Wonder Woman (2017) succeeded because it wasn’t heavy handed in its cultural politics, but no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.
The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, Steve the lone exception, are irredeemably evil and painfully one-dimensional. To prove this point there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by 80’s guys, all of them white except for an Asian guy who is apparently white guy adjacent.
White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal)- a Latino, is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by…you guessed it…evil white guys!
Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an “Egyptian” Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them…which sounds a lot like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians…but of course in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in Wonder Woman 1984 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis but Arabs.
The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot, who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar for Israel, fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.
Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia…you’ll definitely connect with WW84.
Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.
Jenkins made a name for herself with Wonder Woman, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies, but her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it did Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.
Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the 80’s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.
Jenkins doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular 80’s music in order to set tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent tv shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably there isn’t a single 80’s song in the entire film, and that is the most monstrous moviemaking malpractice imaginable!
WW84 saves the worst for last as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera meant to be profound and poignant that is pretentious and patronizing…which is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the “Imagine” viral video. In that disastrous effort she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.
A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot movie released in 2020 was “Imagine”. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as Wonder Woman 1984.
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully tedious and idiotic movie that pales in comparison to the first Wonder Woman from 2017.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The Midnight Sky is so dreadful it makes you wish the earth were uninhabitable…especially for George Clooney
Christmas season is when movie studios put out prestige films and big box office contenders. In normal times, people flock to theatres during the holidays because they’re off work and it gives them something to do with family or, in some cases, to avoid family.
This year with coronavirus closing many theatres, the studios are still using the holidays to roll out their biggest movies but now they’re using streaming services to supplement or replace theatres. For instance, on Christmas day the Pixar animated film Soul debuts on Disney + and the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 premieres in both theatres and on HBO Max.
Not to be outdone, Netflix’s early entry into the big movie holiday sweepstakes, The Midnight Sky – a film with a $100 million budget directed by and starring George Clooney, was released on December 23rd.
I’m sure Clooney and Netflix were hoping that The Midnight Sky would be the comeback vehicle to launch him back into the pop culture stratosphere…but unfortunately it is neither a crowd-pleaser nor an art house gem, and thus this cinematic rocket crashes and burns on the launch pad.
Set in 2049, The Midnight Sky tells the story of Augustine (Clooney), a scientist dying of cancer in an outpost at the Arctic Circle who must protect a stranded young girl after an ecological apocalypse while also trying to warn an incoming space crew to stay away from earth and to start civilization over again on a moon of Jupiter. If that sounds ridiculously convoluted or just plain ridiculous to you, you aren’t alone.
Despite boasting a top-notch cast that includes Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler and Demian Bechir, there is no genuine drama to be found in this muddled misfire of a movie.
I get what Clooney was going for with The Midnight Sky. Ever the good Hollywood liberal he wanted to make a big budget, prestige movie with a diverse cast that dramatized climate change. I’m willing to bet Clooney at least considered casting Greta Thunberg as the little girl in the movie just so he could more emphatically make his point and signal his limousine liberal virtue.
The problem is that this movie is so painfully predictable, and so full of saccharine sentimentality and maudlin melodrama that watching it makes you yearn for any disaster, ecological or otherwise, to strike as soon as possible in order to end your misery.
The film attempts to be a family drama, a space drama, an adventure story and a race-against-the-clock thriller, and it fails miserably at all of those things. Ultimately it tries so hard to be everything it ends up being a whole bunch of nothing.
It also features a dramatic climax so predictable yet cringe worthy it made me roll my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a seizure.
I’m old enough to remember when George Clooney was at the top of the Hollywood heap and a highly respected actor, director and producer.
He was admired for being a tv and movie star but also for producing a daring live tv version of Fail Safe, directing the Oscar nominated Good Night and Good Luck, and for his Oscar winning acting in Syriana. He was also respected for starring in some ambitious movies, like Three Kings, Solaris, Michael Clayton and The American, which were notable artistic ventures for a big movie star.
But it has been quite a while since Clooney has acted in a movie that mattered, and his directing career has been on a similarly downward trajectory.
His first directorial feature was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a quirky and somewhat endearing little movie, followed by Good Night and Good Luck (2005), which garnered him a Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. After that there’s been a precipitous decline.
Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) and Suburbicon (2017) are all forgettable movies rightfully condemned to the bottom of the bargain bin at a Walmart check out counter.
Sadly, The Midnight Sky might be the very worst of them all.
In my mind Clooney has always been a sort of a poor man’s Warren Beatty, a pretty faced womanizer who wanted to be taken seriously so he used partisan politics to mask his inherent frivolousness and intellectual vapidity and vacuity.
Beatty is by far the better artist, actor, director and political animal than Clooney could ever hope to be…but that hasn’t stopped gorgeous George from using the Beatty blueprint and using it well, as Clooney’s career rewards have far exceeded his limited talent. But Clooney’s recent recurring failures, The Midnight Sky included, have exposed him to be a Hollywood emperor with no clothes.
Of course, we should shed no tears for George Clooney as he is insanely rich and lives a delightfully comfortable existence…but the writing is on the wall and in the bottom line business that is Hollywood, if Clooney doesn’t churn out a hit or award winner soon, it will be his career that suffers the apocalypse instead of earth.
The bottom line is that The Midnight Sky is a mess of a movie you shouldn’t waste one second of your time on. My Christmas gift to you is that I watched this piece of garbage so you don’t have to. Merry Christmas to everyone!
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a disastrous disaster movie.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.
The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.
I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.
I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.
After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.
In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.
Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.
In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.
The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.
Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.
Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.
It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.
The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther. So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.
The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.
Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.
Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.
The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 806 seconds
The docu-mini-series showcases sex, money, power, class, race and gender as it dives deep into the fetid swamp of a controversial 2011 sex assault case in a futile search for truth.
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. An at-times interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying experience.
Room 2806: The Accusation, the new four-part documentary mini-series that premiered on Netflix December 7th, tells the twisted tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the sexual assault claim brought against him in 2011.
In 2011, DSK was at the zenith of his career. As head of the IMF he had performed admirably during the 2008 financial crisis and now seemed poised to defeat unpopular incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy and become the president of France.
Life was good for the darling of the Socialist Party and of the socialite set, due to his career success and his marriage to the beautiful heiress Anne Sinclair, an accomplished and connected French journalist.
Then DSK went to New York on a business trip and stayed at the posh Sofitel Hotel in room 2806, the presidential suite. This is where, on May 14, 2011, the 62-year-old had a brief sexual encounter with a32-year-old housekeeper, Nafissatou Diallo, right before leaving to catch a scheduled flight.
Diallo, an illiterate immigrant from Guinea, quickly made the claim to hotel security, and then the police, that she was sexually assaulted. In response, NYPD swiftly arrested Straus-Kahn at JFK airport.
And thus begins the tumultuous journey to find out the truth of what actually happened in Room 2806.
Along the way DSK is charged with sexual assault, held in the notorious Rikers Island jail, resigns from the IMF and loses any chance of becoming the French president. In addition, both DSK and Diallo have their lives upturned, backgrounds scoured and are ultimately thoroughly humiliated in the press…and yet the truth still remains elusive.
Room 2806 is like a B-movie or dime store novel in that it is filled with a series of evermore-improbable twists and turns.
Conspiracy theories, not unfounded and not satisfactorily debunked, swirl around the case as French intelligence and their connections with Sarkozy and the Sofitel’s parent company, raise serious questions as to whether DSK was set-up.
There are also shocking revelations about both DSK and Diallo, which leave the viewer dismayed and disoriented, as neither protagonist can be trusted.
The well-paced series uses May 14, 2011, the date of the alleged sexual assault, as the epicenter of the story, but bounces forward and backward in time in an attempt to give more context.
This approach initially humanizes DSK, who, at times, comes across as an impressive and sympathetic figure in this real-life melodrama.
Despite his power and wealth, which usually protect people like him, DSK’s elite social status is instead an incentive for law enforcement and the media to be vicious towards him. As DSK’s licentious proclivities, both past and future, are exposed his friends and supporters claim he’s merely a libertine and lothario rather than a rapacious sexual predator, but that is far too generous an assessment. As the film reveals, DSK is a lecherous, licentious, lascivious and depraved degenerate who is a shameless slave to his own voracious ambitions and appetites.
Unsurprisingly, Daillo is sympathetic…at first. The narrative of the hard working, single parent immigrant preyed upon by an entitled and debauched elite is a compelling one. But there is something off about her…and those feelings of unease are backed up when she’s exposed as being a much more complicated and compromised character than originally portrayed.
As ultimately unlikeable as DSK and Diallo both are, this case attracts a collection of odious secondary characters like dung beetles to a manure pile.
Shakespeare once wrote, “first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”, and this insight is certainly applicable to the DSK case. His lawyers are, not surprisingly considering his enormous wealth and status, the very best in the business. Ben Brafman is one of the most talented and notorious lawyers in New York, and for the right price he quickly slithers to DSK’s defense with fork-tongued aplomb.
Diallo has a pair of lawyers as well, neither of which seem to have a brain between them, and they bend over backwards to aggrandize and embarrass themselves in the documentary.
Then there are the self-serving activists that use the awful case as a platform from which to shout their inanities. There is a black former NYPD officer who is now a race activist who does a cheap Al Sharpton impersonation and screams that Diallo is a victim of racism – even though that is a vacuous claim and there is explicit evidence to the contrary.
Feminists plant their protest flag on the dung heap as well. Some even suggest that the DSK case was the true beginning of the #MeToo movement. This seems a historically tenuous claim, but that is expected from vapid hysterics.
The events documented in Room 2806: The Accusation leave you feeling in despair for humanity and in need of a shower. It also leaves you believing DSK, Diallo, their lawyers, the cops and the parasitical activists, are all vile creatures that truly deserve the pronounced misery of each other’s company.
Little wonder that DSK, now an embittered 71-year-old forced into the shadows, has announced plans to release his own documentary next year, claiming the “time has come for me to speak out (something he declines to do in Room 2806), Is it likely to be more illuminating? I suspect it will simply throw another forkful or two on the steaming dung heap he created in the first place.
In the final analysis, wading through the muck and mire that is the DSK case by watching Room 2806: The Accusation, is at-times, an interesting and entertaining exercise, but ultimately and unfortunately, it is never an insightful or truly satisfying one.
A version of this this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds
Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood but Mank doesn’t glamorize Tinsel Town’s golden age but rather reveals the wound festering beneath the mythology…the same wound inflicting modern America.
On its surface, Mank, the new film by esteemed director David Fincher, chronicles the life and times of famed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, most notably his struggle to write the Oscar winning screenplay for Citizen Kane.
Just below that gloriously photographed black and white surface though, a complex story of class struggle, financial control and political corruption lives, and it is that narrative that makes Mank a story for our time.
Herman Mankiewicz a.k.a Mank, brilliantly portrayed by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, is a disheveled drunkard and degenerate gambler with an undeniable roguish charm. A brilliant wordsmith, Mank’s quick and erudite wit gets him in the good graces of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and by extension, the Hollywood heavyweights at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.
It is from this privileged perch at the luxurious dining tables of W.R. Hearst and in the offices of L.B. Mayer and Thalberg, that Mank is shown the diabolically deceptive practices and devious machinations of those in power. Mank’s growing discomfort and disgust at the charade of these powerful but hollow men eventually manifests in some alcohol-fueled, but extremely insightful diatribes.
But Mank, ever the slave to his own destructive impulses, is impotent to do anything about these men…until the opportunity to write a screenplay for the “boy genius” Orson Welles comes along.
With Citizen Kane, Mank uses his mighty pen to embarrass and eviscerate the all-powerful Hearst while also extending a middle finger to the repugnant Mayer.
Mank resonates in our current time because like Hearst and Mayer in the time of Citizen Kane, the new generation of decadent robber barons from Wall Street to Silicon Valley (Netflix – the film’s producer and distributor, prominent among them) wield their financial, cultural and political power to dominate and control society from their gilded castles while the rest of us scratch and claw just to stay alive.
In Mank there is a terrific scene where Louis B. Mayer tearfully speaks to a collection of MGM workers, whom he calls family, asking them to take a 50% pay cut in order to save the company. Mayer’s performance in that meeting is better than any acting he financed during his long reign at the movie studio, as he gets the workers to give up their money while he walks away giving up nothing.
That scene speaks to the nefarious political and media narrative of the last forty years since the Reagan (and Thatcher) revolution brought us the unmitigated horrors of financialization and trickle-down economics cloaked in the waving flag of an empty patriotism. It also perfectly encapsulates America since the financial collapse of 2007-08, where a plethora of too big to fail corporations with big bosses receiving huge bonuses got bailed out while working people picking up the tab got financially beaten down and will never recover.
It is the anger over that blatant economic unfairness and injustice that fueled movements as disparate as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders and even Trump’s rise to power. But as Mank shows us, the game is rigged, as the propaganda mills promise to strangle any working class movement in its crib.
As the last two presidential elections proved, oligarchs and their media minions will relentlessly wield identity politics like a cudgel to bludgeon the working class and cease any chance at any economic change. Divide and conquer has never been so easy as in our current age of manufactured victimhood.
The character Mank embodies the impotent confusion of so many American voters. He is a compulsive contrarian and as much as he loathes the malignant management class he is also wary of labor unions. Intuitively a man of the left, Mank is still clear-eyed enough to see that both sides of the duopoly are thoroughly compromised.
The devil’s bargain Mank makes with the power structure costs him his soul, and Citizen Kane is his attempt at personal redemption and revenge for the little guy. Like the rest of us, all Mank is able to do is take pleasure in his small and ultimately inconsequential victory.
Mank’s triumph with Citizen Kane is public but completely personal, as it garners him an Oscar but leaves the power structure that so infuriates him, unbowed, unbent and unbroken…even to this day.
For proof of this one need look no further than the recent election. Americans were forced once again to choose between two vacuous avatars for the same oligarchical ruling class.
Even in the midst of a pandemic and government forced shut down resulting in an economic holocaust for working class people, both parties in Washington steadfastly refuse to consider universal healthcare, universal basic income, or even stimulus payments but are united in their insatiable desire to fellate the corporate class. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, same as every boss we’ve ever had.
As for Mank, it is a slightly flawed, but thoroughly worthwhile, art house film that boasts some A-list talent, chief among them Fincher and Oldman. For those with the patience to stick with it, Mank does what very few movies attempt to do, never mind accomplish…it tells the uncomfortable, complicated and ugly truth about America and Americans. Bravo.
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A complicated film that pulls no political punches. Gary Oldman and David Fincher flex their consider artistic muscles in this challenging but worthwhile drama.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds
IS HILLBILLY ELEGY A TRULY TERRIBLE MOVIE OR ARE LIBERAL CRITICS BLATANTLY BIASED?
The new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy chronicles life among a dysfunctional white working class Appalachian family and savage reviews from liberal critics has triggered another battle in the culture war.
Hillbilly Elegy, the new film from Oscar winning director Ron Howard, premiered to much fanfare and controversy on Netflix Tuesday.
The film, which stars perennial Oscar nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography of the same name, and tells the story of how Vance escaped his chaotic upbringing at the hands of his white-working class Appalachian family, most notably his volcanically erratic mother Bev and his hard-edged grandmother Mamaw, and became a Yale Law School graduate.
The book Hillbilly Elegy became a cause célèbre in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory because it gave the establishment a glimpse into the misunderstood white working class and poor folk from flyover country that had come out en masse for Trump.
Among the media elite, the shine wore off of Vance and his book pretty quickly, though, as he was labeled too conservative for consumption after having the temerity to label his hometown hillbilly culture as corrosive and self-destructive. Vance’s critique of the Appalachian white working class was just too pro-personal responsibility for the liberal establishment’s tastes.
It is in this context that Hillbilly Elegy has come out in film form and generated a great deal of vitriol and venom from mainstream movie critics.
For example, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe proclaimed it “poverty porn”. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called it “almost laughably bad – if it weren’t so melodramatic”. And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times derisively decried the movie as “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics”.
These critical eviscerations are not anomalies as the film currently has a dismal 25% critical score review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. There is some pushback though, as the film currently boasts a robust 89% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.
In response to the cavalcade of critical denouncements, noted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted about the film “I've seen "Hillbilly Elegy." Amy Adams and Glenn Close are both terrific. The movie is a well-told family drama. The reason the critics are crapping all over it is simple: the book was treated as humanizing "Trump supporters," and is now a Bad Book™. So the movie is also Bad™.”
My experience of Hillbilly Elegy began when I read and the book back in 2016. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be an extremely insightful and compelling account.
Hillbilly Elegy is an important book and it should have been an important movie…but having seen it I can report that it most assuredly is not. Instead it is a maudlin, dramatically obtuse, narratively incoherent, appallingly poorly made and atrociously amateurish cinematic venture.
Director Ron Howard is an artistic eunuch not exactly known for his deft cinematic touch, and he is as ham-fisted as ever on Hillbilly Elegy. Howard clumsily creates a contrived drama and fumbles the film’s flimsy narrative to such an egregious degree as to be cinematically criminal.
Howard’s visually unimaginative, painfully trite and obscenely shallow approach reduces Vance’s dramatically potent life story into a cinematically flaccid cross between a Lifetime movie, an ABC After-School Special and an anti-drug public service announcement.
As for the acting? Amy Adams is one of the best actresses around, but her performance as the volatile Bev is forced and rings entirely false. Decked out in her oversized ‘mom jeans’, with frizzy hair and sans makeup, Adams is devoid of both subtly and humanity. Adams’ performance is such an over-the-top, one-note caricature it is actually embarrassing.
Glenn Close contrived performance as the foul-mouthed matriarch Mamaw doesn’t fare much better. Both Close and Adams are obviously angling for an Oscar with their ugly-fied, faux-gritty acting, but they end up being uncomfortably shallow and cartoonish in their roles.
Ben Shapiro claiming that Hillbilly Elegy is “well-told” and that Adams and Close are “terrific” only proves that he is either being intentionally contrarian in order to stoke the culture war or he really doesn’t know a goddamn thing about movies and acting. I promise you, Hillbilly Elegy is not the hill(billy) that Ben Shapiro should be willing to die on.
With that said, I have no doubt that liberal critics are gleefully overplaying the very bad hand that is Hillbilly Elegy. If the film were made by a minority director as opposed to a pasty white one, and dealt with black poverty as opposed to poor white people, their criticisms of it would be substantially more delicate and thoughtful.
White liberal critics have long been protective and paternalistic toward black artists and films. Examples of which can be found in the critical reception of Spike Lee’s film Da Five Bloods (2020) and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Both movies are dreadful cinematic disasters, but critics fawned over Da Five Bloods and were wholly encouraging of DuVernay’s abysmal film because of its “diversity”.
Hillbilly Elegy could have been treated with the same kid gloves and rose-colored glasses as Lee and DuVernay’s work- but wasn’t, and one can surmise that the white working class subject matter and the conservative politics of the protagonist are a major reason why.
So is Hillbilly Elegy truly that terrible or as Ben Shapiro suggests are liberal movie critics blatantly biased against it?
The answer is definitely…YES…to both.
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ron Howard at his worst. Just an embarrassingly terrible movie with terrible performances and terrible writing and terrible directing and everything is terrible.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A must-see new documentary that eviscerates the mainstream narrative on race in America and insightfully reveals the manipulations and machinations that distort modern-day race relations.
What Killed Michael Brown? is the most important documentary of the year. The film, which is exquisitely directed by Eli Steele and gloriously written and narrated by famed conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele, takes a deep dive into the tangled web of race in America through the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014.
From the get go the movie jumps out at you, not with cinematic bombast but with a subtle brilliance. The opening title sequence uses the same distinct font as Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and by so doing lets viewers know it is unabashedly challenging popular myth.
This film is a searing, scintillating and staggering examination of race in America, but make no mistake, it is not some emotionalist screed or partisan polemic, it is a thoughtful, reasoned and measured commentary.
Shelby Steele, the film’s narrator, is armed with an impressive background in civil rights, a towering intellect and a monumental mastery of language, which allows him to confidently march viewers through the maze and minefield of race without ever misplacing a step.
Steele frames the American conflict over race as a battle between “poetic truth” and “objective truth”. Poetic truth is a distorted and partisan version of truth and is used by race hustlers and charlatans like Reverend Al Sharpton and former Attorney General Eric Holder, to paint Michael Brown as an innocent victim and noble martyr for the cause.
This poetic truth conflates present with the past, which results in the tragedy of Michael Brown being transformed into a continuation of slavery’s violence and Jim Crow era lynching by depraved whites.
Through this paradigm, Michael Brown becomes all black people, and all black people become Michael Brown.George Floyd
The establishment media and racial activists embrace this poetic truth because their objective is coercion, not reason.
This version of truth does two critically destructive things, it gives blacks an identity through victimization, and it gives whites a way to assuage their racial guilt.
As Steele explains in the film, “white guilt became black power”. This dynamic set up a vicious cycle where blacks use victimhood to exploit white guilt, and whites steal agency from blacks in order to assuage said guilt. Therefore the learned helplessness of blacks feeds the self-centered, narcissistic paternalism of whites and vice versa.
As Steele insightfully declares, “humans never use race except as a means to power…never an end, always a means. “ This is contrasted by the vision of Steele’s working class, minimally educated father who grew up under Jim Crow and fervently “favored character over race as a means to power.”
As seen in Ferguson in 2014 and in recent months all across America, racial anger has become ritualized and choreographed. Grievance is claimed without evidence and protest encouraged with no good faith it will lead to anything.
Whether it be Michael Brown, George Floyd or Brianna Taylor, these deaths are seen less as tragedies and more as opportunities.
The film highlights Al Sharpton as one of the more aggressive opportunists and as the epitome of the race grievance peddler. Reverend Al’s mendacious model is now used by Black Lives Matter and their ilk, who are just as intellectually and morally dubious as their duplicitous mentor.
Unlike the extraordinarily successful and morally impeccable civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr., which exposed its opponents as devoid of moral authority, BLM and Sharpton are themselves morally bankrupt.
As the film points out, none of these opportunists are interested in the development of black people or communities, but in “justice”, and their definition of “justice” is amorphous, ever expanding and rooted entirely in emotionalism and greed.
Steele uses the immigrant owned convenience store in Ferguson where the Michael Brown tragedy began, as proof of the absurdity of the demand for alleged “justice”.
The mob demands the store owners shut down for three days on the anniversary of Brown’s death as well as a whole host of other demands. The owners acquiesce, but it is never enough. Once one demand is fulfilled, a new and more egregious one sprouts up…until finally the mob is clamoring for the store owners to literally give away their store to protestors.
Besides the movie’s robust intellectualism, it is also exceedingly well made, and like its soulful and melancholy jazz soundtrack, never loses its pace or rhythm.
In a bizarre twist, considering the high quality filmmaking on display, Amazon first refused to allow What Killed Michael Brown? to run on its streaming service, claiming it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”.
It’s ironic that major corporations like Amazon are now emphasizing black artists but when those artists don’t toe the establishment line on race, they are told to sit at the back of the bus.
Thankfully, after much public pressure, Amazon has now relented and is allowing the film to stream for purchase on their service. But this is not the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last time that mainstream gatekeepers try to silence truth tellers.
In conclusion, What Killed Michael Brown? is mandatory viewing because it is an intellectually vibrant, finely crafted piece of work that brazenly and bravely reveals the uncomfortable reality of race in America today. SEE IT NOW!
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. The scathing but flawed documentary is worth seeing to challenge any pre-concieved notions on the subject of illegal immigration.
New Documentary ‘America’s Forgotten’ Tells the Illegal Immigration Story the Establishment Media Ignores
America’s Forgotten is a new documentary from filmmaker Namrata Singh Gurjal that exposes the fetid swamp that is illegal immigration into the U.S.
The film has been shunned by mainstream distributors (like Netflix) but has still generated a good deal of interest because Gurjal, an Indian immigrant and registered Democrat, takes direct aim at Joe Biden and Democrats for their immigration policies which she believes lead to catastrophe for illegal immigrants and chaos in America.
The film examines the complex topic through four personal stories. These narratives focus on Gurpreet – a little Indian girl who died trying to cross the Southern border, Maria, a Mexican woman who runs a gauntlet of extortion and rape to illegally immigrate, Sabine Durden-Coulter, whose adult son Dominic – a legal immigrant from Germany- is killed by an illegal immigrant in a drunk driving accident, and Jonathan Decoster, a native born former Marine who lives on the streets of Los Angeles.
These four stories show that Americans are good people but that their “misplaced compassion” toward illegal immigrants leads to policies that actually increase illegal immigration – which is extremely dangerous for both the immigrants and America.
Politically and philosophically, the film is spot on and tells a forceful story that has been shamelessly blacklisted by the establishment media.
The movie exposes the fact that the only people who benefit from illegal immigration are coyotes, cartels and corporations. The coyotes exploit illegal immigrants for money, cartels smuggle people and drugs across the porous border and corporations gleefully profit from the immigrant’s cheap labor.
Those egregiously harmed by illegal immigration are the exploited immigrants themselves and the forgotten poor and working class in America.
The film reveals that, in contrast to common perception, illegal immigrants are often not the poor, tired and hungry running from persecution in third world nations, but rather are middle class foreigners paying $5,000 to $15,000 from Central America, $50,000 from Europe or Africa, and $50,000 - $75,000 from India, to chase the dream of a pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow.
One of the most interesting parts of the film though is about the Iraq war vet, Jonathan Decoster. The movie uses Decoster to tell the story of how immigration decimates the poor and working class here in America by diverting resources, lowering wages and eliminating opportunity. Decoster’s despair turns into opioid addiction and ironically, he heads to the Mexican border to find the lowest prices for heroin.
To the film’s credit it highlights some stunning and disturbing facts, such as at least one-third of female illegal immigrants will be sexually assaulted on their journey, and that by percentage non-citizens far outpace native citizens in terms of benefits they receive despite paying far fewer taxes.
America’s Forgotten doesn’t just expose the problem of illegal immigration but offers a solution. The film contends the blueprint for a safe and fair immigration system that works for both immigrants and natives is the Bracero Program, which was a guest worker program that thrived from the 1940’s until 1965.
That type of program seems to be a logical solution to the scourge of illegal immigration that harms American workers and immigrants alike, but emotion has long ago replaced logic on this polarizing and partisan issue.
And that leads to one of the things that bothered me about America’s Forgotten…emotionalism. The mainstream media deceives Americans by emotionally manipulating them regarding the illegal immigration issue. They tug on American heartstrings and Americans predictably react with “misplaced compassion”.
Unfortunately, America’s Forgotten uses the same tactic, exploiting the grief of Ms. Durden-Coulter, the pain of Maria and the despair of Jonathan Decoster, in order to make its points. That doesn’t mean those points are invalid, it just rubs the wrong way because whenever there is a naked appeal to emotion, there is also an appeal to discard reason.
I also struggled with the film’s participatory style, which is the same style Michael Moore uses to great affect. This results in director Gurjal being the movie’s protagonist, driving the story from her personal perspective. The problem with Gurjal is that her voice, which narrates the entire story, is grating and weak, and she simply isn’t a compelling or commanding enough presence to carry this urgent story.
Another problem is that the movie is very poorly produced. There are technical glitches throughout, most notably with the sound, that make it seem like an amateur endeavor, and frustratingly that undermines the film’s strong thesis.
At the beginning and end of America’s Forgotten, a message comes on the screen informing viewers that due to fear of political reprisals, the crew has all agreed to work anonymously. The members of the sound team certainly dodged a bullet on that one.
In truth, Gurjal and her crew are wise to fear reprisals, as the powers that be in Hollywood, including the malicious middle management class, are extremely partisan and relentlessly petty. I have no doubt that Gurjal’s Hollywood career is now essentially over before it ever really had a chance to begin.
In conclusion, if you want to see the illegal immigration story the media don’t want you to see, rent America’s Forgotten (available on Vimeo, SalemNow and iScreeningRoom). I’m not sure in our polarized political era it can change any minds, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t telling a very ugly truth.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 69 seconds
The Hallmark and Lifetime channels are targeting their Christmas movies at gay audiences this year. Activists have hailed this as a victory, but there will be little to celebrate in terms of quality filmmaking.
“Don we now our gay apparel” takes on a whole new meaning this year as The Hallmark Channel airs The Christmas House, its first gay themed Christmas movie.
The film stars Jonathan Bennett as one half of a gay married couple who visit family as they anxiously await a call about adopting their first child.
According to PinkNews, “LGBT+ fans have long been crying out for a queer festive film – and this year, they have finally been granted their grown-up Christmas wish”.
PinkNews also reported that, “In July, queer Hallmark Christmas fans were sent into a frenzy when the company confirmed the LGBT+ Christmas films were on the way.”
The “queer frenzy” over The Christmas House is heightened by the fact that the Lifetime Channel also has a gay themed holiday film this year, The Christmas Set-Up. Looks like there will be a lot of same sex canoodling under the mistletoe on tv this holiday season.
To be honest I’m confused as to why having a gay Christmas movie is such a big deal. According to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), a whopping 10.2 % of characters on tv shows identified as LGBT+ in 2019. According to Gallup, LGBT+ people make up just 4.5% of the general population, which means the LGBT+ community represention on tv is more than twice as large as it is in reality.
Americans are so inundated by gay characters in entertainment that it wildly distorts their perception, resulting in a consistent over-estimation of the size of the gay population in polls. Gallup polls show Americans on average believe LGBT+ people make up nearly 25% of the population, which is five times their actual population percentage.
The same polls shows that women over-estimate the size of the LGBT+ community the most, believing that nearly one in three people are gay. Since women are the target audience of Hallmark and Lifetime’s Christmas movie crap-a-thon, one can assume that this is only the beginning in expanding gay representation on those networks come holiday season.
The Christmas House and The Christmas Set-Up seem less like another battle in the manufactured War on Christmas than just another LGBT+ victory parade.
Of course, the quaint notion of Christmas being a celebration of the birth of Christ was long ago lost thanks to capitalism’s red clad enforcer Santa Claus and his relentless elves of commercialism and consumerism, so what difference could a few more whacks on the dead religious Christmas horse from a rainbow-striped candy cane truly make?
As far as gay rights and acceptance goes, I am all for it but I’m not sure it’s a sign of progress that the LGBT+ community now gets to have really dreadful and cheesy Hallmark holiday films marketed toward them.
It reminds me of the comedian (I can’t remember which one) who said after gay marriage became legal that “now gay people can enjoy the misery of marriage just like the rest of us”.
The Christmas House premieres on November 22nd, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, which is ironic because if JFK were still alive today his mind would be blown not – if you believe the preposterous official story - by a bullet from Lee Harvey Oswald’s Mannlicher Carcano rifle but by the idea that a gay Christmas movie could ever be shown on a banal network like the Hallmark Channel.
Someone from JFK’s generation would find the speed with which homosexuality and gay rights have been accepted by mainstream American culture over the last thirty years to be utterly astounding.
As with all issues revolving around representation though, nothing is ever good enough. No doubt soon we’ll hear cries of outrage over a lack of black, Latinx, Asian and Indigenous lesbian, transgender and gay Christmas movies.
I’m sure the gay friendly geniuses at Hallmark are already fast at work creating their own lame lavender adaptation of Dickens’ holiday classic A Christmas Carol to appease the diversity gods and the LGBT+ market.
It won’t take much effort to ’queer up’ old Ebenezer Scrooge since he had a uniquely intimate relationship with his supposed “business” partner Jacob Marley, who, like a wife, haunted him even after death.
As for this year’s holiday fare A Christmas House, there is no doubt that a cornucopia of sentimental divorcees, old ladies and camp-adoring gay people with decidedly bad taste are already gearing up in eager philistine anticipation of the movie’s premiere by hoarding boxes of wine and macarons just for the festive occasion.
But as a devout cinephile tired of projects choosing forced diversity over artistry, I say bah-humbug….this holiday season there will be no donning of gay apparel or indulging in the Hallmark channel for me.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds
Some Russians have taken offense at Anastasia Romanov’s cartoonish depiction in a low-budget movie released earlier this year. They shouldn’t waste their energy on a criminally stupid piece of film making.
In case you haven’t heard, #HandsOffAnastasia is the outrage du jour on Twitter. If you were unaware of this controversy, I deeply envy you. Here is a quick breakdown of how #HandsOffAnastasia came to be.
In Spring of this year a terrible movie titled Anastasia: Once Upon a Time came and went and no one cared because it was laughably low budget and hysterically awful. The film is a live action kids movie that tells a fantastical tale of Anastasia Romanov time traveling, with the help of a wizardly Rasputin, from Russia in 1918 to Madison, Wisconsin in 1988 in order to evade Vladimir Lenin and Yara the Enchantress’s malevolent grip. To give you an indication of the caliber of movie that Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is, here are some highlights…Rasputin has a break dance battle at a mall, plays video games and models in a fashion show, there are some absurdly random musical numbers, and a Filipino comedian plays Lenin.
I am no expert on Russian history, but I am pretty sure the film is not entirely historically accurate. And this is where the outrage comes in…apparently some Russians are up in arms that “Hollywood” would denigrate Russian history and besmirch a Sainted Russian figure like Anastasia Romanov, who was brutally murdered by Bolsheviks at age 17 with the rest of her family, by comically re-imagining her tragic tale…thus #HandsOffAnastasia was born.
More kindling on the #HandsOffAnastasia fire is a clip from the film circulating online that shows Anastasia eating spaghetti with her hands, thus implying she, and all Russians, are uncivilized barbarians.
Sadly for me, this whole #HandsOffAnastasia situation forced me to watch this stupid movie. My assessment is this…how do you say “much ado about nothing” in Russian?
First things first…Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is obscenely amateurish and ridiculously imbecilic…but it doesn’t make Anastasia out to be some Neanderthal anti-princess. The spaghetti eating scene isn’t mean spirited or even “anti-Russian”, it is just unconscionably lazy movie making.
The other thing, and this is the most important point, is that this film is so inconsequential as to be absurd. Why anyone, anywhere would care what it says or does is beyond me.
This is not some “Hollywood”, big budget operation backed by the marketing muscle of Disney. The movie was produced by Congolomerate Media and distributed by Freestyle Digital Media…not exactly Hollywood heavyweights…in fact they don’t even qualify as flyweights…or Hollywood, which is why no one has ever heard of this film until this silly controversy.
The budget for the film is bare bones, and it shows in the locations, cheap special effects and shabby costumes. Whatever money they did have seems to have been almost entirely spent acquiring the rights to the Cindi Lauper song “Time After Time”, which it uses liberally (without Lauper’s pricey vocals) throughout the film for no discernible reason.
If I could point to one remarkable thing about Anastasia: Once Upon a Time it would be that it boasts the largest collection of the worst Russian accents ever captured on film at one time. The biggest star in the movie is Brandon Routh who plays Tsar Nicholas II. Once upon a time Routh played Superman on the big screen, and in Anastasia he reveals his kryptonite is twofold…acting and a Russian accent.
The film is produced by Armando Gutierrez, who also did no one a favor by casting himself in the critical role of Rasputin. The film would have been better served casting an inanimate carbon rod in the role instead of Gutierrez.
On the bright side, there is exactly one good performance in the film, and that comes from the talented Amiah Miller, a young actress who played Nova in War for the Planet of the Apes.
Besides that the only interesting thing about this movie is that on its IMDB page it actually lists Anastasia Romanoff as one of the screenwriters. That is an intriguing marketing ploy but simply cannot be true because if the real Anastasia ever had to watch this dreadful movie she would run into the basement and shoot herself just to end the misery and embarrassment. I am sure that last joke offended some people…but here is the thing, if you have the time and energy to get upset about that lame joke or about this nonsensically preposterous movie, then you really need to get a life.
This isn’t to say that Hollywood, like the rest of America, isn’t Russophobic. It certainly is. It isn’t to say that Americans aren’t historically illiterate about Russia and ignorant about Russians. They certainly are. It is to say that this third rate clownshow of a movie is so laughably trivial that it should never ever generate any emotion, be it positive or negative, from anyone, anywhere.
#HandsOffAnastasia is, like so much of Twitter culture, a function of people with too much time on their hands searching high and low, far and wide for something, anything about which to be offended.
In conclusion, the hypersensitive Russian woke folk of #HandsOffAnastasia desperately need to keep their hands off Twitter and go out and re-connect with their heritage by doing truly Russian things…like competing in a break dancing battles at the mall, or modeling in impromptu fashion shows, or eating spaghetti with their hands.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This stillborn comedy is a mess of a movie but it does succeed as a piece of pro-abortion agitprop
Last week was a good week if you crave poorly crafted movies designed to trigger culture war clashes, but a bad week if you’re a cinephile more interested in quality cinema than political posturing.
On September 9th, Netflix defecated Cuties, the controversial French film that hypersexualizes 11 year-old girls, onto an unsuspecting and uncomfortable public.
The very next day, September 10th, HBO Max picked up the gauntlet of inappropriateness and released UNpregnant, its teen girl, road trip, abortion buddy comedy.
Thankfully UNpregnant is rated PG13, which means the scantily-clad, twerking 11 year-olds of Cuties only have a two year wait before they can watch the movie-version of the abortion handbook that is UNpregnant.
UNpregnant is the story of Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson), a 17 year-old over-achiever in Missouri who asks her misfit former friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to give her a ride to New Mexico for an abortion.
Missouri and its surrounding states all have laws against minor’s getting abortions without parental consent, and Veronica is afraid to tell her “Jesus freak” Catholic parents, so she needs to hit the road to the Land of Enchantment for the no-strings, underage abortion at the end of the rainbow.
In mythical girl power fashion, Veronica and Bailey’s journey is undertaken in a Pontiac Firebird, because like a phoenix, these girls will rise from the ashes of the patriarchal society that oppresses them…or something like that.
Unfortunately, UNpregnant is a painfully conventional and relentlessly dull film. It’s ironic that a movie burdened with such flaccid performances and impotent comedy should be about a pregnancy borne out of unrestrained virility.
The film’s dreadful script, which is in part written by Ted Caplan and Jenni Hendriks and is based upon their book of the same name, reads like the exposition Olympics, and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s direction is abysmally amateurish.
The two leads, Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira, try as hard as they might, lack any comedy chemistry whatsoever. Both of them push so hard to make something funny happen that you’d think they were actually in labor…but the fruits of that labor never appear as apparently the comedy in their performances was aborted too and never had the chance to grow beyond a miniscule fetus.
UNpregnant wraps itself so tight in liberal political correctness it could pass for a social justice mummy. The movie has all the right heroes and heroines and all the proper enemies to appease the woke faithful.
For instance, the film exerts a great deal of energy proving it isn’t racist by having every single black person in the movie be wonderful allies to the abortion cause.
Yes, these black people, like Peg, the pawn shop owner with the heart of gold, Jarrod, the local cowboy with the heart of gold, and Bob, the apocalyptic conspiracist with the heart of gold, are all edgy and dangerous, but ultimately, due to their previously mentioned hearts of gold, end up being kind and extremely helpful to Ivy league bound, suburban white girl Veronica in her abortion quest.
And just in case viewers were confused about the cultural politics of the movie, there’s a superfluous lesbian romance thrown in too.
As for the villains, there’s Kevin, Veronica’s white, empty-headed yet controlling, stalker boyfriend, who intentionally failed to reveal the condom broke. Like all straight white men in Hollywood movies nowadays, Kevin is simply no good.
The most deplorable villains in the movie though are a family of pro-life, white Christians who are the personification of evil. This family is meant to represent the pro-life movement, as unsubtly indicated by their secret “pro-life” room in their home, and by their mobile pregnancy and ultrasound equipped recreational vehicle, which they use to chase down Veronica and Bailey.
The sequence with the evil pro-life family is so farcical and tonally out of step with the rest of the movie, it feels like it is intentionally placed there for no other reason than to denigrate and inflame Christians.
Needlessly ridiculing Christians is not exactly a sound marketing strategy if, like UNpregnant, you are trying to make a popular movie and not some niche arthouse film. Proof of this is that UNpregnant currently has a 40% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes total sense since 65% of Americans identify as Christian.
The film does currently boast an 85% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, but I think that has everything to do with it being a shameless advertisement for abortion and woke utopian wet dream of anti-Christianity for establishment liberals rather than any honest analysis of its artistic or entertainment merits.
As a cinematic venture, as a comedy and as a piece of entertainment, UNpregnant fails miserably, but as a piece of agitprop that normalizes abortion, which I believe is the movie’s ultimate intention, it thoroughly succeeds.
Abortion in UNpregnant is depicted as a gateway to freedom and truth and an undeniable good. Abortion is portrayed as this wondrous and physically, mentally and emotionally painless procedure that leaves girls emphatically relieved and joyously buoyant in its wake. As post-abortion Veronica sums up to her mother at movie’s end, “I don’t feel bad…”
I’m glad at least someone didn’t feel bad at the end of the movie, because I sure did, and not because of UNpregnant’s political stance on the complex issue of abortion, or its ham-handed cultural politics, but because it is an unfunny, cliché-ridden, mess of a movie that is poorly written, acted and directed.
In conclusion, UNpregnant is a stillborn cinematic dud that should have taken its own advice and aborted itself in the first trimester of its creative process.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The deviant, under-aged sexuality in Cuties doesn’t make the middling movie an art house gem. It’s incredible some critics are blind to its toxic depravity just to score political points.
Cuties premiered on Netflix this week amid much controversy and fanfare. As a film critic, I am willing to give the artistic benefit of the doubt to most any movie, so as I sat down to watch Cuties I was conscious of the controversy surrounding the film, which started three weeks ago after Netflix’s marketing material made the movie look like it was sexually exploiting 11 year-old girls. But I was also open minded enough to think the film might not match the marketing.
Cuties starts off with an intriguing premise that is bursting with dramatic potential as it tells the story of Amy, an 11 year old immigrant from Senegal, as she navigates the clash between her old world, Islamic family, and the modernity and libertinism of her new French friends.
Unfortunately, Cuties pretty quickly devolves from its powerful premise and becomes licentious and lurid rather than dramatically lucid. Director Maimouna Doucoure makes the egregious error of trying to make a social commentary about how modernity hypersexualizes young girls by actually hypersexualizing young girls. It is like making a social comment on animal cruelty by actually torturing animals on film.
I am a cinephile, not a pedophile, so I found Doucoure’s repeated and extended shots of 11 year-old girl’s scantily clad, gyrating pelvis, buttocks and groins to be gratuitous, shocking and frankly, repulsive.
It is amazing that there are people out there, like highly respected film critic Richard Brody of The New Yorker, in a lather vehemently defending the film. Brody’s review is not so subtly titled, “Cuties, the Extraordinary Netflix Debut That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign” praises the film but ultimately indicts the critic.
Brody boasts, “I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far right) have actually seen “Cuties,” but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: it’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order.”
I’ve seen Cuties and I’m not a right-winger, and yet I’m able to see the insidiousness of exploiting little girl’s sexually under the guise of being against the “patriarchy”…why isn’t David Brody? Brody and his ilk are so eager for a culture war fight they are completely blind to the striking malevolence of Cuties.
For Brody, Cuties is just another opportunity to signal his alleged liberal virtue as evidenced by his statement, “The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.”
It would seem Brody is over estimating the power of education, as he is a Princeton grad and yet he is incapable of putting the deviant sexuality of Cuties into proper perspective. Brody’s review comes to a close by stating, ““Cuties” dramatizes what people of color and immigrants endure as a result of isolation and ghettoization, of not being represented culturally and politically… it’s enough to give a right-winger a conniption.”
To Brody and other Cuties defenders, and there are plenty of them as the film has a 90% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, Cuties is just another gateway drug to the cultural narcotic of racism, sexism, xenophobia and all the rest, and is just another cudgel against “right wingers”.
The beauty of it is that Brody is chastising “right-wingers” for politicizing Cuties by politicizing his review of Cuties, just like the film comments on the hypersexualization of kids by hypersexualizing kids. This is Matrix level, multi-dimensional chess of the highest order.
On a purely artistic and cinematic level, Cuties is a decidedly middling affair. Director/writer Doucoure makes some rudimentary structural and character development errors that undermine the film to a great degree.
In addition, despite its one good shot, which is its final one, the film has no distinct visual flair and only seems capable of mimicking the style of those creepy American Apparel ads that were shot by…not surprisingly…famous photographer and alleged sexual predator Terry Richardson.
There is one scene where 11 year-old Amy is basically possessed by some evil, uncontrollable twerking demon, where in close-up she is sprinkled with water and gyrates in skimpy underwear, that was particularly reminiscent Richardson’s lascivious style.
What struck me as I watched Cuties was that there was a much more interesting, complicated and artistically worthy subject hiding in plain sight and that would be a story where one of the truly awful little girls in Cuties, who dresses like a whore and twerks and watches porn, actually leaves her religion of libertinism and becomes enamored and engrossed in an old world religion like Islam, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, or Orthodox Judaism.
Brody and his companions in the elite establishment would despise that version of the movie because it would show the depravity of the chaotic libertine world they cheer while showing a viable, and although not perfect but much more ordered, alternative.
In conclusion, being a film critic is sometimes a good job and sometimes a bad one. On the good days you get paid to watch a Terrence Malick film…on the bad days you are forced to endure Cuties. I highly recommend you do yourself a favor and skip Cuties and spare your mind and soul from being subjected to the toxic depravity of little girls being drowned in the most repugnant of cinematic sexual stews.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 13 seconds
If Hollywood wants to become a true woke utopia, it should follow my guidelines to rid itself of the plague of white men.
The Academy Awards have set stringent new diversity guidelines to which all films must adhere by 2024 if they want to be considered for the prestigious Best Picture award.
The new guidelines require films to meet on screen representation standards where at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be either Asian, Hispanic, black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.
Cinephiles can sleep well knowing that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s movies will still be eligible for Best Picture.
If a film doesn’t meet the actor requirement then it can still pass the test by having representation from those same minority groups along with women, LGBTQ and people with cognitive or physical disabilities or who are deaf or hard of hearing represented in acceptable numbers behind the scenes on the crew, in apprenticeships or internships or in executive positions.
The bottom line is basically if you are a straight white guy in Hollywood you’ve just been served notice that your skill and talents are only needed for as long as it takes to train your female or minority replacement.
As someone who has long felt that hiring people based on their talent and skill was a devout evil, I for one welcome our new diversity and inclusion overlords and want to let them know that as a straight white male I could be useful in sniffing out other straight white men in Hollywood trying to scheme their way into being considered a worthy minority.
La La Land being La La Land I’m sure there are a plethora of desperados already strategizing on how to circumvent these new rules that will make Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug look like pikers.
As of right now the Academy is saying that the new standards will be enforced by “spot checks” on set….but I am deeply concerned that those “spot checks” won’t be strenuous enough to rid the movie industry of the damned straight white male menace that plagues it.
I have a few proposals to help strengthen inclusion enforcement and assure diversity compliance.
1. I think Academy Gestapo, oops, I mean enforcement officers, should be armed with a standard color chart where they can hold up the color card next to a person and see if their skin color matches the “right” (aka non-white) tone to be allowed to work on a movie. If someone is too light skinned they can immediately be escorted off of the set and counselors can be brought in to soothe the traumatized left in the white male devil’s wake.
2. In order to ensure that no white men ever slip through the cracks, I also propose a partnership between the DNA testing company 23 and Me and the Academy Awards. Everyone working on every movie must be forced to give a DNA test in order to prove their ethnic or racial heritage.
And let’s be clear, we want pure minorities…none of this “my mother is black and Latina and my father is Asian and white” business because that still means the curse of whiteness is coursing through their veins. Any drop of white blood in a person should be unacceptable in Hollywood.
It will also be L.A. law that everyone must carry their DNA papers with them at all times. Failure to have your papers will result in immediate expulsion from the movie industry.
The 23 and Me results could actually become a fun part of Oscar night where an envelop is opened on stage revealing the film with the most diversity, which is then declared Best Picture. I think we can all agree this is how Best Picture should always be determined, not by the antiquated measure of artistic quality and worth.
3. One troubling diversity and inclusion loophole is that some deplorable straight white male could claim to be gay, thus qualifying as a minority. Let it be known throughout Hollywood that just using unorthodox pronouns like They/Them or Ze/Zir will not be enough to prove minority status!
I am sure there is some enterprising young man or selfless older male studio executive out here in Tinsel Town who’d be willing to advance his standing in the Academy by doing special intimacy examinations, preferably on camera, to see if these white men are “gay enough” to be allowed to work.
Obviously the Academy should hire me as a turncoat consultant, but if they don’t I’m already getting deviously entrepreneurial by hoarding hearing aids that I can rent out on the white market for $200/a day to other straight white men so that they can claim to be “hard of hearing” just to keep their grueling gigs as gaffers.
My sincere wish is that Hollywood succeeds in curing itself of its straight white male pandemic. Straight white men, be they Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis or regular working Joes, have stained cinema with their straight white maleness for long enough.
Somewhere there is a deaf, transgender Indigenous actor signing the phrase, “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up!” Let’s hope these new diversity and inclusion rules make They/Them into the biggest star in the universe and the dream of a woke Hollywood utopia relentlessly churning out cinematic mediocrity into a reality.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds
UNpregnant appears to ignore the moral complexity of abortion in favor of promoting an insidious amorality on the issue.
UNpregnant is the controversial new abortion buddy comedy movie set to premiere on HBO Max on September 10th.
The film, based on the novel of the same name, tells the story of Veronica, a pregnant 17 year-old girl, and her friend Bailey, as they go on a wild and whacky road trip from Missouri to New Mexico so that Veronica can get an abortion.
In its trailer, UNpregnant sells itself as a zany road picture where hilarity ensues when a goofy odd couple of teenage girls steal a car and try to hop a train on their epic odyssey down the yellow brick road to abortionland.
The road picture narrative is a long time Hollywood staple, think Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with their numerous “road to” musical comedies of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s…except in UNpregnant, Crosby and Hope are teenage girls crossing state lines to get an abortion. Hilarious!
It is easy to see why pro-life advocates are up in arms over UNpregnant as the trailer makes the film appear to be a piece of pro-abortion agitprop specifically designed to antagonize them by making light of abortion and demonizing Veronica’s Catholic parents as “Jesus freaks”.
2020 has been a banner year for decidedly pro-abortion films with UNpregnant, the critically acclaimed drama Sometimes, Always, Never, Rarely, and the indie dramedy Saint Frances, which all have an amoral attitude toward abortion, all being released.
Notice I described these films as pro-abortion and not pro-choice, that is because pro-choice implies a grappling with the moral gravity of the abortion decision, whereas pro-abortion removes any moral dimensions at all, and reduces abortion to being akin to getting a nose piercing.
This amoral approach to abortion is perfectly summed up by Kelly O’Sullivan, writer and star of Saint Frances, who told Time magazine, “I wanted to write a story where it’s a non-traumatic depiction of abortion. It’s ordinary and light and sometimes funny…”
Yes, because if abortion is anything it is ordinary, light and sometimes funny.
Hollywood has not always been so devoid of nuance in its depiction of the extraordinarily complex issue of abortion.
In 2007, Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress all portrayed their female protagonists wrestling with an unwanted pregnancy and highlighting the choice part of the pro-choice position, with each ultimately choosing to not have an abortion.
These films were wildly successful, with Juno and Knocked Up raking in $231 million and $219 million respectively, and Waitress pulling in a respectable $22 million with just a $1.5 budget.
Juno also garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, while winning for Best Original Screenplay.
The commercial and critical success of these films was a result of their mirroring American’s extremely conflicted feelings on the subject of abortion.
Polling shows that a majority of Americans are pro-choice in some form, but as Barbara Carvalho of Marist Poll told NPR, “People do see the issue as very complicated, very complex. Their positions don't fall along one side or the other. ... The debate is about the extremes, and that's not where the public is."
In the thirteen years since Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress hit big screens Hollywood has abandoned the nuance and dramatic complexity of American’s view of abortion in favor of the extremist pro-abortion message of UNpregnant.
Tinsel Town is no longer interested in connecting with as wide an audience as possible but rather prefers to signal their self-professed virtue with cultural propaganda that directly targets underage girls while preaching to the minority of pro-abortion zealots in their midst.
Most troubling for movie lovers is that internal moral conflicts are what make for the most interesting drama and comedy, and to ignore them in favor of self-aggrandizing political posturing is self-defeating for both artists and the movie industry.
An example of a mainstream filmmaker successfully embracing morally complex issues, including abortion, is Knocked Up director Judd Apatow, who has made a career of wrapping moral debates in his signature raunchy humor.
Apatow’s films, which include 40 Year Old Virgin, This is 40, Funny People and Trainwreck, are “conservative” comedies where adult protagonists face moral dilemmas and though tempted to make the libertine choice, eventually make the difficult but responsible one instead.
As Hollywood’s cultural politics become ever more strident, Apatow’s formula, which has made him a gazillionaire, will become anathema in the movie industry and “get woke, go broke” will most assuredly be made manifest in La La Land.
The UNpregnant trailer, which boasts such cringe-worthy dialogue as “it’s my life, my choice” and the insipid tag line “when life gets off track, forge your own path”, makes clear the popular 2007 approach of entertaining adults with moral complexity is now abandoned in favor of indoctrinating kids with extremist agitprop.
Maybe when UNpregnant comes out we’ll discover that it’s a terrific film and more morally complex than its trailer suggests…or maybe it is the canary in the cultural coalmine reflective of how the new, grotesquely woke Hollywood is desperate for its cancer of vapid amorality and decadent depravity to metastasize to the next generation of girls and young women. My bet is on the latter.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
On today’s podcast Barry and I take a look at the 2019 Clint Eastwood film, Richard Jewell. On the episode we discuss the hopefully soon-to-be discovered, glorious genius of the film’s star Paul Walter Hauser, as well as the reliable acting brilliance of Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell. In addition we wrestle with the often-times frustrating nature of Clint Eastwood’s directing approach and the never ending mystery of Jon Hamm.
LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 23 - RICHARD JEWELL
Thank you for listening!
©2020
This week Barry berates me for trying to stay current by choosing as a topic the new Netflix sci-fi action movie The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron. In the episode we break down the movie and consider what worked (not much), what didn’t (a lot), and why. We also dive into the unending mystery of who actually shot this movie.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 22 - The Old Guard
Thanks for listening!
©2020
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 14 seconds
The Pentagon and China are waging a propaganda war against their own people, and the greedy globalists of corporate Hollywood are happy to help
Hollywood won’t choose between the totalitarian Sauron of China and the authoritarian Darth Vader of the U.S. military, but instead will support both evils, and the people of the world and the art of cinema will suffer greatly because of it.
There is currently a propaganda war being waged by China and the U.S. military where both want to control Hollywood, and therefore the minds of their citizenry, for their own nefarious means.
Not surprisingly, like whores at a battlefield brothel, the morally ambiguous harlots of Hollywood are trying to profit by servicing both combatants.
PEN America, a group championing free expression, recently released an exhaustive report detailing how China has taken control over Hollywood.
The report states, “The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”
China strictly controls films released in their market, which is soon to become the largest box office in the world, and Hollywood wants in on that lucrative action, so they appease their Chinese overlords by obeying censorial demands, like whitewashing a Tibetan character from Marvel’s Dr. Strange, and strenuously self-censoring, like cancelling a planned sequel to World War Z.
The whitewashing of a Tibetan character from Dr. Strange is particularly interesting as that became the outrage of the moment back in 2016 when the movie was released. Many activists and journalists howled at the inherent racism of casting a white woman (Tilda Swinton) in a role that was an Asian man in the source material. Interestingly enough, Disney (who owns Marvel) stayed entirely silent throughout the controversy. The PEN America report shows that the reason for the whitewashing was that China wouldn’t allow a Tibetan portrayed on screen, so Disney dutifully complied in an attempt to get the film in the Chinese market. Disney also kept its mouth shut as to why it engaged in whitewashing in order to cover up its appeasement to Chinese demands.
Disney genuflecting to China should come as no surprise. In 1998, Disney’s then CEO, Michael Eisner, met with Premier Zhu Rongji to talk about Disney’s desired expansion into China and the 1997 Martin Scorsese biography of the Dalai Lama it produced, Kundun, which infuriated the Chinese government.
The loathsome Eisner said of Kundun, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it,” Eisner then groveled further, “Here I want to apologize, and in the future we should prevent this sort of thing, which insults our friends, from happening.”
In the two decades since then, Chinese power has only grown and Hollywood has only become more and more weak kneed and reflexively compliant.
This Orwellian sentiment of controlled storytelling to fit a government-approved narrative is not limited to the communists of China though. The U.S. military has long had a very fruitful arrangement with Hollywood where they exchange free military equipment, expertise, personnel and locations in exchange for ultimate control over scripts.
Capt. Russell Coons, Director of Navy Office of Information West, sounded like Xi Jinping when he described Pentagon expectations while cooperating with a movie, “We’re not going to support a program that…presents us in a compromising way.”
PEN America notes this Pentagon propaganda program, “…the United States government has benefitted from, encouraged, and at times even directed Hollywood filmmaking as an exercise in soft power.”
But then disingenuously dismisses it, “But this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing’s does.”
That is an absurd contention as the Pentagon picks movies based on a studio’s willingness to conform to its rigidly pro-military narrative standard, which is, in function if not form, just like China picking which Hollywood movies it allows to run in its country based on their adherence to a pro-China criteria.
Regardless, the reality is if Hollywood can financially benefit by acquiescing to the Pentagon and/or China’s demands, it certainly will.
In response to China’s Hollywood propaganda, Sen. Ted Cruz proposed the egregiously titled Stopping Censorship, Restoring Integrity and Protecting Talkies Act, or SCRIPT Act.
Cruz’s bill aims to kneecap Hollywood studios by withholding access to U.S. government support – the Pentagon propaganda program, if they alter their movies to appease Chinese censors.
Of course, SCRIPT will never go anywhere as the Motion Picture Association of America will aggressively lobby to get the whole thing scuttled to keep both Chinese and Pentagon money flowing to La La Land.
On the bright side, the SCRIPT Act has at least frightened the propagandists in the Pentagon and Hollywood enough that they are now openly touting their shadowy alliance.
For example, The Military Times recently ran a jaw dropping op-ed by Jim Lechner shamelessly espousing Hollywood’s Pentagon propaganda.
Lechner admits, “…limits on the cooperation with skilled storytellers at the American movie companies would significantly degrade the ability of the U.S. government to tell its own story…”
Lechner then boasts, “…over the decades, Hollywood has provided one of the most powerfully positive images of our military. No Pentagon-based press relations operation could come close to what Hollywood has achieved through its films.”
Over the last three decades, the Pentagon-Hollywood alliance has drastically altered American’s perception of the military and successfully neutered filmmakers as artists and truth-tellers.
For example, in the 70’s and 80’s Francis Ford-Coppola, Stanley Kubrick and Oliver Stone, made great anti-war films like Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, that explored the dark side of American militarism and empire.
That type of artistic and intellectually challenging anti-war movie went on the endangered species list in 1986 when the Pentagon collaborated on the making of the blockbuster Top Gun, and has since become extinct, which is why we haven’t had any great movies detailing the heinous fiascoes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Oliver Stone spoke about how he had wanted for decades to make a movie about the My Lai Massacre but was unable to get a studio on board for funding. Stone did not explicitly state this, but the implication was clear, the Pentagon’s propaganda program not only assists pro-military movies, but intimidates studios into avoiding films that are anti-war or highlight military misdeeds.
Ironically, Top Gun has become not only a symbol of the Pentagon’s propaganda prowess, but of China’s as well. In the poster for the sequel due out this year, Tom Cruise’s Maverick is still wearing his signature leather jacket, but in order to appease Chinese censors, gone from its back are the prominent Japanese and Taiwanese flags from the original.
The modern golden era of Hollywood films exploring the darker side of China peaked in 1997 with Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner. China’s swift and severe reaction to those films and the studios and production companies that made them, was extremely effective as it has resulted in studios strangling any truthful artistic exploration of Chinese themes and stories in order to avoid alienating the Chinese Communist Party and potentially missing out on the ever expanding Chinese box office.
As a cinephile and a truth-seeker, I want to see films made by true artists that chronicle the dramatically potent moral and ethical atrocities of both America and China. The plethora of post 9-11 American evils (surveillance, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan) and the brutal Chinese atrocities against the Uighers, Tibetans and members of the Falun Gong, are fertile cinematic ground. But sadly…thanks to Hollywood’s insidious, incessant and insatiable greed, none of those important stories will ever be told on the big screen.
The reality is that the propaganda war is already over and the authoritarian and totalitarian corporatists, globalists and militarists of Hollywood, Washington and Beijing, have handily won…and we the people, and the art of cinema, have lost.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2020
Acting Coach & Teacher Westside Los Angeles
FILM
September 5 directed by Tim Fehlbaum
Flow directed by Gints Zilbalodis
The Brutalist directed by Brady Corbet
Sing Sing directed by Greg Kwedar
Nosferatu directed by Robert Eggers
The Substance directed by Coralie Fargeat
Late Night with the Devil directed by Colin and Cameron Cairns
Joker: Folie a Deux directed by Todd Phillips
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga directed by George Miller
Dune: Part Two directed by Denis Villeneuve
TV
Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+)
Sing Sing (pod)
Saturday Night
UFO WEEK - Battle for Disclosure
UFO WEEK - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown
UFO WEEK - Investigation Alien
UFO WEEK - Manhattan Alien Abduction
The Rings of Power: Season Two (TV)
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders (TV)
Killers of the Flower Moon (pod)
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection (pod)
Wes Anderson Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (pod)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (pod)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (pod)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Mandalorian Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up - White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian
History of the World Part II (tv)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (pod)
The Banshees of Inisherin (pod)
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoilers)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (spoiler free)
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio(pod)
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (pod)
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
Moment of Contact - Documentary
House of the Dragon - Current Fantasy TV Champion of the World
The Greatest Beer Run Ever (pod)
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU(pod)
Obi-Wan Kenobi(TV)(first 3 eps)(final 3 eps)
Jurassic World: Dominion(review)/(Pod)
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Lost Daughter(pod)
Pam and Tommy(TV)
Peacemaker (Ep.1-3)/Peacemaker(finale)(TV)
Nightmare Alley(pod)
Everything’s Gonna Be All White(TV)
Ozark(TV)
Finch(pod)
Hawkeye(TV)
JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass
Succession(TV)
Dopesick(TV)
Ted Lasso Season Two(TV-pod)
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
Y: The Last Man(TV)
Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace(TV)
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union(TV)
The Prince(TV)
What If?(TV)
CODA(pod)
WandaVision/Winter Soldier/Loki(TV-pod)
No Sudden Move(pod)
We the People(TV)
Bo Burnham: Inside(pod)
Tenet(pod)
Exterminate All the Brutes (TV)
Coded Bias (TV)
Coming 2 America(pod)
Ted Lasso(TV-pod)
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
Recipe for Seduction(pod)
The Queen’s Gambit(TV-pod)
The Crown(TV)
Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice
Spitting Image(TV)
Cursed(TV)
Monty Python’s The Life of Brian
Lance(TV)
The Last Samurai(pod)
The Social Network(pod)
Inception(pod)
John McTiernan Films(pod)
There Will Be Blood(pod)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy(pod)
Hell or High Water(pod)
Zodiac(pod)
Ex Machina(pod)
Contagion(pod)
Space Force(TV)
The Last Dance(TV)
Fleabag(TV)
The Amazing Jonathan Documentary
Once Upon a Time…in. Hollywood
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
War for the Planet of the Apes
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
Batman v. Superman : Dawn of Justice
A Very Pleasant Awakening : Thoughts on a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Derek & Orange is the New Black
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: Lee Daniel's The Butler
W.A.P.O.G. Collection: August: Osage County
LIVE MUSIC REVIEWS
La La Land : An Analysis - Political Subtext
Jason Bourne, Projecting the Shadow and the Technological Hunter : A Review and Commentary
The Big Short : A Review, a Diagnosis and a Warning
Sicario: A Review and Reports From Down the Rabbit Hole of the Drug War
Citizenfour : A Review and Random Thoughts
Knight of Cups : A Review and Dispatches From the Great Malick Civil War
The Birth of a Nation : A Review and Commentary
ACTING TECHNIQUE AND THEORY
Marlon Brando, The Big Bang and the Birth of Modern Acting
Stillness: Lessons from Redford, DeNiro and Penn
Al Pacino : Top 5 performances
Requiem for a Heavyweight: James Gandolfini
On Grief and Acting: Revelations from Hamlet in the April of my Discontent
Ethan Saylor and a Lack of Empathy Part One
St. Patrick's Day : The Five Best Irish Films
AWARDS NONSENSE
1st Annual Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Annual Mickey Awards (2015)
3rd Annual Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Annual Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Annual Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Annual Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Annual Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Annual Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Annual Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Annual Mickey Awards (2023)
11th Annual Mickey Awards (2024)
1st Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2014)
2nd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards(2015)
3rd Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2016)
4th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2017)
5th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2018)
6th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2019)
7th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2020)
8th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2021)
9th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2022)
10th Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2023)
11th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards (2024)
Must-See Documentaries
Can’t Get You Out of My Head directed by Adam Curtis
HyperNormalisation directed by Adam Curtis
Century of the Self directed by Adam Curtis
The Power of Nightmares directed by Adam Curtis
LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA PODCAST
Season 1 - 2020
Ep. 2 - Marriage Story
Ep. 8 - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*
Ep. 9 - Portrait of a Lady on Fire*
Ep. 11 - Coronavirus and Contagion
Ep. 14 - Hell or High Water*
Ep. 15 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy*
Season 2 - 2021
Ep. 35 - Promising Young Woman
Ep. 40 - Tenet and Nolan Films
Ep. 41 - Top 5 Alien/UFO Films
Ep. 42 - No Sudden Move and Top 5 Heist Movies
Ep. 43 - WandaVision/Falcon and Winter Soldier/Loki
Ep. 44 - Bo Burnham: Inside & The State of the Comedy Union
Ep. 45 - Black Widow
Ep. 47 - Movie Streaming Recommendations
Ep. 50 - Eternals
Ep. 52 - Ghostbusters: Afterlife
Season 3 - 2022
Ep. 57 - Spider-Man: No Way Home*
Ep. 67 - Ozark Season 4 Part 2
Ep. 68 - Dr. Strange in the Mutiverse of Madness
Ep. 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion
Ep. 72 - Thor: Love and Thunder and the State of the MCU
Ep. 79 - The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Ep. 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)*
Ep. 88 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio*
Ep. 89 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
Season 4 - 2023
Ep. 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin*
Ep. 95 - Oscars Wrap Up and Black Panther : Wakanda Forever
Ep. 98 - Ghosted
Ep. 99 - Air (pod)
Ep. 100 Part One - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 100 Part Two - Streaming Movie Recommendations
Ep. 101 - Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Ep. 103 - Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Ep. 104 - Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Ep. 106 Ted lasso Season Three
Ep. 107 - No One Will Save You*
Ep. 108 - Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Films*
Ep. 109 - Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
Season 5 - 2024
Ep. 115 - Killers of the Flower Moon
Ep. 122 - Deadpool and Wolverine*
Season 6 - 2025
Ep. 130 - Gladiator II
DISPATCHES FROM THE SHITSHOW - 2024 ELECTION
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine
The Trump Legal Charade and Other Uncomfortable Truths
Biden, Trump and the 2024 Election
Vices and a Stunning Lack of Virtues
Cheney, RFK Jr., Gambling and More
PROPAGANDA WATCH
November 2023 Propaganda Report - More 60 Minutes
Propaganda Watch: Ireland Edition
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
CULTURAL CRITICISM
Truth, Justice and the Curious Case of Chris Kyle
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
The Tragedy of Charlottesville and the Age of Identity
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Election 2016 : Random Dispatches From the Shitshow
Election 2016 Post-Mortem : Crossing the Rubicon and Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Election 2016 Aftermath : A Practical Handbook to Survive and Thrive in the Era of Trump
BLOG POSTS
2025
2024
UFO WEEK - Battle for Disclosure
UFO WEEK - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown
UFO WEEK - Investigation Alien
UFO WEEK - Manhattan Alien Abduction
The Rings of Power: Season Two (TV)
Hollywood’s Self-Inflicted Box Office Problem
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
10th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon
2023
This Week in Propaganda: 60 Minutes Edition
Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl Short Film Collection
Ahsoka (TV)
Encounters (TV) - UFO Documentary
Winning Time (TV)
Jury Duty (TV)
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Barry (TV)
Succession (TV)
Adventures in Idiocy - Dylan Mulvaney, Max and Monty Python
The Mandalorian - Season Three (TV)
TV Round Up (White Lotus/Black Bird/Slow Horses/Succession/The Mandalorian)
The Last of Us (TV)
Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II
9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey Awards
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
2022
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) - Review and Commentary
House of the Dragon Season One - Final Analysis
The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law Season One - Final Analysis
The Greatest Beer Run Ever - Review and Commentary
TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor
The Rings of Power: Amazon’s Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens
The Last Movie Stars documentary
House of the Dragon - Episode One
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Episode One
Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Final Verdict
Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Everything Everywhere All at Once
Come and See (1985) and the War in Ukraine
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira, Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Has Defeated Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends the Woke Over the Edge
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv are crumbling just as new taboos around speech are being erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
A Not-So-Expert Opinion on our Future With the Coronavirus
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
What to Watch: TV Suggestions to Pass the Time
Coronavirus: Thoughts and Musings
Lost Opportunities and Dastardly Deeds in the Age of Coronavirus
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
The Super Bowl Halftime Shitstravaganza
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Martin Scorsese Top Five Films
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Anecdotal Observations on Elizabeth Warren
Thoughts and Musings: Featuring Fredo, Bed Bug, Lady Kicker and More
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Angry Americans, Shark Attacks and Synchronicity II
Quentin Tarantino Films Ranked Worst to First
Propaganda and the Delusion of Wokeness
Women’s Soccer, pay Equality and Pandering
Movie Subscription Services and Box Office Booms and Busts
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
The Emotionalist Buffoonery of Charles Blow
Brief Thoughts Before the End of Game of Thrones
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Game of Thrones: The Battle of Winterfell and the Fog of War
United Sheep of America: Assange, Fascism and Liberal Hypocrisy
Russiagate: Puzzlements and Lost Causes
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
Beating the Dead Horse of Grammy Award’s Racism
2018
Bush, Bertolucci and a Requiem for Truth
2018 Mid-Terms: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Serena Williams and Her Basket of Deplorables
Burt Reynolds and the End of the Movie Star
The Existential Catholic Crisis
The Awful File: Oscars, Millennials, Brie Larson and More
Thar He Blows: Charles Blow Has a Question...I have an Answer
Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two
Disturbing Dispatches From "Real America"
American Animals, Anthony Bourdain and Late Stage American Empire
Song of Experience in A Quiet Place
The Farcical Fury Over the White House Correspondence Dinner
Morgan Freeman and the #MeToo Whispers
Next Stop - Speculation Station: Syria and Scott Pruitt Edition
I Told You So: Conor Lamb Edition
A Wrinkle in Time, Film Criticism and White Liberal Paternalism
Thoughts on the Academy Awards
#MeToo: It's Not Broke, but You Can See the Cracks
Queen Oprah: Pope of the Cult of Personality
A Week of Holes: A$$holes, Sh*tholes and Rabbit Holes
Some Brief Thoughts on the Golden Globes
2017
Perversion and the Religion of Self
He Who Laughs Last - Edward S. Herman Edition
The Death of Edward S. Herman and the Death Knell for Liberalism in America
Sex Scandals and the Phases of a Panic
While We Were Sleeping...The Dogs of War Awoke
JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins
JFK and the Conspiracy Conundrum
The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don't
Eternal Darkness of the Artist's Mind
Mayweather, McGregor and the Heart of Darkness
Deconstructing Criticism of Oliver Stone's "The Putin Interviews"
The Whitewashing Controversy Part Two: A Response
Caesar Americanus : Trump, Shakespeare and the American Illiterati
Greg Gianforte, Punching Nazis and the Absence of Moral Authority
JOE McCARTHY WAS RIGHT!! Shocking Revelations From a Manchurian Op-Ed Writer
Curious George and the Banana Republic
Through the Looking Glass : Truth and Lies in Week One of 2017
Theatre of the Absurd : Road to Damascus Edition
Meryl Streep, Character and Moral Authority
TWIB : This Week in Bullshit (Feb 17- 24)
President Trump : A Viewer's Guide
Raping Truth : Brando, Butter and Last Tango in Paris
#OscarsSoWhite: Don't Believe the Hype?
The Way of the Gun: Meditations on America and Guns
OP-EDS
2022
Everything’s Gonna Be All White
The Book of Boba Fett and the Future of Star Wars
2021
Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier
Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
The Russians are Coming…to Space!
Harry and Meghan - Lifetime Movie
The Woke Wet Dream of ‘What If…?’
In the Same Breath Docdumentary
Numbnuts Chris Evans Goes Full Captain America
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union
They Are Us and the Tragedy Trap
Tarantino’s Pact with the Weinstein Devil
Pentagon UFO Report Viewer’s Guide
In the Heights Box Office Bomb
In the Heights and the Woke Albatross
Riz Ahmed and Muslim Under-Representation
Anne Boleyn and Color Conscious Casting
The Father and the MSM’s Dementia Simulation Machine
A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Culture of Life
Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show
China’s Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Hollywood
Keira Knightley, Sex Scenes and the Male Gaze
Biden Inauguration Performances
Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy
2020
Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020
Midnight Sky is the End of George Clooney’s World
Chadwick Boseman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
The Woke War on Parents and Family
Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age
The Media Lie…Even About Peppa Pig
Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash
The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics
Biden Defeats Trump - Meet the New Boss…Same as the Old Boss
Trump’s Minority Support Sends Woke Poseurs Over the Edge
What Killed Michael Brown? Review
Chris Pratt in Cancel Culture Crosshairs
Disney’s New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope
Jessica Chastain, The 355 and the CIA-Hollywood Alliance
Critical Race Theory in Kindergarten
UNpregnant - Review and Commentary
Cuties - Review and Commentary
Academy Awards Diversity and Inclusion Rules
Sexual taboos on tv crumble just as taboos around speech are erected
Spitting Image, BoJo’s Penis and Fear of a Black Puppet
The Crown just cast an Australian to play Princess Diana!
The Pentagon and China’s Propaganda Wars
Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of the King Arthur Legend
The Woke Philistines taking Over Hollywood Hate White Men More Than They Love Cinema
Horny Women of the World Unite! Don’t Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!
Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of Our Current Press
Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn’t Get Any Worse, the ‘I Take Responsibility’ Video Comes Out
Racism is Now Gone With the Wind
Comedians Must never Apologize if Comedy is to Survive in the Age of Cancel Culture
Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish its Propaganda Mission
‘Hoaxed’ Exposes the Mainstream Media’s Bias…and Its Own
Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America’s Delusional Culture
Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, The Last Dance is Anything but Great
Covid-19 is Deadly, but it Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness
UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?
Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will
Hollywood and the Economic Time Bomb of Coronavirus
The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Viewer’s Guide
Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema
Trump, Parasite and the 2020 Election
La Resistance est Mort! The Cesars, L’affaire Polanski and the #MeToo Virus
Birds of Prey Hates Men, but Wants Their Money - No Wonder It’s Bombing at the Box Office
Do You Believe in Miracles? Parasite Wins Best Picture
You’re Welcome World! Academy Awards Courageously Save Earth From Global Warming
It’s a Miracle…Hollywood Finds Religion!
Hollywood’s Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences
Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit and the Holocaust
The Tedious Woke Outrage Over Oscar Nominations
1917 Dazzles the Eye but Fails to Stir the Soul
Feminist Fleabag and Woke Critics
2019
Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism
Woke Hollywood Gets Burned By Charlie’s Angels Box Office Bomb
Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics
Patron Saint of Incels? Woke Outrage Over Joker is a Bad Joke
Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now to the Stars for Guidance
Meathead Beats the Dead Horse of Collusion
Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind
Jussie Smollett’s Hate Crime Hoax Exposes America’s Shocking Skepticism Shortage
Toxic Femininity: ‘Badass’ US Women Demand Right to Torture and Kill for Empire…Just Like Men
2018
A Curious Case of Mystery Attacks, Microwave Weapons and Media Manipulation
In a Fit of Anti-Trump Pique, Liberals Shamelessly Embrace 'Deep State' Criminals
Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness
Captain America v Trump in Battle of the Useful Idiots
Hollywood's Self=Serving and Misguided Immigration Protests
Trump is Deadpool and We're All Doomed
Kanye Tweets He Loves Trump, Civilization on Brink
Hollywood's Malicious Propaganda Dehumanizes All Russians
The Pentagon and Hollywood's Successful and Deadly Propaganda Alliance
Profiles in PC Courage: Brave Millennials Attack 'Friends'
Echoes of Totalitarianism in #MeToo and Russia-Gate
2017
#MeToo Wildfire Rages Out of Control
Has Fear of Putin Seized Hollywood?
Stephen Colbert Heads For Russia Looking For Laughs; He'd Find Better Material at Home
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? Trump, That's What!
Trump - Griffin Scandal Underscores American Celebrity-Obsessed Culture
Suffering Children as Propaganda and the Jimmy Kimmel Story
Colbert Attacks Trump, Was it Homophobic? Hysterical? Or Both?
Oscars and Grammy Racism : Perception or Reality?
La La Land is Hollywood's Version of "Make America great Again"
Buzz Lightyear Claims Hollywood is Nazi Germany, Captain America to the Rescue?
John Oliver - Shameless Establishment Shill
Snoop Dogg Barks Up The Wrong Tree
Express Yourself? Madonna Don't Preach!!
Goodbye Ringling Brothers, Hello Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow
JOHN OLIVER
The John Oliver Twist 1 : Court Jester as Propaganda Tool
The John Oliver Twist 2 : The Drumpf Affair and Little Bill Maher's Power Fetish
The John Oliver Twist 3 : Waxing Brazilian and Waning Credibility
The John Oliver Twist 4 : Out Trumping Trump on the Great Wall of Trump
John Oliver Twist 5 : Things Said and Unsaid
GENERAL
Irishness, Cultural Memory and the Curse of St. Patrick's Day
BOOKS
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Dreamland by Sam Quinones
Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy
Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic by Barry Meier
American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts by Chris McGreal
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America by Chris Arnade
Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60’s by Tom O’Neill
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev
Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin
The Duel by Anton Chekhov
Ward No. 6 by Anton Chekhov
The Bishop by Anton Chekhov
The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Projecting the Shadow : The Cyborg Hero in American Film by Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz
Re-Membering Frankenstein : Healing the Monster in Every Man by G.H. Ellis
Man and His Symbols edited by C.G. Jung
Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C.G. Jung
Under Saturn's Shadow : The Wounding and Healing of Men by James Hollis
Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano
Kill the Messenger by Nick Schou
Dark Alliance : The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb
Whiteout : The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn & Jeffrey St. Clair
Boundaries of the Soul by June Singer
Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant by Daryl Sharp
Merton's Palace of Nowhere by James Finley
SHE: Understanding Feminine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
HE: Understanding Masculine Psychology by Robert A. Johnson
The Problem of the Puer Aeternus by Marie-Louis Von Franz
Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger
Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt by Sylvia Brinton Perera
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
MUSIC
Centennial Collection by Robert Johnson
The Anthology, 1947-1972 by Muddy Waters
L.A. Woman by the Doors
Hendrix in the West by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Born Under a Bad Sign by Albert King
Burglar by Freddie King
Indianola Mississippi Seeds by B.B. King
Rhythm & Blues by Buddy Guy
The Complete Recordings by Mississippi John Hurt
Trouble in Mind by Big Bill Broonzy
His Best : The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection by Howlin' Wolf
Traveler by Chris Stapleton
The Nashville Sound by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit
A Sailor’s Guide to Earth by Sturgill Simpson
A/B by Kaleo
Blue Train by John Coltrane
Yardbird Suite: The Ultimate Charlie Parker by Charlie Parker
Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins
Go! by Dexter Gordon
Beauty is a Rare Thing : The Complete Atlantic Recordings by Ornette Coleman
Incesticide by Nirvana
Purple by Stone Temple Pilots
Mingus Ah Um by Charlie Mingus
Rearviewmirror by Pearl Jam
Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden
Dirt by Alice in Chains
Brown and Roach by Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Moanin' by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
Somethin' Else by Cannonball Adderley
Superfly (Deluxe Edition) by Curtis Mayfield
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
Sea Change by Beck
Signs by Tedeschi Trucks Band
Walking the Line: The Legendary Sun Recordings by Johnny Cash
Misterioso by Thelonious Monk
Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins
The Sky is Crying by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
Me and Mr. Johnson by Eric Clapton
The Story of Sonny Boy Slim by Gary Clark Jr.
Bootleg Series Vol. 8 : Tell Tale Signs by Bob Dylan
Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk by Jeff Buckley
Harvest by Neil Young
Email: mpmacting@yahoo.com
