- 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
On this episode, Barry and I head to Arrakis to ponder Denis Villaneuve's sprawling space epic Dune. Topics touched upon include Villaneuve's appealing style but curious lack of brand, Jason Mamoa as a force of nature, and Barry's highly erotic and inappropriate man-crush on Timothee Chalamet.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 49 - Dune
Thanks for listening!
©2021
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dismal, dull and dopey god-awful mess of a movie which is in the running to be the worst Marvel movie ever.
The new Marvel movie Eternals, written and directed by Oscar winning Best Director Chloe Zhao, and starring a cavalcade of stars including Angelina Jolie, is supposed to be the blue print for the newest phase of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Kevin Feige, the MCU mastermind who intricately weaved 25 movies into a coherent over-arching narrative that dominated pop culture for almost 15 years, said of the movie, “The impact Eternals will have on the MCU will be nothing less than redefining the cinematic universe entirely.”
That declaration should scare the crap out of Marvel fanatics and Disney executives alike because Eternals is as catastrophically atrocious a cinematic venture as Marvel has churned out in their 26-film run.
The film, which has an ungodly two-hour and thirty-seven-minute run time that often feels eternal, tells the story of the Eternals, a bunch of immortal super-beings sent to earth to protect humanity from the Deviants, a group of vicious, wiry monsters. Superhero movies are often only as good as their villains, and the Deviants are as generic as it gets.
I’d dive deeper into the plot, which frequently jumps back and forth in time, but it’s so convoluted as to be incoherent.
Think of the Eternals as sort Avengers Plus, as they’re more akin to ancient gods than they are to modern superheroes. The Eternals are comprised of Sersi, Ikaris, Thena, Kingo, Phastos, Sprite, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh and Ajak.
Unlike with The Avenger films, which featured well-known characters, many of which had already had multiple solo films to explore their background and inner life, part of the problem with Eternals is that the superheroes on display are not well-known to casual fans. So, the movie must try and develop the characters and the audience’s connections to them on the fly while also attempting to entertain. It fails miserably at all of these endeavors.
The blame for these failings falls on writer/director Chloe Zhao, who is utterly hapless and hopeless at the helm. Zhao, who is respected as a maker of small, intimate, introspective films like Nomadland, is completely out of her depth on the sprawling Eternals as she flounders in every aspect of the storytelling. The pacing is abysmal, the character development nearly non-existent and the dialogue forced, trite and overwhelmed with exposition.
In addition, the visuals of the film are flat, the CGI second-rate, and the action sequences dull, unimaginative and repetitive. Every fight sequence features someone being “unexpectedly” saved from sure death by the swift action of an unseen superhero off-screen swooping in at the last minute, and consistently throughout “Eternals assemble” type shots - where all the characters come together in a line in a movie poster pose, rear their manufactured head.
Another major problem with Eternals is that in our age of wokeness and corporate virtue signaling, it seems more concerned with waving the diversity, representation and inclusion flag than with making an entertaining movie.
The wokeness on display in Eternals is so inane as to be ridiculous. For example, in the comics, Ajak, leader of the Eternals, is a man, but in the movie he’s a middle-aged Mexican woman (an uncharismatic Salma Hayek). Latina box checked.
Makkari, the Eternals’ Flash-like superhero, is no longer a white guy like in the comics, but instead is now a mixed-race woman who is deaf for some inexplicable reason, and of course, is played by a mixed-race, deaf actress, Lauren Ridloff. Disability box checked.
In the comics, Phastos is a muscular bad-ass black man, but in the movie, he’s transformed into a frumpy gay guy played by Brian Tyree Henry. It goes without saying that a gay kiss is featured in the film, no doubt used to hit over the head the people too dense to pick up on Phastos’ homosexuality by the fact that he has a husband. LGBTQ box checked.
Considering that Marvel movies are usually populated by beautiful people in skin tight outfits, Henry is an odd choice to play the first openly gay character in a Marvel movie. Unlike his co-star Kumail Nunjiani, who obviously spent an inordinate amount of time in the gym transforming his body to look more Marvel-ish to play the comic relief character Kingo, Henry looks as if he’s allergic to exercise in general and barbells in particular. I like Henry as an actor, but he is woefully miscast in this role.
Speaking of the casting, the usually luminous Angelina Jolie just looks odd and bored as Thena, and the beautiful Gemma Chan is exposed as being rather anemic as the film’s lead Sersi.
The only bright spot was Richard Madden, who was surprisingly dynamic as Ikaris, so much so that I actually thought he might make a passable James Bond should the opportunity ever present itself.
As of this writing, Eternals has a well-earned Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 49%, the lowest in MCU history. Considering all the blatant woke pandering in the film, and critics’ consistent genuflection at the altar of all things “diverse”, the dismal Rotten Tomatoes critical score is even more damning.
Making money is currently baked into the Marvel cake, and Eternals will no doubt have decent box office returns, but the film is the poster child for Marvel entering the creative bankruptcy phase of its self-destruction.
If, as Marvel guru Feige claims, Eternals is the blue print for the next phase of the MCU, then “get woke, go broke” will be made manifest as Disney/Marvel are killing their cinematic cash cow by worshipping the golden calf of wokeness and sacrificing quality and entertainment at its altar.
Eventually, audiences will tire of this type of hackneyed and hollow identity-politics based pandering and shoddy filmmaking, and Disney/Marvel will have no one to blame but themselves.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A visual marvel but ultimately a rather barren drama. Readers of the book will follow the action and bask in the film’s staggeringly sumptuous cinematography, but neophytes to the story will be left completely dumbfounded.
Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, has long been deemed “unfilmable”, and depending on your perspective regarding director Denis Villeneuve’s new ambitious big budget adaptation, that label may very well still apply.
Dune is a complex and complicated story of empires and religious mysticism set in a future that is structurally not too different from the medieval past. It’s sort of, but not exactly, a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars…but nowhere near as good as either.
In Dune, the planet Arrakis, a barren and desolate sandscape, is a key piece on the political chessboard because it’s the only place in the universe that has “spice”, which is both a hallucinogenic drug used by the Fremen – the Bedouin’s of Arrakis, but more importantly, a vital element that makes interstellar travel possible. Dune appears to be a loose metaphor for various empires lust for oil in the Middle East over the years.
The machinations that bring the rulers of House Atreidis, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their teenage son Paul (Timothee Chalamet) to Arrakis by imperial decree to replace the brutish House of Harkonnen, which has ruled the planet for generations, are never clearly spelled out in the film.
In fact, much of what happens in the film is not clearly spelled out, which is why the movie is so impenetrable for those who haven’t read the book. Fortunately for me, I’ve read enough of the book to know what was happening, but unfortunately not enough to why it’s happening.
The film is actually just “Part One” of Dune, and one can’t help but wonder if Warner Brothers is waiting to see how well the movie does at the box office before greenlighting further films.
It seems to me that the problem for Dune is that it’s much too esoteric and unexplainable to be able to generate enough of a box-office bonanza to induce funding for a second picture. This is also why the notion of Dune generating Star Wars/Marvel levels of excitement among audiences seems highly unlikely.
An issue with Dune is that, unlike the first Star Wars, it isn’t a stand-alone movie. Star Wars had a very a satisfying ending all its own – the destruction of the death star. The film’s sequels only added to that experience, they didn’t make it. With Dune, the ending of Part One is in no way satisfactory, and it’s relying on future films to elevate audience’s experiences.
In fact, Dune’s climactic scenes are so mundane and dramatically insignificant it feels like the main story hasn’t yet begun when the final credits roll.
What makes the Marvel franchise so successful is that it can be glorious for audience members who know the source material, as well as digestible and entertaining for viewers who’ve never read a comic book in their lives.
The same is not true for Dune. If you haven’t read ‘Dune’, you will, like the U.S. when it rolled into the Middle East thinking it would impose its will over cultures it didn’t know or understand, be overwhelmed by your ignorance and arrogance. The ‘Dune’ illiterate will be bogged down by their own ignorance-induced boredom, as the muck and mire of world building is a maze for which they lack a map. Forever lost amidst the dust and dizzying detritus of Dune, first-timers to the story will feel like foreigners and will quickly check out.
Director Villeneuve is known for making gorgeous looking films, the proof of which lies in the stunning cinematography of Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, and Dune is certainly no exception.
The movie is a visual marvel, and if that’s your cup of tea then I highly recommend you see the movie in theatres as opposed to on HBO Max. It really is impressive to behold. But with that said, Villeneuve’s visual feasts are often vast and stunning, but they can also leave you hungry for drama and humanity, and Dune is a perfect example of that too.
Timothee Chalamet is the film’s lead and to be frank, he has always been a mystery to me. A pretty boy with little substance and no physical presence, he feels like a manifestation of a pre-teen girl’s platonic fantasies.
Chalamet is a whisp of an actor and is devoid of the intensity and magnetism to carry a single movie, never mind a big budget franchise.
I suppose Chalamet is just eye-candy, another weapon in Villeneuve’s prodigiously gorgeous cinematic palette. But like much of Villeneuve’s beautifying flourishes, Chalamet feels entirely empty, like a miniature statue of David, or a high-end department store mannequin.
I enjoyed Dune as a cinematic experience because it’s such a beautifully photographed film, but I also understand that my interest in cinematography is not shared among the general populace. And I readily admit that this movie may very well flop, which is disappointing because as frustrating as it is, I’d still like to see Villeneuve make one or two more Dune films as the sort of high-end alternative to other less visually ambitious franchise movies…like Star Wars and Marvel.
Ultimately, fans who loved the book should see Dune in theatres as they’ll most likely enjoy the movie as they marinate in Villeneuve’s cinematic grandeur. But if you haven’t read the book, Dune is, like Arrakis, a very forbidding and foreboding land that is best avoided.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
On this episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey, I review Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s new movie directed by Ridley Scott, The Last Duel.
Thanks for watching!
©2021
My review of Halloween Kills on The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.
Thanks for watching!
©2021
****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MINOR PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS FOR THE LAST DUEL!! IT IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****
My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. This is one of those rare films that is actually geared toward grown-ups. It has some major flaws, but it’s also well crafted and ultimately entertaining.
This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for The Last Duel.
Despite its best efforts to be a #MeToo movie, director Ridley Scott’s new movie The Last Duel is being chastised by some virtue-signaling critics.
The film, set in France in 1386, tells the true he-said, he-said, she-said tale of Sir Jean de Carrouges (a committed Matt Damon), Jacque Le Gris (a mis-cast Adam Driver), and Marguerite de Carrouges (a terrific Jodie Comer) – Jean’s wife, who claims that Le Gris raped her.
Ridley Scott, one of the great cinematic craftsmen of his generation, makes the wise decision to structure the film Rashomon-style, where the perspectives of three main characters are shown around the same single contentious event.
The story is broken down into three chapters titled “The truth according to…” Jean, Jacque and Marguerite. Unfortunately, Scott tips his rather heavy-hand when he lets on that it is Marguerite’s story that is really the “truth” of the incident.
This choice, to have Marguerite’s subjective experience be deemed the objective truth, greatly undermined both the dramatic and artistic potential of the film. This decision felt like it was made in order to appease the #MeToo mob that can become hysterical over any perceived slights.
The film’s star and co-writer, Matt Damon, knows this all too well, as he caught some serious flak when at the height of the #MeToo mania he dared to say something rational about how there’s a difference between a pat on the backside and rape, which infuriated the pussy-hat brigade.
The filmmakers (Ridley Scott and co-writers Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener) aggressively let the audience know they side with Marguerite, but excluding the actual rape, her version of events seem just as narcissistic, fantastical and delusional as Jean’s and Jacques’.
Jean and Jacques both self-righteously see themselves as noble and honorable warriors who are kind of heart. Their perspective is, of course, skewed by self-interest, but the filmmakers refuse to hold Marguerite to the same standard.
Marguerite sees both Jean and Jacques as beasts, and that may be true, but her vision of herself is so saintly as to be hilarious, as even the lie she tells is noble. Marguerite is portrayed not only as a loyal and well intentioned wife, but also brilliant. For instance, she effortlessly turns around illiterate Jean’s business fortunes, collecting debts and breeding horses, while he is off fighting a war for money.
As a female character in the film correctly declares, “There is no ‘right’, there is only the power of men!”, which is an unintentional and uncomfortable truth revealed not only about medieval men in question but also about modern-day feminism and its adherents. As The Last Duel shows, feminism is only born in a bubble of prosperity built by the brute force of ferocious men, and it’s a sign of decadence, if not delusion.
Yet, despite The Last Duel’s insipid #MeToo pandering and its cinematic flaws, and even in spite of myself, I actually liked the film and found it entertaining, which is a testament to both Ridley Scott’s directorial skill and my thirst for remotely decent, adult-oriented cinema in our current cultural desert.
Yes, some of the worst hair-dos in cinematic history are featured in The Last Duel, with Damon sporting a mule-kick of a medieval mullet, and Affleck – who chews-scenery as debauched royal Count Pierre, looking like he got a free bowl of soup with his haircut, but the movie also has an undeniable momentum to it that is cinematically compelling and climaxes with the bone-crunching, deliriously satisfying duel.
Unlike me, The New Yorker’s critic and resident virtue-signaler Richard Brody actually despised the film because it wasn’t feminist enough, calling it a “wannabe #MeToo movie”.
Brody got the vapors because Scott dared show the rape of Marguerite twice – once from Jacques’ perspective and once from Marguerite’s. To be clear, the rape is uncomfortable, it’s a rape after all, but it isn’t gratuitous, there’s no nudity and it’s as tasteful as it could be under the circumstances.
Despite this, Brody writes of the rape scene, “I was gripped with unease—not with horror but with a queasy sense of witnessing a visual exploitation of that horror.”
Brody, I’d like to remind you, wasn’t filled with any unease, but rather ecstatic glee, as he once gushed over the Netflix film Cuties, which graphically hyper-sexualized 11-year-old girls to an alarming degree, calling it “extraordinary”.
Maybe if Marguerite were an 11-year-old, scantily-clad girl Brody would’ve felt less queasy about The Last Duel’s rape scene, who knows?
Brody closes his review by chastising Scott, claiming he should’ve displayed “…the cinematic artistry and, even more, the cinematic ethic…” to not “…show the rape even once.”
According to Brody, Scott should have “put the cinematic onus on…himself – to affirm that Le Gris raped Marguerite, to believe her not because Scott himself created his own image of ostensible veracity to justify and prove her claim but because she said so.”
This is Brody turning the virtue signaling up to eleven by basically saying Ridley Scott didn’t rigorously enough embrace the ethic of “believe all women”.
The buffoonish Brody and his ilk are why no artist should ever try to pander to the insidiously woke. No matter what you do, it’ll never be enough. Nuance is never allowed, only reverence for the cause and compliance with the woke’s ever-changing demands.
The bottom line is that The Last Duel definitely has flaws, it’s most potentially fatal one being that it tried to appease the unpleasant and unpleasable #MeToo woke mob. But thanks to Ridley Scott’s craftsmanship, it’s a well-made enough movie to overcome its considerable shortcomings and short-sightedness to ultimately be deemed worthy of a watch.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This documentary is devoid of insights and only serves up the same old insipid ideology of identity politics. The film ‘s manipulative thesis uses Covid as a cudgel to divide instead of unite and therefore reinforces the current power structure.
The Covid pandemic has been a difficult time for all of us, except of course for documentary filmmakers, who seem to be living through the most booming of boom times.
In recent months the much-hyped HBO documentaries Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenter: 9/11 – 2021 ½ and Nanfu Wang’s, In the Same Breath, have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to tackle the tantalizing topic of the Covid pandemic.
Now Netflix is getting into the Covid documentary game with Oscar winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s Convergence: Courage in Crisis, which began streaming on Tuesday, October 12th.
The film’s thesis is clearly stated as “While Covid-19 exacerbates vulnerabilities across the world, unsung heroes in all levels of society help turn the tide toward a brighter future.”
If you want to truly understand the intellectual impotence and manufactured manipulation of Convergence: Courage in a Crisis, one need only watch the final few minutes as it concludes with a montage of ordinary folks from across the globe singing the song “Lean on Me” in unison.
This scene sparked my PTSD and I began having ferocious flashbacks to the cringe-fest that was the bevy of self-righteous Hollywood celebrities singing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem “Imagine” back in the Spring of 2020. Yikes.
What precedes that sanguine sing-along of “Lean on Me” is just as contrived and seems just as fake as the sing-along itself.
Convergence, like seemingly every other Covid documentary, is devoid of insight because it’s incapable of actually focusing on Covid, and instead uses Covid as a delivery system for its various political, social and cultural agendas.
For example, the film follows the stories of nine different people and couples as they navigate the peril of the pandemic and selflessly help others and fight the disease. These folks live across the globe in London, Miami, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paolo, Lima, Oxford and Wuhan and do such varied things as treat the sick, clean hospital rooms, drive doctors to clinics and ambulances into poor neighborhoods.
Apparently though, according to Convergence anyway, the only people who were both deeply affected by Covid and also who fought most valiantly against it, were people of color, as they make up eight of the nine stories.
The lone white face featured in the film is Oxford Vaccinologist, Professor Sarah Gilbert, and she gets minimal screen time as she is treated as more an inconvenience to the film’s thesis than as a story worth watching.
A strange example of the film’s political bent is found in the story of Hassan Akkad, a Syrian refugee living in London. Akkad gets a job cleaning the Covid ward in a hospital and uses social media to protest the British government’s decision to not include immigrants like him working as porters and janitorial staff in hospitals in their “bereavement scheme” - which would grant “indefinite leave to remain” status for family members of any immigrant workers who died from Covid.
According to Akkad, the Assad regime tortured him and is currently bombing hospitals, a claim which should be taken with a grain of salt considering director von Einsiedel’s documentary The White Helmets is dubious in its veracity, but even though Akkad is living a good life in London, instead of being grateful he complains that he and his girlfriend deserve better immigration “status”.
Another example of the film’s insipid ideology is that it declares that Covid isn’t the only pandemic around, that there’s also pandemics of inequality, racism, poverty and “misguided nationalism”. How original.
Of course, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter get a good bit of attention, mostly through the story of Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician and activist in Miami.
When Henderson gets “racially profiled” by a cop in front of his own house during the pandemic, and his daughter witnesses the event through security cameras, Henderson claims the incident “robbed his child of her innocence”. I’m no fan of the law enforcement community but if you’re concerned about the loss of innocence of black children, blaming the police is about as obtuse as it gets when you consider black on black violence and the eroding morality and ethics of the wider culture.
Dr. Henderson dreams of a sort of utopia of equity being born out of the dystopia of Covid, a notion also favored by World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Teydros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Dr. Teydros goes so far as to proudly espouse the eye-rolling slogan “Build Back Better” and claims that “opportunities are born from crisis.”
That same sort of sentiment is how we got the War on Terror and the atrocity of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and got billions in bailout money to Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007/08. If past is prologue, the idea of using Covid as a catalyst for some great change that will usher in a glorious world of wonder is a chilling proposition that will only further empower the powerful and further enrich the wealthy.
Ultimately, I found Convergence to be an infuriating and emotionally manipulative exercise that decided to use Covid as a cudgel to divide people rather than unite them, thus deceptively reinforcing the status quo.
Covid doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone and, contrary to the propaganda of this documentary, we’d be better off looking beyond identity when it comes to solving big problems because once something becomes about identity, it stops being about anything else, most especially the truth. The insidiously manipulative and meaningless Convergence is glaring proof of that.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Hello readers! Just wanted to share with you all the premiere episode of my new film review series for RT, The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.
First up…The Sopranos prequel - The Many Saints of Newark. Hope you enjoy and thanks for watching!
©2021
To: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, RAF Exchange Officer
From: Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, U.S. Space Force
CC: Dr. Strangelove – The War Room, General Buck Turgidson – Joints Chiefs of Staff, President Merkin Muffley – President of the United States of America.
Dear Captain Mandrake –
I regret to inform you that the Russians have once again beat us to the punch in the space race, this time by shooting the first feature film in space, and I’m deeply concerned that all American’s precious bodily fluids are now in grave danger.
Let me explain, Mandrake. For my entire life as a proud American, I was dutifully marinated in establishment media propaganda that long ago indoctrinated me with the holy belief that all things Russian are nefarious and evil. It was through this lens of star-spangled truth that I read the news that Russia had successfully sent actress Yulia Peresild (Battle of Sevastopol – 2015) and director Klim Shipenko to the International Space Station in order to shoot a feature length film in space, something never before accomplished.
What makes this space-based movie shoot for the film Challenge, which tells the tale of an emergency mission to the international space station to tend to an ailing cosmonaut, all the more villainous, is that it beat Hollywood legend Tom Cruise in the moviemaking-space-race, as the Mission Impossible star had hoped to be the first to pull off the stunt with the help of our friends at NASA and SpaceX.
Russians have long been scoring firsts when it comes to the space race against us, Mandrake, as they put the first satellite (Sputnik), first dog (Laika), first person (Yuri Gagarin) and first woman (Valentina Tereshkova) into space and also did the first space-walk (Alexei Leonov), but none of those victories came at the expense of American icon Tom Cruise.
Yes, we did beat those commie bastards (and we all know they’re still commies because a commie leopard can never change its spots!) by having Stanley Kurbick shoot a fake “moon landing” in Burbank…oops…that’s the pure-grain alcohol talking, please disregard that last statement. What I meant to say is that at least we beat those Rooskies to the moon. But still, Mandrake, I can’t help but feel that we’ve taken a hit on this one.
To add to my aggravation the New York Times is reporting that Dmitri Rogozin, head of the Russian state space agency Roscosmos, “hopes the mission will make ‘a truly serious work of art and a whole new develop of the promotion of space technologies’, in order to attract young talent to Russia’s space program.”
A movie as a “serious work of art”? How un-American can you get? Ami right, Mandrake?
Furthering my irritation is that NBC News reports that Rogozin said, “Movies long have become a powerful instrument of propaganda”, and that he hoped this new film would “counter the West’s attempts to ‘humiliate’ the Russian space program.” Can you believe he just openly admitted that this commie Russian movie is propaganda, Mandrake?
Personally, I’m proud to live in a free country that doesn’t manipulate movie audiences with mindless militarism and nationalist narratives meant to propagandize and indoctrinate them. By the way, Mandrake, did I ever tell you that my favorite Tom Cruise movie is Top Gun? I loved it when he slaughtered those MiG flying Soviet sons of bitches at the end.
Mandrake, understand this, as a devoted fan of Rachel Maddow and a devout consumer of American corporate media, I’m smart enough to connect the dots regarding this Russian movie-making space venture and can no longer sit back and remain quiet about the true nature of this devious mission.
I confidently declare to you that this mission is about using a mysterious microwave weapon, the same one used against our noble and loving intelligence agency operatives in Havana and across the globe, to sap and impurify all American’s precious bodily fluids.
Just like the mainstream media, I have no proof or any clear understanding of the plan, or how it works, or if this mysterious microwave weapon that impurifies American’s precious bodily fluids even exists, but that won’t stop me from acting against it.
To counter this cinematic microwave space-attack I believe we need to put into motion Operation Starlet Starship. If you’ll remember, Operation Starlet Starship gathers together every nubile young starlet in Hollywood, along with a select group of government and military leaders, like us, as well as Tom Cruise, and sends us into space so that we can run a breeding program in order to repopulate the U.S. after the microwave weapons attack wipes out all precious bodily fluids of every American.
I believe it was Buck Turgidson who came up with the idea of Operation Starlet Starship, and he recommended a Starlet to Stodgy Old Man ratio of 10-to-1. Wise old bird that General Turgidson.
If we can’t round up the requisite number of starlets, I suppose another option is to just get Tom Cruise up to space immediately and have him shoot an all-American, non-propaganda movie where he kills some evil commie cosmonauts as he dismantles their microwave weapon before it impurifies all our precious and vastly superior bodily fluids.
I’d love to see that movie, Mandrake, almost as much as most Americans would want to see all of Hollywood shot into deep space and never seen again. Hopefully we can get Tom Cruise into space before the Russian’s cinematic space plan gets too far advanced!
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
‘A Clockwork Orange’ is fifty years old and rings as even more true today than it did in 1971.
Kubrick’s masterwork of sex and violence is an insightful work of art that is deeply relevant to our depraved modern era.
Fifty-years-ago the Beethoven-loving Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) donned his droog uniform of all white, false eye-lashes (on one eye), a bowler hat and prominent codpiece, and sang and danced into our twisted hearts with his brutally ironic and ironically brutal rendition of “Singin’ in the Rain”.
Yes, it’s been fifty years since A Clockwork Orange, director Stanley Kubrick’s controversial masterpiece, was unleashed upon the public. Apparently, time flies when you’re busy doing all that old in-out in-out and ultra-violence.
Kubrick’s highly-stylized, now iconic film, which was chock full of sex and violence and sexual-violence, shocked many, as even esteemed film critic Pauline Kael notoriously lambasted the film and called Kubrick a “pornographer”.
I recently bellied up to the Korova Milk Bar, put my feet up on a distractingly attractive nude mannequin, downed some Moloko-Plus (with drencrom) and re-watched the film and discovered that Kael is still egregiously wrong and that Kubrick’s vision has only gained in strength over the years.
Seeing the movie through the eyes of 2021 is an alarming exercise, not because the film is bad pornography but because the world of A Clockwork Orange bears an uncomfortable resemblance to our own.
The film is set in a dystopia that is both decaying yet decadent, where every relationship and inter-action is clouded by a will to power and will to pleasure that dehumanizes everything it touches. Alex’s universe is authoritarian and cruel on both an individual and institutional level, where everything and everyone is deeply marinated in a corrosive moral and ethical corruption. Sound familiar?
Turn on a television, read a newspaper or wade into the fetid swamp that is social media and you’ll experience the same ghastly, grotesque world Alex inhabited with only minor details being different.
Like violent cops, flag-waving militarists, MAGA members, Black Lives Matter, identity politics adherents, CRT proponents, or cancel culture Twitter mobs, for Alex and his droogs, cruelty isn’t a bug – it’s a feature, as it gets their blood pumping and gives their meaningless lives a momentary purpose.
Another striking similarity between the film’s world and our own is that everything is performative.
Whether it be the droogs fight against Billy Boy and his Nazi adorned gang – which is reminiscent of an Antifa v Proud Boys battle where the anti-fascists are just as fascist as the fascists they fight, occurs under a proscenium arch, or his infamous song and dance as he assaults the Alexander couple, or his on-stage humiliation under the spell of the Ludovico technique, or his smiling, steak-eating photo-op with the Minster of the Interior, Alex is always performing. And so it is with our time, where social media has morphed both the mundane and the monstrous and the personal and the political into performance art.
The most intriguing revelation of my re-watch was the realization that Alex’s odyssey down the bloody brick road of A Clockwork Orange is a journey to the most exalted position of power in any decaying and inverted civilization, that of victim.
Alex is a sort of anti-Christ, not in the sense that he is Satan but rather that his suffering ultimately does not bring about any personal or spiritual catharsis, but rather solidifies in him the fallen nature of man.
Like the apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey who evolve to use bones as weapons, victimhood just becomes another tool for Alex to reap violence. When he is labelled a “victim of the modern age” the wily Alex quickly recognizes that moniker as a powerful new weapon and thoroughly embraces it.
This evolution doesn’t turn Alex from a barbaric beast into a beatified being, but instead makes him an even more monstrous predator able to swim with a higher class of sharks, namely the Minister of the Interior who fills Alex’s gob with filet in front of a mindless press who eats up the story like Alex does his well-served meal.
In our current age where victimhood reigns supreme, there are hordes of eager new Alex’s yearning for this ultimate superweapon, and none of them even care a lick about Ludwig Van. These self-declared victims know to exploit their stories to gain power, while others emulate that manipulation and conjure victimhood where none exists in order to elevate their social status and bludgeon their enemies. Of course, the establishment media drink up this insidious victimhood narrative like its Moloka Plus with Vellocet.
Re-watching A Clockwork Orange made it abundantly clear that a movie like this, as great as it is, could never be made in a cultural climate like ours.
The film is too bold, too brash, too brazen in its honest yet stylized depiction of the foibles and failures of humanity and our society, and to unflinching in its artistic honesty and insight.
In addition, Kubrick, despite the fact he is one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time, would be deemed too ‘problematic’ and his politics too amorphous to pass the cancel culture test of 2021.
The film also features a prodigious amount of nudity and violence which in our oddly and performatively puritanical times would make it a no go for the corporate entities of Hollywood, which is ironic since our country and culture is so steeped in actual pornography and real-life violence.
Thankfully A Clockwork Orange did get made and it was a great film in 1971 and is even greater when seen in the context of 2021. Do yourself a favor and go watch it and see that Kubrick wasn’t just a cinematic genius, he was a prophet.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!****
My Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This atrocity isn’t just terrible, its toxic, as it tries to make hating white women culturally cool.
When people inquire about what I do for a living and I tell them I’m a film critic, they often ask, “what’s that like?” My pat answer is “it’s better than digging ditches.”
After having suffered through the atrociously awful new Black Entertainment Television original movie Karen, I realize that statement isn’t true, as I would’ve been better off spending that hour and half digging a ditch in which to bury myself alive.
Karen tells the story of Malik and Imani, a young black couple who move into a mostly white suburb of Atlanta, and “Karen” is their white racist neighbor Karen Drexler, who’s like the creature from the white lagoon, as menacing music accompanies her every appearance on screen.
The word ‘Karen’ is a slur against busybody white women, so not surprisingly, every white woman in Karen is racist, either overtly or covertly, but Karen Drexler is really racist. If racism were sport Karen would be Muhammed Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth combined.
The movie opens with a shot from above of “Black Lives Matter” written in chalk on a street, and then Karen comes in and dumps water on it and starts frantically scrubbing it out. Subtle.
If that didn’t clue you in that Karen REALLY hates black people, the pictures of confederate soldiers on her bathroom walls as well as her confederate flag soap dispenser (I kid you not) should do the trick.
Karen is a widow and stay-at-home mom to two children, a teenage boy and a third-grade girl. Somehow neither of her children are racist, in fact, her third-grade daughter is so not-racist she has a black boyfriend named Kobe…and no I’m not making any of this up.
Karen is also the president of the Homeowners Association (HOA) for the Harvey Hill Homes, named after a confederate politician, and she wields her presidential power like a true tyrant. The only resistance is from Jan, an Asian board member, who dutifully points out all of the racist assumptions of the HOA, including correcting white people that they should use the term “African-American” instead of “black”. Good to know.
Now if you think Karen is bad, wait ‘til you get a load of her brother Mike Wind (yes, there’s actually a character named Mike Wind), an Atlanta cop who belongs to a racist secret society, “The Brotherhood”, that reaches throughout law enforcement, from cops to District Attorneys to judges.
As for Malik and Imani, they’re the most laughable cardboard cutout characters imaginable, with Malik working at a “community center” and Imani a “successful blogger”. Eye roll.
The couple says things to each other like, “you are a strong, beautiful and woke black man, and that’s why I married you”, and “you’re a college-educated, socially-aware, beautiful black woman”, and finish every sentence with the word “baby”. Cringe.
Speaking of cringe, Malik and Imani are having fertility issues, which may be linked to Imani’s reluctance to “bring a baby into this messed up racist world” with its “pandemics, police killing us and racism”. I was surprised to see that MSNBC didn’t get a screenwriting credit.
Eventually Karen is caught on video doing ‘Karen’ things and it goes viral so she turns her racism up to eleven. Her brother Mike unleashes his racism too and conspiracies and more bad cinema ensue.
Trying to point out the egregious sins of this asinine movie is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500, but the turn the film takes in its final scenes is particularly egregious to the point of being insulting.
After all the flaccid drama, the movie ends with Ben Crump, the real-life lawyer for the family of George Floyd, giving a press conference with Malik and Imani standing next to him while accompanied by a trumpet player on the stage with them playing “America the Beautiful”. I shit you not.
As Crump’s shameless and very poorly-delivered speech rambles on the film cuts to the sign for the Harvey Hill Homes being changed to John Lewis Homes, thanks to new HOA president Imani. Then as Crump impotently utters the meant-to-be-profound final line “all lives can’t matter, until black lives matter too!”, we see Malik and a pregnant Imani standing at the door to their house staring deeply into the camera. Yikes.
Look, this movie is, at its very best, a ludicrous Saturday Night Live skit gone woefully awry. The script is garbage, the dialogue consistently laughable, the acting atrocious and the directing so dreadful as to be criminal.
Obviously, I loathed this steaming sack of crap, but this movie isn’t just bad, it’s toxic, because it’s marinated in the same mindless identity-based hate it allegedly claims to despise, but because that hate is directed at white women it’s deemed culturally acceptable.
If you’re one of those delusional, virtue signaling woke white women who has bought into the Black Lives Matter moral panic and believes America is in the grip of an epidemic of racism, you may consider yourself one of the ‘good ones’, but Karen disagrees, as it paints all white women as nefarious Karens at heart.
Just like the pernicious press, patronizing politicians and pandering corporations that stoke the fires of racial resentment and use emotionally manipulative misinformation to dupe sentimental simpletons, Karen is a relentlessly shallow, viciously vapid and rabidly racist movie that makes a mockery of a serious subject matter in an attempt to make money and spread anti-white animus.
If only someone would complain or call the cops on this movie and get this atrocity cancelled. Where’s a Karen when you really need one?
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dismal and disappointing directing effort from Clint Eastwood that features some utterly embarrasing performances and a painfully thin script.
Hollywood icon Clint Eastwood has long been an avatar for America. From the phenomenal spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone to Dirty Harry to his genre closing masterpiece Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood has been an archetypal figure embodying America’s sense of itself and its masculinity.
Eastwood’s new movie Cry Macho, which he directs and stars in, isn’t in the same cinematic ballpark as Unforgiven or Dirty Harry, in fact, it’s a pretty dreadful movie, but that doesn’t mean it lacks archetypal insight.
Cry Macho features Eastwood once again mirroring America, but this time he unintentionally reveals a deeply delusional nation in steep decline.
The film tells the story of Mike Milo (Eastwood), a very old ranch hand hired by wealthy Texan Howard Polk to get his wayward teenage son, Rafo and pet rooster named Macho, from Mexico out of the clutches of Rafo’s drug dealing, abusive mother.
It is important at this juncture to unequivocally salute Clint Eastwood for making Cry Macho. Directing a movie requires a Herculean effort. Starring in a movie takes a super-human amount of energy. Clint Eastwood not only directing but starring in a movie at the age of 91 is a stunning and miraculous achievement.
While I have been highly critical of many of Eastwood’s late-stage films, and rightfully so, that does not diminish in my eyes his singular position in the history of American cinema and the breadth of his acting and directing career.
I respect Eastwood’s continued ambition and work ethic (but certainly question his work style) but I refuse to let sentimentality cloud my judgement of his work.
Eastwood has been starring in movies for 57 years, and while he’s never been a great actor, he’s always been a formidable and compelling screen presence. But Clint Eastwood is 91-years-old, and while he’s robust for a 91-year-old, that doesn’t make it any less delusional that he cast himself as a character that is 40 in the book upon which the movie is based. Hell, Eastwood even turned down this same role back in the 80’s when he was a much more age appropriate.
At 91, Eastwood doesn’t just seem old, but elderly and fragile, as he moves like an extra on Night of the Living Dead. The sight of him breaking horses, dancing the night away and punching thugs, beggars belief.
When a woman less than half his age is so overcome with sexual-attraction she tries to seduce him, and another about half his age falls madly in love with him, it’s utterly absurd.
This aggressive self-delusion is the perfect embodiment of the current state of the American empire, which is in a sorry state but sees the ruggedly handsome Clint Eastwood of 1965 in the mirror instead of the more accurate reflection of the feeble, infirm and geriatric Clint Eastwood of today.
This level of delusion is equivalent to those American voters who convinced themselves that Joe Biden wasn’t a dementia-addled, establishment whore or that Donald Trump was anything but a bloated, bloviating reality tv buffoon.
Like so much of America and American culture, Cry Macho is a cheap, sloppy, dramatically and narratively incoherent venture that features some of the worst acting you’ll ever see. When the best actor in your movie is a rooster, you’ve got serious problems.
Eastwood is famous, or infamous, for shooting minimal takes on his films in order to stay on time and on budget. When his cast consists of all-time greats like Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman and Richard Harris, as it did on Unforgiven, this approach can work incredibly well. When, in an attempt to cut corners and save money, the cast is loaded with unknowns, as it is on Cry Macho, then the results can be frighteningly amateurish, which is painfully similar to the cast of characters currently starring in the stale drama of American politics. Who among us doesn’t think a rooster would be a significant upgrade from Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or any of the other vacuous and vapid villains inhabiting Washington?
Cry Macho, much like Unforgiven thirty years ago, highlights Eastwood wrestling with the darker side of his uniquely American archetype.
In Unforgiven he grappled with the ramifications of the violence he portrayed on-screen and that the American ethos unleashed upon the world. In Cry Macho the meditation is not nearly as profound, but it’s certainly there.
The teenage Rafo, one of the countless two-dimensional, third-world characters in the film that can either be a sinner or a saint and nothing in-between, is uncomfortably desperate to prove his masculinity, as Mike points out when he tells him how odd it is for “a man to name his cock Macho”.
Eastwood saying the lines “the macho thing is overrated” and “they don’t like that macho stuff in America” to Rafo feels like a frank admission that America has become so hyper-feminized that even Clint Eastwood, the archetype of American masculinity, is now admitting defeat.
But the most insightful dialogue comes from Rafo, who confronts Eastwood’s Mike and rips into him, and by extension, eviscerates the notion of American exceptionalism, when he says, “you used to be tough, now you’re weak…you used to be strong, and now you’re nothing.”
That’s uncomfortably insightful as the decrepit Clint Eastwood of today perfectly reflects the current state of America, as he’s delusional, infirm and feeble. The reality is that America pretending it’s anything but a decadent nation in a death spiral doesn’t change that fact, it just maintains the facade for those too frightened to admit the truth.
This is reminiscent of when Rafo continuously defends his pet rooster by telling Mike, “he’s not a chicken, he’s Macho!” Calling a chicken ‘Macho”, doesn’t change the fact that it’s a chicken, and sooner or later it will end up sliced and diced on the dinner table.
I wish Cry Macho was a better movie because it has something to say and didn’t say it very well, but the one obvious take away is that if the once-great but now over-the-hill Clint Eastwood is the embodiment of modern American masculinity, now is definitely the time to cry macho.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW****
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie musical really sucks. Just a dreadful piece of amateurish trash.
Amazon Studio’s new Cinderella, written and directed by Kay Cannon, is a jukebox musical that sets out to upend the old-fashioned fairy tale by injecting a powerful dose of girl power into its traditionalist veins.
Starring pop singer Camilla Cabello this woke re-telling now streaming on Amazon Prime, which might have been considered ideologically edgy in 1956, is a bland, flat concoction that looks as unappealing as it sounds.
To promote the new movie, cast members Cabello, Idina Menzel, Billy Porter and James Corden (also a producer of the film) recently got into costume and did a flash mob at various Los Angeles intersections where they sang the grating Jennifer Lopez hit “Let’s Get Loud”.
After having seen a video of this occurrence, which included Corden sexually thrusting his hips in a mouse costume, I’ve been, like Winston Smith, haunted by rodent filled nightmares.
After having watched the movie itself, I only wish I could’ve been at that intersection when the mob of the thirsty and famous broke out and done the world a favor by running over every one of these annoying fools. At least then I could’ve spent the hour and fifty-three-minute run time of the movie hosing Corden’s copious innards from the underside of my car rather than suffering through his bloated performance on screen. (It is important to note that this paragraph is not an endorsement of hit and run or encouragement of violence of any kind against anyone, particularly James Corden…I am just making a dark joke at that annoying fat fuck’s expense.)
Putting the Cinderella story through the woke wash cycle seems like a painfully-typical-for-the-times, Disney channel inspired, algorithm assisted experience. The plot they came up with was that the new Cinderella is a fashion designer who, along with all the other women in the kingdom, is suffering under the patriarchy and its sexist traditions.
As everyone knows, Cinderella is supposed to marry the prince, but in this new wokelandia, she instead literally says, “I choose me!”, and decides on her blossoming fashion design career over love. You see, this Cinderella doesn’t want to be confined to the basement or the Royal box. She wants to toss the glass slipper and shatter the glass ceiling. You go, girl!
Of course, Cinderella ultimately gets to have both her career and love when Prince Robert, played by Nicholas Galitzine who, how do I put this…doesn’t exactly seem like the type of guy who is into the ladies, gives up his bollocks, oops, I mean his claim to the crown, and follows Cinderella in her fashion career.
You’ll be glad to know that Prince Robert’s sister, Gwen, an ambitious Hillary Clinton type bursting with so many great ideas that none of the men ever listen to, now becomes ruler of the kingdom. Girl Power rules!!
If that all sounds really egregiously dreadful to you, then you are not alone.
The problems with Cinderella aren’t just the relentless girlboss bullshit, it’s also the fact that the movie looks and feels like a bunch of ten-year-olds lip-synching to the radio as they put on a play in their grandmother’s backyard.
It has also boasts a nearly incoherent script, is amateurishly directed, embarrassingly choreographed and abysmally acted. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
A big problem with the film is that its lead, Camilla Cabello, is an unappealing and unattractive screen presence who seems less a fairy princess in waiting than a rookie waitress stumbling through her maiden shift at a renaissance fare.
The first forty-five minutes of the movie are run of the mill garbage, but then the awfulness goes into hyper-drive when the king of crap arrives, James Corden, who in an uncomfortable bit of typecasting plays an annoying fat mouse.
To add insult to injury, at about the same time Billy Porter (acclaimed star of Kinky Boots and Pose) brings his gay minstrel show to the festivities in the form of the character Fab G, which is described in the film’s promotional material as a “genderless fairy godparent”. Fab G is, you guessed it, “FABULOUS!”, but unfortunately is not genderless, as she describes herself as a “fairy godmother” in the film, which horrified me no end as it seems aggressively binary. Cancel Cinderella for its binary conformism and trans-hate!
As for the rest of the cast, Pierce Brosnan and Minnie Driver play the king and queen and their work seems to embody the attitude that ‘the mortgage ain’t gonna pay for itself’, which as we all know…it isn’t.
Idina Menzel plays the wicked step-mother, but thankfully she isn’t really wicked because women aren’t capable of being bad in wokelandia because they have no agency, instead the wicked step-mother is just a misunderstood victim of the patriarchy.
The music in Cinderella, which features songs from Janet Jackson, Queen, Madonna, Ed Sheeran among many others, falls decidedly flat because the performances are dull and the arrangements so predictable, they seem to be done by a second-grade music teacher.
I understand this is the world we live in and we have to suffer through these uber-woke movies and tv shows that only care about “the message” and not the quality of the product or its entertainment value, but this feminist monstrosity is beyond the pale.
It astounds me that in our already hyper-feminized to the point of absurdity culture, which denigrates men at every turn and intentionally conflates true masculinity with toxic masculinity, that Hollywood still feels the need to so aggressively indoctrinate young girls and boys into this rancid woke nonsense.
We’ve become a vapid and vacuous nation of clowns, cuckolds and eunuchs, and Amazon Studios, James Corden, Billy Porter and the awful new Cinderella are a sign of how far and how fast we’ve fallen, and we aren’t getting up.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
On this episode Barry and I reveal our mastery of sign language by silently discussing the Apple TV movie CODA, which stands for 'children of deaf adults'. The discussion hits upon such diverse topics as the luxury of sleeping on a bus, a Hallmark version of Good Will Hunting, deaf actors vs actors playing deaf, and how John McTiernan would make a great deaf heist movie.
Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 46: CODA
Thanks for listening!
©2021
New HBO documentary ‘In the Same Breath’ examines the horror of Covid and the Chinese and American government’s initial misinformation campaigns in response to the outbreak.
The film shows that trusting government, whether it be socialist or democratic in nature, is a fool’s errand.
In the Same Breath, the flawed but at times fascinating new documentary airing on HBO and HBO Max, chronicles the inept response and often deceptive practices of both the Chinese and U.S. governments in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the power of propaganda to shape perception.
The documentary features some harrowing and horrifying footage from within Wuhan during the height of the Covid outbreak. Scenes of patients gasping for air and dying, and families struggling to decide whether their elderly mother should die in a hospital parking lot waiting for care that will never come or admit death’s inevitability back in the comfort of their apartment, are gut-wrenching.
One of the most unnerving sequences in the film is when a CCTV camera captures the very beginning of the pandemic when it records a cavalcade of people from the Wuhan fish market coming to a clinic with a cough and high fever. The doctor who greets and treats them then develops the same symptoms and goes from hospital to hospital looking for care, but is turned away every time, and later dies.
Director Nanfu Wang, best known for her searing documentary One Child Nation about China’s one child policy, obviously has insights into the Chinese mindset and she is unforgiving when it comes to the Chinese government.
In the Same Breath spotlights the relentless drumbeat of misinformation from the Chinese government that at first diminished the disease’s power, with officials declaring it doesn’t transmit human to human and dissenters arrested for their heresy. When the truth became undeniable, the government shifts into propaganda mode and stories of brave front line medical workers flood the Chinese tv market, with the message that the government and people of China are working hand in hand to defeat the Covid menace takes hold.
Wang, an American citizen born and raised in China, is a skilled documentarian who has a keen eye for Chinese propaganda but a bit of a blind spot for her own American political bias.
The two main villains of In the Same Breath are the corrupt Chinese government and the incompetent Trump administration. Both are deserving of scorn, but at least in the American side of the coronavirus pandemic story, this documentary feels a little shallow as it isn’t just the Trump administration that has misinformed and deceived regarding coronavirus, it’s been the entire political and media establishment.
The documentary almost seems quaint when it ponders potential Trump authoritarianism when in his absence vicious tribalism and covid misinformation have continued to flourish unabated.
To her credit, Wang does briefly highlight some Democrats as being misinformation agents too, and excoriates Dr. Anthony Fauci, for his repeated deceptions, especially early in the outbreak.
What Wang doesn’t do is challenge the orthodoxy of HBO’s decidedly liberal audience. For example, the scientists and medical professionals who signed a letter in the summer of 2020 saying that protesting against the lockdown was dangerous and but that protesting for Black Lives Matter was mandatory because of the alleged epidemic of racism in America, are never mentioned, never mind ridiculed. This egregious event is tailor made for Wang’s thesis but is undoubtedly a bridge too far for the bigwigs at HBO and their liberal audience.
She also studiously avoids the controversial lab-leak theory.
Wang’s main focus is that she’s afraid of what people in power will do to maintain and expand their power, especially during a pandemic. She highlights China’s numerous authoritarian abuses and the Chinese people’s not only acceptance of those abuses, but outright praise for them, to make her case.
This all seems very relevant to the hotly debated vaccination issue here in the U.S., but unfortunately In the Same Breath only covers 2020, so that issue is never raised.
I’m devoutly agnostic on the vaccine question, but it’s striking to me that the same Chinese tactics and techniques regarding Covid featured in the documentary are currently either being copied or mirrored by the elite in the U.S
For instance, Wang makes a strong case that China has undercounted the number of dead in order to make the government seem more effective, turning a possible 30,000 dead in Wuhan into just 3,000.
In contrast, the U.S. corporate media have used a bait and switch approach where the highest number is always the one featured, possibly in an attempt to scare people into compliance. For example, in the early days of Covid the death toll made headlines, then it subtly shifted to the number of positive tests, and now to the percentage of sick who are unvaccinated.
Wang also expresses frustration with the U.S. government’s refusal to share accurate data with the American public, a sentiment she admittedly shares with ‘deplorable’ Trumpers.
China bullied people into silence and compliance by making emotional and nationalistic pleas, while in the U.S., the argument for people to take vaccines is also emotional – do no harm to grandma, and collective – we need to work together for herd immunity.
The bullying impulse is strong in the pro-vaccine movement too, as restricting liberties and requiring vaccine passports for government aid have remarkably become the default position among elites, many liberals and the media, despite resulting in obvious racial disparities.
As for In the Same Breath, it’s a flawed documentary, but if viewers can overcome its limiting bias and see the authoritarian forest for the partisan trees, it’s worth watching for no other reason than to remind of the insidious and nefarious nature of power and how easily freedom is suffocated by governments meant to protect it.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!***
My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A significant upgrade over 2016’s Suicide Squad, this movie is a stylized, at times amusing, blood-soaked comic book comedy that boasts a shockingly subversive political message at its heart.
This article contains spoilers to ‘The Suicide Squad’.
Despite garnering mostly good reviews and generating positive word of mouth, I didn’t watch director James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad when it hit theatres and HBO Max on August 5th here in the U.S.
I was, pardon the pun, ‘gun-shy’ about the film because I’d suffered through the previous cinematic crucifixion that was Suicide Squad, the David Ayers directed movie monstrosity from 2016.
Still bearing the scars from the Suicide Squad atrocity, I expected Gunn’s new pseudo reboot, oh-so-creatively titled The Suicide Squad, to be more of the lifeless, corporatized, Pentagon approved propaganda that passes for blockbuster entertainment nowadays.
That expectation was based on the fact that Warner Brothers is notorious for squeezing the artistic life out of their superhero movies and that leaked documents revealed that the Department of Defense were, not surprisingly, nefariously involved behind the scenes in the making of The Suicide Squad, no doubt assisting in extraction of anything remotely interesting from the final product in exchange for the use of military members as extras and the use of an Osprey aircraft.
But then a funny thing happened when I watched The Suicide Squad, I actually found a shockingly subversive movie wrapped in the usual corporate comic book cloak.
Now maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight, but it seems to me that Gunn’s greatest accomplishment with The Suicide Squad was sneaking its remarkably subversive political message past his controlling corporate overlords and censorious Department of Defense bureaucrats.
How else to explain a mainstream comic book film that boasts ‘9-11 was an inside job’ symbolism at its narrative heart, and anti-American imperialism at its sub-textural center?
The plot of The Suicide Squad is that two ‘suicide squads’ of super-villains are taken out of Belle Reve prison in Louisiana and sent on a mission by the U.S. government to invade a small island off of South America, Corto Maltese, which was ruled by an American-friendly dictator now deposed by a hostile military coup.
The first group of suicide squaders hit the Corto Maltese beach like the Bay of Pigs invasion force, and meet a similarly gruesome fate.
In another tinfoil hat moment, during this initial ‘Bay of Pigs’ type invasion fiasco, Blackguard (Pete Davidson) storms the beach and gets his brains blown out by a high-powered rifle, just like JFK did in Dallas, and yes, both of their heads went “back and to the left”.
When supervillain Savant (Michael Rooker) tries to run away from the fray, U.S. government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) detonates an explosive device implanted in his head in a Stalinesque lesson to the others to never retreat.
This is not exactly standard issue Pentagon propaganda.
This invasion is simply a distraction so a second suicide squad, led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and made up of Peacemaker (John Cena) – a super patriot and psychopath, Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and King Shark (Sly Stallone), can arrive unnoticed on Corto Maltese.
As the Suicide Squad go on their odyssey, they mistakenly massacre a group of rebels intent on overthrowing the anti-American military junta due to Ms. Waller’s order to “kill anything they see”.
Again, not exactly the usual pro-America message the Pentagon prefers.
The Squad’s mission is to break into a heavily fortified tower named Jotunheim that houses a powerful, one-eyed Sauron-esque alien named Starro, which can control entire populations of people by taking over their brains.
The U.S. were complicit in capturing Starfish from space and now that an unfriendly government has taken over Corto Maltese, they want the Suicide Squad to blow up Jotunheim and kill Starfish.
The Suicide Squad eventually get to Jotunheim and, hold onto your tinfoil hats, they place C4 explosives on each floor of the tower. But the plan goes awry and the explosions happen too early, thus the tower only partially collapses.
The visual similarities of the demolition of the Jotunheim to the WTC towers collapsing on 9-11 are pretty blatant, and one doesn’t have to be a “conspiracy kook” to notice them.
For instance, Bloodsport escapes the tower’s initial collapse and finds himself atop what is left of the Jotunheim, but then the floor he’s standing on collapses to the floor below, which begins a cascading collapse where each floor pancakes onto the one below with Bloodsport surfing the crumbling building to the bottom.
The symbolism when Bloodsport arrives at the bottom of the tower is striking, as he finds super-patriot Peacemaker poised to execute Ratcatcher at the behest of the American government so as to keep a computer file detailing the U.S.’s involvement in Project Starfish from ever coming to light.
Donning an Izod shirt and short shorts, and brandishing a flag-waving, violent self-righteousness, Peacemaker is Reagan’s America incarnate, who’d do anything to maintain America’s ‘shining city on a hill’ image.
In the aftermath of the tower’s collapse, Starro escapes and sets out to control or kill the entire population of Corto Maltese but the U.S. government doesn’t care as long as America’s connection to the alien is forever hidden.
Speaking of hidden, in a nod to Operation Paperclip, Jotunheim was built by Nazis who escaped Europe after World War II, which is not the only Nazi symbolism in the film. Javelin, part of the first suicide squad invasion force, is a former Olympian who uses his javelin as a weapon. He’s German, a model of Hitler’s dream of Aryan supermen, and Harley Quinn, who has a crush on him, uses his javelin to pierce the eye of Starfish and ultimately destroy the alien, with the help of hordes of hungry rats (it’s a long story).
As for Starro, the beast released by the tower’s destruction, it’s symbolic of the mindless militarism and neo-conservate group think belched up by America after the twin towers were destroyed. Similar to America’s militarism and neo-conservatism, which led to the disastrous and failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, Starfish’s invincibility is punctured by a rag-tag group with primitive weapons (javelin) assisted by the reviled that live in the shadows (rats).
With an authoritarian, deceptive, murderous American government slaughtering friendly rebels and shrugging at the massacre of innocent women and children, a super-patriotic sociopathic serial killer, Nazis and implying 9-11 government nefariousness, this movie is definitely not the usual Pentagon approved propaganda.
The Suicide Squad is, like most comic book movies, a corporate money grab and commercial for future corporate money grabs, but it’s also a movie with a gloriously subversive political message hiding in plain sight. That’s either a testament to James Gunn’s creative stealth or to the winless-in-wars-over-the-last-80-years Pentagon beginning to slip in the propaganda department too. Regardless of how the message got there, the reality is that the film’s alternative politics are one of the things that make it at least a somewhat interesting and worthwhile watch.
All Gunn had to do with the The Suicide Squad was make it not as awful as Ayer’s Suicide Squad. A major step in the direction for the project was jettisoning the abysmal dead weight of the always dreadful Will Smith as Bloodsport and casting Idris Elba in his stead. Elba is an actor, Will Smith is a poseur.
The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, with Margot Robbie and John Cena as the standouts. The elevation of the acting can be attributed to Gunn as Viola Davis was utterly abysmal in the first film but actually does pretty well in this one.
The bottom line is this, I’m no Gunn fanboy, but it’s obvious he succeeded in his task by making a very stylized comic book comedy with a rip-roaring soundtrack that is best described as a foul-mouthed, blood-soaked, raucous romp akin to a second or maybe third-rate Deadpool…and I guess that’s good enough.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
New HBO Obama doc is race-obsessed establishment pablum meant to distract from the nefarious nature of American governance
The dull and derivative docuseries chooses hagiography over history and style over substance as it white-washes the sins of America’s only black president.
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is the new three-part HBO documentary that sets out to chronicle Barrack Obama’s rise from obscurity to the highest office in the land.
The roughly five-hour series, which features no new interview with Obama but rather relies on archival footage and a plethora of sycophantic talking heads, premiered on HBO on August 3rd, and on HBO Max on August 4th, the former president’s 60th birthday. What do you get the man who has everything for his birthday? If your director Peter W. Kunhardt you give the gift of a shamelessly reverential, hagiographic documentary.
Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is one of those insipid, paint-by-numbers, deferential documentaries that is steadfastly committed to never challenging either its subject or its audience that results in a banal viewing experience painfully devoid of insights.
Designed to do nothing but placate Obama true believers with some ‘no-drama’ nostalgia, the series is resolute in its decision to never give voice to any serious oppositional perspectives. Yes, there are a few talking heads, like the brilliant Cornel West, who delicately air disagreements, but even those are couched in solemn genuflection to Saint Obama.
Not once is someone who actually opposed Obama on principle interviewed or allowed to speak for themselves. The series uses this echo chamber approach in order to appease its target audience of liberals who demand all contrarians and conflicting arguments be purged from their purview, banished forever for their heresy from the kingdom of those “on the right side of history”.
Instead, the filmmakers choose to read minds and project racial animus onto those who fought Obama.
Disagree with Obamacare? Racist! Oppose the stimulus package? Racist!
Ironically, the hyper-racial lens through which the series examines Obama’s meteoric rise and rule is less a monument to America as a racist nation than it is a testament to Obama’s failure and shocking political irrelevance just five years after leaving office, as well as to the intellectual vacuity and lack of imagination on the part of elite establishment liberals.
In this way the docu-series is the perfect revisionist modernization of the Obama myth in that it’s addiction to hyper-racism causes it to be utterly blind to any other topic.
For instance, there isn’t a single mention of Obama’s prodigious use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, but there is an extended focus on black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates being mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police.
There’s no mention of Obama’s immigration policy which resulted in massive deportations and routinely placing “kids in cages”, but there is a focus on Trump’s racist demagoguery and birtherism.
Obama’s complicity in the death and suffering in Yemen, Libya and Syria is verboten, but there is ample time spent on Obama’s love of basketball and his black-centric musical taste.
And of course, Obama’s extra-judicial assassination of American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki is memory-holed but George Zimmerman’s killing of teenager Trayvon Martin is highlighted.
This hyper-racial perspective not only allows the filmmakers to ignore Obama’s egregious sins but to also roll out a cavalcade of kiss-ass clowns like Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Charlamagne tha God, Keegan Michael Key and Jelani Cobb (an executive producer on the series) to spout vapid and impotent inanities about how white supremacy is the DNA of America. The fact that voters, the vast majority of which were not black, overwhelmingly elected a black man to the presidency, not once but twice, would seem to refute that claim.
With its maniacal focus on style over substance, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union fits perfectly into the usual establishment approach toward all things political.
Style is how Obama got elected, as his cool, thoughtful demeanor and eloquence were in stark contrast to Bush’s cowboy buffoonery. In turn, Trump’s reality tv/wrestlemania shenanigans got him elected post no-drama Obama, and Biden’s creepy grandpa routine got him elected because he contrasted Trump’s erratic freneticism (speaking of which, Biden is shown in archival footage in the documentary but never speaks, no doubt because that would alert viewers to his steep decline since his halcyon VP days).
But regardless of which specific stylistic mask is worn and by which president, its objective is to cover the never-changing agenda of the American political establishment which is imperialism and militarism overseas and corporatism and fascism at home. No matter who or what party is in charge and no matter how they behave on the surface, that insidious reality will never be challenged or changed, and this is why Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union exists…to reinforce that duplicitous and distractionary style over substance paradigm.
Obama, the first black president, wasn’t elected to change the substance of American policy, he was elected to distract from it, and this docu-series gives ample ammunition to the gullible and mindless to continue to focus on race and identity politics instead of on the voracious malignancy of U.S. policy, most specifically the cancer of America’s rigged-casino capitalism and the insatiable beast of the military/intelligence industrial complex.
In conclusion, if you’re a “Hope and Change” sucker searching for a short-lived, rather vapid injection of Obama-era nostalgia, then Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is definitely the documentary mini-series for you. But if you’re more interested in cold, hard truths and unflinching insights about Obama, his presidency and America, then this is a five-hour waste of time.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
The shutting down of ‘They Are Us’, the film about the Christchurch massacre of 2019, is the right thing to do for the wrong reason
Artists and audiences need time and emotional distance from a tragedy and trauma before they can make and appreciate any worthwhile cinema about it.
Last week pre-production for the film They Are Us, which intended to dramatize Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the killing of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist in Christchurch in 2019, was shut down due to outrage from New Zealand’s Muslim community which deemed the project “insensitive” and “obscene”.
The film, which had Rose Byrne set to star as Ardern, is now “on hold” and may have a difficult time exiting its self-induced purgatory. And maybe that’s for the best, at least for the time being.
I’m conflicted when it comes to this controversy, as I don’t believe that any group of people being offended, even righteously offended, by a film should ever stifle a project, but I also think that making a movie out of a recent tragedy is a bad idea because it rarely produces worthwhile cinema.
Generally, when a movie rushes to recount a recent tragedy it’s either cynically exploiting trauma to make a quick dollar, or it’s a piece of propaganda meant to manipulate the public.
In the case of They Are Us, it may very well be a combination of the two.
It’s highly curious to make a film focusing on a politician’s reaction to a recent real-life tragedy when that politician is still active in the political arena. It seems likely that They Are Us would be cashing in on a horrific tragedy by making a two-hour campaign commercial for Jacinda Ardern, which doesn’t exactly sound very artistically compelling.
The They Are Us controversy brought to my mind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), which told the story of Chris Kyle, a famed Navy SEAL murdered in 2013.
Kyle’s father told Eastwood “disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell”, so the director dutifully made a hagiography that played up Kyle’s legend and ignored his fabulist tales of punching Jesse Ventura, shooting carjackers and sniping looters in New Orleans.
American Sniper was a propaganda popcorn movie and made tons of money by watering down not only Kyle’s complexity but the Iraq War’s as well. While commercially successful, artistically it was ultimately forgettable as it shamelessly promoted myth in favor of exploring truth.
I’ve a sneaking suspicion They Are Us would follow the same empty path regarding Ahearn and the massacre. Truth is that time and emotional distance are needed for artists to make noteworthy cinema about tragic events and audiences to be able to make sense of them.
For example, the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Vietnam was 1968 and it took a decade before Hollywood could adequately make a movie about that war. Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first to successfully ponder the Vietnam fiasco, with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989), and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) continuing the exploration nearly a decade later.
Time and emotional distance greatly aided these films, their filmmakers and the viewers who digested them, as artists and audiences simply weren’t capable of diving into the horror of Vietnam in its immediate aftermath.
Oliver Stone has often gone back to examine the unhealed wounds of the American psyche. Twenty-eight years after JFK’s assassination he made his masterpiece JFK (1991), and twenty years after Richard Nixon’s downfall he made the brilliantly astute Nixon (1995).
The previously mentioned Vietnam war films and the Oliver Stone historical dramas succeeded artistically because they were constructed on a foundation of reason, and upon that foundation emotion and drama were built, whereas films made closer to traumatic events are usually built on a flimsy foundation of heightened emotion and therefore lack all meaning and purpose besides emoting and manipulating.
Speaking of manipulation, a perfect example of a movie exploiting an event for propaganda purposes is Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to tell the tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.
Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December of 2012, a quick year and nine months after Bin Laden’s killing, and was propaganda meant to lionize the Obama administration and the intelligence community as it played up the effectiveness of torture and played down its barbarity.
Similarly, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, premiered four and half years after 9-11 and exploited the raw emotion of that trauma to indelibly imprint upon the public’s consciousness through drama the government’s version of that heinous event.
Greengrass also made 22 July, about the 2011 massacre in Norway. 22 July came out in 2018, and like United 93, even some time had passed from the traumatic event it recounted, the emotional trauma was still too fresh. Both films are well made but the wounds they probed were too fresh for any valuable insights to be uncovered.
In contrast, Greengrass’s greatest film, Bloody Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre in the north of Ireland by British troops in 1972, came out in 2002, thirty years after the events depicted. And while that movie is viscerally jarring and emotionally unnerving, it’s also powerfully poignant and insightful in ways that United 93 and 22 July simply aren’t because it had the benefit of time, distance and perspective.
As for They Are Us, maybe a decade from now a worthwhile movie about the Christchurch massacre could be made as both artists and audiences will have had time to process that tragic event and be open to insights and interpretations of it that they’re immune to in the current, more emotionally fraught moment. Any movie made sooner than that will most assuredly only be exploiting trauma, rather exploring it for deeper meaning.
A version fo this article was published at RT.
©2021
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds
My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: YIKES!
Space Jam: A New Legacy is just more proof that LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.
This dreadful kid’s movie is a piece of desperate, shameless, self-aggrandizing marketing masquerading as entertainment.
Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James arrived in theatres and on the HBO Max streaming service on Friday.
The movie, a sequel of sorts to Michael Jordan’s 1996 blockbuster Space Jam, tells the story of LeBron and the Looney Tunes characters having to win a basketball game against the villain Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle) and the Goon Squad, a team of computerized NBA and WNBA superstars, in order to save his family from some sort of eternal damnation.
It should come as no surprise considering LeBron’s meticulous, corporatized self-promotion in recent years, from his vociferous support of Black Lives Matter to his pandering to China, that Space Jam: A New Legacy is nothing but a relentless and shameless two-hour commercial for the LeBron brand and Warner Brothers’ intellectual property.
The original Space Jam was wildly popular back in 1996, raking in $250 million at the box office, no doubt because Michael Jordan was such an iconic and beloved figure at the time.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is no Space Jam. Watching Space Jam 2 is the cinematic equivalent of stepping barefoot in a pile of dog mess baking on a sidewalk during a heatwave. It’s so bad it makes the entertaining but middling original look like a cross between Citizen Kane and Star Wars.
The biggest problem with Space Jam 2 is that LeBron James, no matter how hard he tries…and he tries very hard, is no Michael Jordan. Jordan had an undeniable charisma and magnetism to him, both on and off the court. Even basketball fans who loathed the Bulls, still loved and admired Jordan back in the day. The same cannot be said of LeBron, who is a much more polarizing figure, and whose game, while stellar, is considerably less aesthetically pleasing than Jordan’s. It also doesn’t help that LeBron doesn’t have the movie star good looks or charisma of Jordan either.
There’s no denying his greatness on the basketball court, but LeBron is not exactly Le Brando in front of a camera. For someone who has spent their entire adulthood being filmed and who does copious amounts of acting on a basketball court, it’s stunning to behold how painfully uncomfortable LeBron is on screen. They would’ve been better off casting a cigar store Indian in the lead role as LeBron is so wooden in Space Jam 2 he should be checked for termites.
LeBron is certainly a big problem for the movie, that said, he isn’t the only problem.
The film’s director, Malcolm D. Lee, is Spike Lee’s cousin, and his work on Space Jam 2, and his previous filmography, speak volumes to the insidiousness of nepotism.
Space Jam: A New Legacy also boasts a budget of over $150 million and yet remarkably appears decidedly low-rent, as the 3-D versions of the Looney Tunes characters look like unconscionably cheap amusement park mascots.
And then there is the nadir of the film, the Porky Pig rap, the less said about that the better.
Space Jam 2 is supposedly made for kids, but even for them the movie is emotionally, narratively and comedically incoherent. It’s also littered with references they’ll never understand. For instance, there’s a bit about Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bobby Knight throwing a chair at a ref, something that happened in 1985. There’s also a plethora of references to older Warner Brother’s intellectual property, like Casablanca, Mad Max, Austin Powers, The Matrix and Training Day, not exactly stuff a ten-year-old will understand or care about.
As for parents, or self-loathing childless adults, who watch Space Jam 2, they’ll quickly discover that the movie is an instantly regrettable, headache inducing, sensory overloading experience in corporate marketing run amok.
And despite all of that awfulness, my overwhelming feeling at the end of Space Jam: A New Legacy, was that I actually felt bad for LeBron. I know that is idiotic as I’m just some clown reviewing his movie and he is a billionaire basketball god and burgeoning movie business impresario, but it’s true.
What struck me was that LeBron making a blatantly self-reverential, hagiographic movie where everyone tells him he’s the greatest basketball player ever, and where he incessantly declares what a tough upbringing he had, how hard-working and disciplined he is, and what a devoted father and family man he is, is not a testament to his ego but rather a monument to his insatiable insecurity and need to be loved. This is the inverse of Michael Jordan, who was loved and validated by fans because he never needed their love and validation.
LeBron has everything…NBA titles, Hall of Fame credentials, millions of dollars, adoring fans, a great family, and yet he still desperately needs validation. He left Cleveland for Miami in search of it. He left Miami for Cleveland looking for it. He left Cleveland again and came to LA on his quest. He embraced Black Lives Matter hoping for it. He sold his soul to China in an attempt to attain it. And now he tries, once again, to mimic Michael Jordan by making Space Jam 2 in the hopes of securing it…but for LeBron, validation will remain ever elusive.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is not going to make anyone who watches it feel good, including LeBron James. The movie may fill his pockets with money but it won’t make him feel loved and validated because it can’t change the fact that he isn’t Michael Jordan, and he never will be.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Popcorn Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie is a middling Disney money grab chock full of predictable Russophobic caricatures and #MeToo pandering that doesn’t propel the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s storyline forward.
This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for the movie Black Widow.
After a two-year, Covid-induced drought, Marvel is finally back in theatres with the much-anticipated Black Widow.
Black Widow was originally set to kick off Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in May of 2020, but Covid crushed those plans and Marvel fans have had to go to the streaming service Disney Plus to get their Marvel fix in the form of the series WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki.
Black Widow, in case you’ve forgotten, is actually Natasha Romanoff, the former KGB superspy turned Avenger who is portrayed by Scarlet Johansson.
The movie Black Widow, which besides being in theatres is also available to stream on Disney Plus for a hefty fee, is set right after Captain America: Civil War and five years before all the unpleasantness with Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because, spoiler alert, Black Widow actually dies in Endgame. Consider this movie to be cinematic CPR on Natasha Romanoff.
The fear heading into Black Widow was that it would be the wokest Marvel movie yet. That fear was formed when Ms. Johansson made some pre-release noise about how she was uncomfortable with how her character was “hyper-sexualized” in earlier movies, and also that this film was going to be Marvel’s #MeToo movie.
Adding to that sentiment were tweets from various kiss-ass woke media outlets triumphantly declaring that the film “passed the Bechdel test”, which measures size and substance of female representation in a movie, and “puts men in their place and makes them “squeem”, whatever the hell that means.
It seems an odd marketing strategy to alienate half of your potential audience by having friendly media outlets tell them if they watch your film they’ll “squeem” (which sounds uncomfortably like a cross between ‘squeal’ and ‘cream’) and be put in their place…but what do I know?
After watching the movie, I can report that Black Widow is a middling, rather unremarkable and unnecessary Marvel movie that contains a heavy dose of cultural and political propaganda.
The political propaganda is pretty derivative, just some good old fashioned Cold War Russophobia. Throughout the film Russians are painted as the shallow stereotype of innately ruthless, cold-blooded, heartless killers indifferent to human suffering. In one scene Natasha watches an old Bond film, Moonraker, as a sort of knowing wink from the filmmakers about the throwback Cold War caricatures.
The cultural propaganda doesn’t come in until the final act of the movie, which not surprisingly, is also when the whole venture goes completely off the rails with megadoses of Marvel monotony.
It’s in this third act that Marvel runs the #MeToo flag up the pole and turns the movie into a metaphor for breaking the iron spell of the nefarious patriarchy that brainwashes women and takes away their freedom and choice.
The bad guy, General Dreykov, played by a terribly miscast Ray Winstone who absolutely butchers his Russian accent, is meant to embody both the misogynist patriarchy and the inherent villainy of Russians. Dreykov has stolen little girls and trained them to be killers, and if they weren’t up to snuff, killed them. Dreykov is like a Russian Jeffrey Epstein in that he controls world leaders with his army of women, except he traffics in violence, not sex, and his island is in the sky, not the Caribbean.
In a literal sense, Black Widow must defeat Dreykov so as to free his army of mind-controlled females. In a metaphorical sense, she’s fighting to free all women from the prison of the patriarchy and to exact revenge for the abuse they have suffered at its hands.
I have to say Black Widow’s painfully obvious #MeToo metaphor didn’t make me “squeem” or feel put in my place, although it did make me throw-up a little bit in my mouth. And yawn profusely.
Whether it be the insipid Russophobia or the forced MeToo stuff, the overwhelming sentiment conjured by Black Widow is one of indifference. The movie, especially in the shadow of Infinity War and Endgame, just doesn’t seem to serve any purpose at all.
That isn’t to say there’s nothing redeeming about it. Some of the performances, particularly Florence Pugh and David Harbour, are quite compelling.
Pugh, who plays Black Widow’s sister Yelena, absolutely steals the show. Watching Pugh consistently out shine her more famous scene partner Johansson was glorious to behold. Pugh is a terrific actress, but the magnetism she displays in Black Widow reveals that she’s capable of being a gigantic movie star, much bigger than Scarlett Johansson.
David Harbour, who plays Black Widow’s father, the Russian superhero Red Guardian, is also terrific. Harbour is a dynamic presence and sinks his teeth into the Marvel movie inanity with gusto.
Other performances, most notably from two usually very good actors, Rachel Weisz and the aforementioned Ray Winstone, are uncomfortably sub-par, as is Scarlet Johansson’s bland and rather diffident portrayal.
The bottom line is, if you are a devoted fan of the Marvel formula with its forgettable fights, loud chases and snarky humor, you may enjoy Black Widow even though it is meaningless in relationship to the wider MCU canon. As for me, a fair-weather Marvel fan, I found it to be a rather tepid venture, devoid of any real purpose except to line Mickey Mouse’s coffers.
If you want to avoid the vapid cultural and political propaganda that permeates Black Widow, and keep your hard-earned money from the clutches of the Disney devil, I recommend you skip the movie, you really won’t be missing anything.
A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021
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
