Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any worse - along comes 'Wonder Woman 1984'

 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Wonder Women 1984 is the horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie no one wanted but that 2020 deserves.

On Christmas Day the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84) premiered in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero origin story. The film featured a star making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time and was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.

As for Wonder Woman 1984, it is the exact opposite of Wonder Woman as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.

In Wonder Woman, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.

In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend…and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The predictably unclever lowlight of which is a 1980’s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.

Diana is no longer naïve in WW84 but the bearer of burdens, and this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited, remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.

As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point a tertiary character yells out “what the hell is going on here!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I had almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.

As for the film’s politics…if you like white male hating movies that feel like two and a half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism...Wonder Woman 1984 is the movie for you.

Wonder Woman (2017) succeeded because it wasn’t heavy handed in its cultural politics, but no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.  

The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, Steve the lone exception, are irredeemably evil and painfully one-dimensional. To prove this point there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by 80’s guys, all of them white except for an Asian guy who is apparently white guy adjacent.

White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal)- a Latino, is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by…you guessed it…evil white guys!

Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an “Egyptian” Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them…which sounds a lot like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians…but of course in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in Wonder Woman 1984 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis but Arabs.

The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot, who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar for Israel, fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.

Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia…you’ll definitely connect with WW84.

Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.

Jenkins made a name for herself with Wonder Woman, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies, but her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it did Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.

Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the 80’s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.

Jenkins doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular 80’s music in order to set tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent tv shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably there isn’t a single 80’s song in the entire film, and that is the most monstrous moviemaking malpractice imaginable!

WW84 saves the worst for last as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera meant to be profound and poignant that is pretentious and patronizing…which is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the “Imagine” viral video. In that disastrous effort she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.

A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot movie released in 2020 was “Imagine”. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as Wonder Woman 1984.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully tedious and idiotic movie that pales in comparison to the first Wonder Woman from 2017.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Midnight Sky - It's the End of George Clooney's World as We Know it...and I Feel Fine.

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The Midnight Sky is so dreadful it makes you wish the earth were uninhabitable…especially for George Clooney

Christmas season is when movie studios put out prestige films and big box office contenders. In normal times, people flock to theatres during the holidays because they’re off work and it gives them something to do with family or, in some cases, to avoid family.

This year with coronavirus closing many theatres, the studios are still using the holidays to roll out their biggest movies but now they’re using streaming services to supplement or replace theatres. For instance, on Christmas day the Pixar animated film Soul debuts on Disney + and the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 premieres in both theatres and on HBO Max.

Not to be outdone, Netflix’s early entry into the big movie holiday sweepstakes, The Midnight Sky – a film with a $100 million budget directed by and starring George Clooney, was released on December 23rd.

I’m sure Clooney and Netflix were hoping that The Midnight Sky would be the comeback vehicle to launch him back into the pop culture stratosphere…but unfortunately it is neither a crowd-pleaser nor an art house gem, and thus this cinematic rocket crashes and burns on the launch pad.

 Set in 2049, The Midnight Sky tells the story of Augustine (Clooney), a scientist dying of cancer in an outpost at the Arctic Circle who must protect a stranded young girl after an ecological apocalypse while also trying to warn an incoming space crew to stay away from earth and to start civilization over again on a moon of Jupiter. If that sounds ridiculously convoluted or just plain ridiculous to you, you aren’t alone.

Despite boasting a top-notch cast that includes Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler and Demian Bechir, there is no genuine drama to be found in this muddled misfire of a movie.

I get what Clooney was going for with The Midnight Sky. Ever the good Hollywood liberal he wanted to make a big budget, prestige movie with a diverse cast that dramatized climate change. I’m willing to bet Clooney at least considered casting Greta Thunberg as the little girl in the movie just so he could more emphatically make his point and signal his limousine liberal virtue.

The problem is that this movie is so painfully predictable, and so full of saccharine sentimentality and maudlin melodrama that watching it makes you yearn for any disaster, ecological or otherwise, to strike as soon as possible in order to end your misery.

The film attempts to be a family drama, a space drama, an adventure story and a race-against-the-clock thriller, and it fails miserably at all of those things. Ultimately it tries so hard to be everything it ends up being a whole bunch of nothing.

It also features a dramatic climax so predictable yet cringe worthy it made me roll my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a seizure.

I’m old enough to remember when George Clooney was at the top of the Hollywood heap and a highly respected actor, director and producer.

He was admired for being a tv and movie star but also for producing a daring live tv version of Fail Safe, directing the Oscar nominated Good Night and Good Luck, and for his Oscar winning acting in Syriana. He was also respected for starring in some ambitious movies, like Three Kings, Solaris, Michael Clayton and The American, which were notable artistic ventures for a big movie star.

But it has been quite a while since Clooney has acted in a movie that mattered, and his directing career has been on a similarly downward trajectory.

His first directorial feature was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a quirky and somewhat endearing little movie, followed by Good Night and Good Luck (2005), which garnered him a Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. After that there’s been a precipitous decline.

Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) and Suburbicon (2017) are all forgettable movies rightfully condemned to the bottom of the bargain bin at a Walmart check out counter.

Sadly, The Midnight Sky might be the very worst of them all.

In my mind Clooney has always been a sort of a poor man’s Warren Beatty, a pretty faced womanizer who wanted to be taken seriously so he used partisan politics to mask his inherent frivolousness and intellectual vapidity and vacuity.

Beatty is by far the better artist, actor, director and political animal than Clooney could ever hope to be…but that hasn’t stopped gorgeous George from using the Beatty blueprint and using it well, as Clooney’s career rewards have far exceeded his limited talent. But Clooney’s recent recurring failures, The Midnight Sky included, have exposed him to be a Hollywood emperor with no clothes.

Of course, we should shed no tears for George Clooney as he is insanely rich and lives a delightfully comfortable existence…but the writing is on the wall and in the bottom line business that is Hollywood, if Clooney doesn’t churn out a hit or award winner soon, it will be his career that suffers the apocalypse instead of earth. 

The bottom line is that The Midnight Sky is a mess of a movie you shouldn’t waste one second of your time on. My Christmas gift to you is that I watched this piece of garbage so you don’t have to. Merry Christmas to everyone!

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a disastrous disaster movie.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Chadwick Boseman Saves His Best for Last in the Middling 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.

The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.

I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.

I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.

After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.

In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.

Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.

In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.

The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.

Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.

It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.

The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther.  So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.

The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.

Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.

Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes 806 seconds

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2020

Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood but Mank doesn’t glamorize Tinsel Town’s golden age but rather reveals the wound festering beneath the mythology…the same wound inflicting modern America.

On its surface, Mank, the new film by esteemed director David Fincher, chronicles the life and times of famed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, most notably his struggle to write the Oscar winning screenplay for Citizen Kane.

Just below that gloriously photographed black and white surface though, a complex story of class struggle, financial control and political corruption lives, and it is that narrative that makes Mank a story for our time.

Herman Mankiewicz a.k.a Mank, brilliantly portrayed by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, is a disheveled drunkard and degenerate gambler with an undeniable roguish charm. A brilliant wordsmith, Mank’s quick and erudite wit gets him in the good graces of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and by extension, the Hollywood heavyweights at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.

It is from this privileged perch at the luxurious dining tables of W.R. Hearst and in the offices of L.B. Mayer and Thalberg, that Mank is shown the diabolically deceptive practices and devious machinations of those in power. Mank’s growing discomfort and disgust at the charade of these powerful but hollow men eventually manifests in some alcohol-fueled, but extremely insightful diatribes.

But Mank, ever the slave to his own destructive impulses, is impotent to do anything about these men…until the opportunity to write a screenplay for the “boy genius” Orson Welles comes along.

With Citizen Kane, Mank uses his mighty pen to embarrass and eviscerate the all-powerful Hearst while also extending a middle finger to the repugnant Mayer.

Mank resonates in our current time because like Hearst and Mayer in the time of Citizen Kane, the new generation of decadent robber barons from Wall Street to Silicon Valley (Netflix – the film’s producer and distributor, prominent among them) wield their financial, cultural and political power to dominate and control society from their gilded castles while the rest of us scratch and claw just to stay alive.

In Mank there is a terrific scene where Louis B. Mayer tearfully speaks to a collection of MGM workers, whom he calls family, asking them to take a 50% pay cut in order to save the company. Mayer’s performance in that meeting is better than any acting he financed during his long reign at the movie studio, as he gets the workers to give up their money while he walks away giving up nothing.

That scene speaks to the nefarious political and media narrative of the last forty years since the Reagan (and Thatcher) revolution brought us the unmitigated horrors of financialization and trickle-down economics cloaked in the waving flag of an empty patriotism. It also perfectly encapsulates America since the financial collapse of 2007-08, where a plethora of too big to fail corporations with big bosses receiving huge bonuses got bailed out while working people picking up the tab got financially beaten down and will never recover.

It is the anger over that blatant economic unfairness and injustice that fueled movements as disparate as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders and even Trump’s rise to power. But as Mank shows us, the game is rigged, as the propaganda mills promise to strangle any working class movement in its crib.

As the last two presidential elections proved, oligarchs and their media minions will relentlessly wield identity politics like a cudgel to bludgeon the working class and cease any chance at any economic change. Divide and conquer has never been so easy as in our current age of manufactured victimhood.

The character Mank embodies the impotent confusion of so many American voters. He is a compulsive contrarian and as much as he loathes the malignant management class he is also wary of labor unions. Intuitively a man of the left, Mank is still clear-eyed enough to see that both sides of the duopoly are thoroughly compromised.

The devil’s bargain Mank makes with the power structure costs him his soul, and Citizen Kane is his attempt at personal redemption and revenge for the little guy. Like the rest of us, all Mank is able to do is take pleasure in his small and ultimately inconsequential victory.

Mank’s triumph with Citizen Kane is public but completely personal, as it garners him an Oscar but leaves the power structure that so infuriates him, unbowed, unbent and unbroken…even to this day.

For proof of this one need look no further than the recent election. Americans were forced once again to choose between two vacuous avatars for the same oligarchical ruling class.

Even in the midst of a pandemic and government forced shut down resulting in an economic holocaust for working class people, both parties in Washington steadfastly refuse to consider universal healthcare, universal basic income, or even stimulus payments but are united in their insatiable desire to fellate the corporate class. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, same as every boss we’ve ever had.

As for Mank, it is a slightly flawed, but thoroughly worthwhile, art house film that boasts some A-list talent, chief among them Fincher and Oldman. For those with the patience to stick with it, Mank does what very few movies attempt to do, never mind accomplish…it tells the uncomfortable, complicated and ugly truth about America and Americans. Bravo.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A complicated film that pulls no political punches. Gary Oldman and David Fincher flex their consider artistic muscles in this challenging but worthwhile drama.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

IS HILLBILLY ELEGY A TRULY TERRIBLE MOVIE OR ARE LIBERAL CRITICS BLATANTLY BIASED?

The new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy chronicles life among a dysfunctional white working class Appalachian family and savage reviews from liberal critics has triggered another battle in the culture war.

Hillbilly Elegy, the new film from Oscar winning director Ron Howard, premiered to much fanfare and controversy on Netflix Tuesday.

The film, which stars perennial Oscar nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography of the same name, and tells the story of how Vance escaped his chaotic upbringing at the hands of his white-working class Appalachian family, most notably his volcanically erratic mother Bev and his hard-edged grandmother Mamaw, and became a Yale Law School graduate.

The book Hillbilly Elegy became a cause célèbre in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory because it gave the establishment a glimpse into the misunderstood white working class and poor folk from flyover country that had come out en masse for Trump.

Among the media elite, the shine wore off of Vance and his book pretty quickly, though, as he was labeled too conservative for consumption after having the temerity to label his hometown hillbilly culture as corrosive and self-destructive. Vance’s critique of the Appalachian white working class was just too pro-personal responsibility for the liberal establishment’s tastes.

It is in this context that Hillbilly Elegy has come out in film form and generated a great deal of vitriol and venom from mainstream movie critics.

For example, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe proclaimed it “poverty porn”. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called it “almost laughably bad – if it weren’t so melodramatic”. And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times derisively decried the movie as “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics”.

These critical eviscerations are not anomalies as the film currently has a dismal 25% critical score review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. There is some pushback though, as the film currently boasts a robust 89% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

In response to the cavalcade of critical denouncements, noted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted about the film “I've seen "Hillbilly Elegy." Amy Adams and Glenn Close are both terrific. The movie is a well-told family drama. The reason the critics are crapping all over it is simple: the book was treated as humanizing "Trump supporters," and is now a Bad Book™. So the movie is also Bad™.”

My experience of Hillbilly Elegy began when I read and the book back in 2016. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be an extremely insightful and compelling account.

Hillbilly Elegy is an important book and it should have been an important movie…but having seen it I can report that it most assuredly is not. Instead it is a maudlin, dramatically obtuse, narratively incoherent, appallingly poorly made and atrociously amateurish cinematic venture.

Director Ron Howard is an artistic eunuch not exactly known for his deft cinematic touch, and he is as ham-fisted as ever on Hillbilly Elegy.  Howard clumsily creates a contrived drama and fumbles the film’s flimsy narrative to such an egregious degree as to be cinematically criminal.

Howard’s visually unimaginative, painfully trite and obscenely shallow approach reduces Vance’s dramatically potent life story into a cinematically flaccid cross between a Lifetime movie, an ABC After-School Special and an anti-drug public service announcement.

As for the acting? Amy Adams is one of the best actresses around, but her performance as the volatile Bev is forced and rings entirely false. Decked out in her oversized ‘mom jeans’, with frizzy hair and sans makeup, Adams is devoid of both subtly and humanity. Adams’ performance is such an over-the-top, one-note caricature it is actually embarrassing.

Glenn Close contrived performance as the foul-mouthed matriarch Mamaw doesn’t fare much better. Both Close and Adams are obviously angling for an Oscar with their ugly-fied, faux-gritty acting, but they end up being uncomfortably shallow and cartoonish in their roles.

Ben Shapiro claiming that Hillbilly Elegy is “well-told” and that Adams and Close are “terrific” only proves that he is either being intentionally contrarian in order to stoke the culture war or he really doesn’t know a goddamn thing about movies and acting. I promise you, Hillbilly Elegy is not the hill(billy) that Ben Shapiro should be willing to die on.

With that said, I have no doubt that liberal critics are gleefully overplaying the very bad hand that is Hillbilly Elegy. If the film were made by a minority director as opposed to a pasty white one, and dealt with black poverty as opposed to poor white people, their criticisms of it would be substantially more delicate and thoughtful.

White liberal critics have long been protective and paternalistic toward black artists and films. Examples of which can be found in the critical reception of Spike Lee’s film Da Five Bloods (2020) and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Both movies are dreadful cinematic disasters, but critics fawned over Da Five Bloods and were wholly encouraging of DuVernay’s abysmal film because of its “diversity”.

Hillbilly Elegy could have been treated with the same kid gloves and rose-colored glasses as Lee and DuVernay’s work- but wasn’t, and one can surmise that the white working class subject matter and the conservative politics of the protagonist are a major reason why.

So is Hillbilly Elegy truly that terrible or as Ben Shapiro suggests are liberal movie critics blatantly biased against it?

The answer is definitely…YES…to both.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ron Howard at his worst. Just an embarrassingly terrible movie with terrible performances and terrible writing and terrible directing and everything is terrible.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

What Killed Michael Brown? Documentary: A Review

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

America's Forgotten: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice - A Review

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

 MY RATING: 3.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT - This intimate, gut-wrenching glimpse at the lengths that parents will go to keep their children, and hope, alive…is a surprisingly poignant portrait of familial love and grief.

In Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice, filmmaker Pailin Wedel masterfully documents the compelling story of the Naovaratpong family, comprised of father - Dr. Sahatorn, his wife Nareerat and their teenage son Matrix, who suffer the terrible loss of their beloved two year-old daughter Einz from ependymoblastoma, a rare and aggressive brain cancer.

During Einz’s illness, her father frantically uses his science background (he is an engineer) to try and learn on the fly and discover a cure for his ailing daughter as she deteriorates.

After a dozen surgeries and 20 chemotherapy and radiation treatments, it becomes readily apparent that time is running out for little Einz. In response, Sahatorn then turns his attention to cryogenics, in the hope that he could freeze his daughter after death, in order to one day re-animate her when a cure for her disease is found.

Immediately following Einz’s heart-breaking demise, doctors from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation go about cryogenically freezing her. Once that process is completed, Einz’s body is sent from Thailand to storage in Arizona.

This story sounds like some bizarre science fiction, but Hope Frozen masterfully turns this strange tale into a morally and ethically complex story that is intensified by the emotional power of grief.

In addition, the film raises a plethora of profound philosophical questions, but to its credit it never presumes to know the answers.

The film ponders what is consciousness? Is consciousness attached to the body? Are memories kept in tact when someone is cryogenically frozen? Is that frozen body really a person or just a collection of flesh and bones? Can death be scientifically defeated? Will cryogenics even work? Can people be re-animated in the future? Will a cure for cancer ever be found?

These questions are made even more complicated by the family’s fervent faith in science coupled with their spiritual belief in Buddhism. This results in the family grappling with issues such as will freezing Einz stop her from reincarnating? And is cryogenics just imprisoning Einz’s soul in a lifeless body?

The most intriguing member of the Naovaratpong family is the son Matrix, a smart and sensitive young man haunted by his sister’s death.

At his father’s prodding Matrix is a scientific genius that dedicates his life to finding a way to bring his sister back to life. Ever the big brother, he even becomes a novice Buddhist monk in an attempt to try and protect his dead sister’s soul.

Like his mother and father, Matrix will never shed the painful burden that is the death of Einz. The Naovaratpong’s simply can’t let go…of their daughter, of the dream of their daughter’s future and of their grieving wound.

By cryogenically freezing Einz, the family freezes themselves into a perpetual state of hope and grief…this keeps Einz fresh in their minds. Their hope and grief are all they have left so they do not want to let them go. As long as hope for her return and grief for her loss are frozen in place, Einz lives on.

As the film progresses, the story takes on multiple twists and turns that makes for interesting viewing – particularly a scene where Matrix calls home after a trip to America, but the most fascinating part of the film is the love for Einz at the core of it.

You can question the family’s decision to cryogenically freeze their daughter and their quest to keep the hope of her alive in the face of death, I know I did, but what I never did was question the purity of their motives or the profundity of their love.

As a parent it is impossible to watch Hope Frozen and not have compassion and empathy for Sahatorn, Nareerat and Matrix. Their love for Einz is exquisitely beautiful to witness even when it is wildly contorted by grief and despair.

The family’s devotion to science in the form of cryogenics in the hope of overcoming death is no different than any other faith taking center stage in an existential crisis. Faith is our shield against the slings and arrows of life and the inevitability of our own annihilation.

The Naovaratpongs wrap themselves in the cloak of science in order to maintain the illusion that Einz will rise from the dead, just as a Catholic like myself clings to that same delusion that death can be conquered through God’s love and power.

This need to believe in something, anything, to make the colossal pain of grief, and the terrifying prospect of the eternal abyss of death, subside, is all too human, and is strikingly highlighted in Hope Frozen.

In conclusion, Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice is a deeply moving documentary because it reminds us that life is fleeting and that love isn’t everything…it’s the only thing.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Only Thing Dumber Than the #HandsOffAnastasia Twitter Furor is the Dreadful Movie That Sparked It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

Some Russians have taken offense at Anastasia Romanov’s cartoonish depiction in a low-budget movie released earlier this year. They shouldn’t waste their energy on a criminally stupid piece of film making.

In case you haven’t heard, #HandsOffAnastasia is the outrage du jour on Twitter. If you were unaware of this controversy, I deeply envy you. Here is a quick breakdown of how #HandsOffAnastasia came to be. 

In Spring of this year a terrible movie titled Anastasia: Once Upon a Time came and went and no one cared because it was laughably low budget and hysterically awful. The film is a live action kids movie that tells a fantastical tale of Anastasia Romanov time traveling, with the help of a wizardly Rasputin, from Russia in 1918 to Madison, Wisconsin in 1988 in order to evade Vladimir Lenin and Yara the Enchantress’s malevolent grip. To give you an indication of the caliber of movie that Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is, here are some highlights…Rasputin has a break dance battle at a mall, plays video games and models in a fashion show, there are some absurdly random musical numbers, and a Filipino comedian plays Lenin.

I am no expert on Russian history, but I am pretty sure the film is not entirely historically accurate. And this is where the outrage comes in…apparently some Russians are up in arms that “Hollywood” would denigrate Russian history and besmirch a Sainted Russian figure like Anastasia Romanov, who was brutally murdered by Bolsheviks at age 17 with the rest of her family, by comically re-imagining her tragic tale…thus #HandsOffAnastasia was born.

More kindling on the #HandsOffAnastasia fire is a clip from the film circulating online that shows Anastasia eating spaghetti with her hands, thus implying she, and all Russians, are uncivilized barbarians.

Sadly for me, this whole #HandsOffAnastasia situation forced me to watch this stupid movie. My assessment is this…how do you say “much ado about nothing” in Russian?

First things first…Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is obscenely amateurish and ridiculously imbecilic…but it doesn’t make Anastasia out to be some Neanderthal anti-princess. The spaghetti eating scene isn’t mean spirited or even “anti-Russian”, it is just unconscionably lazy movie making.

The other thing, and this is the most important point, is that this film is so inconsequential as to be absurd. Why anyone, anywhere would care what it says or does is beyond me.

This is not some “Hollywood”, big budget operation backed by the marketing muscle of Disney. The movie was produced by Congolomerate Media and distributed by Freestyle Digital Media…not exactly Hollywood heavyweights…in fact they don’t even qualify as flyweights…or Hollywood, which is why no one has ever heard of this film until this silly controversy.

The budget for the film is bare bones, and it shows in the locations, cheap special effects and shabby costumes. Whatever money they did have seems to have been almost entirely spent acquiring the rights to the Cindi Lauper song “Time After Time”, which it uses liberally (without Lauper’s pricey vocals) throughout the film for no discernible reason.

If I could point to one remarkable thing about Anastasia: Once Upon a Time it would be that it boasts the largest collection of the worst Russian accents ever captured on film at one time. The biggest star in the movie is Brandon Routh who plays Tsar Nicholas II. Once upon a time Routh played Superman on the big screen, and in Anastasia he reveals his kryptonite is twofold…acting and a Russian accent.

The film is produced by Armando Gutierrez, who also did no one a favor by casting himself in the critical role of Rasputin. The film would have been better served casting an inanimate carbon rod in the role instead of Gutierrez.

On the bright side, there is exactly one good performance in the film, and that comes from the talented Amiah Miller, a young actress who played Nova in War for the Planet of the Apes.

Besides that the only interesting thing about this movie is that on its IMDB page it actually lists Anastasia Romanoff as one of the screenwriters. That is an intriguing marketing ploy but simply cannot be true because if the real Anastasia ever had to watch this dreadful movie she would run into the basement and shoot herself just to end the misery and embarrassment. I am sure that last joke offended some people…but here is the thing, if you have the time and energy to get upset about that lame joke or about this nonsensically preposterous movie, then you really need to get a life.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood, like the rest of America, isn’t Russophobic. It certainly is. It isn’t to say that Americans aren’t historically illiterate about Russia and ignorant about Russians. They certainly are. It is to say that this third rate clownshow of a movie is so laughably trivial that it should never ever generate any emotion, be it positive or negative, from anyone, anywhere.

#HandsOffAnastasia is, like so much of Twitter culture, a function of people with too much time on their hands searching high and low, far and wide for something, anything about which to be offended.

In conclusion, the hypersensitive Russian woke folk of #HandsOffAnastasia desperately need to keep their hands off Twitter and go out and re-connect with their heritage by doing truly Russian things…like competing in a break dancing battles at the mall, or modeling in impromptu fashion shows, or eating spaghetti with their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

UNpregnant: A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This stillborn comedy is a mess of a movie but it does succeed as a piece of pro-abortion agitprop

Last week was a good week if you crave poorly crafted movies designed to trigger culture war clashes, but a bad week if you’re a cinephile more interested in quality cinema than political posturing.

On September 9th, Netflix defecated Cuties, the controversial French film that hypersexualizes 11 year-old girls, onto an unsuspecting and uncomfortable public.

The very next day, September 10th, HBO Max picked up the gauntlet of inappropriateness and released UNpregnant, its teen girl, road trip, abortion buddy comedy.

Thankfully UNpregnant is rated PG13, which means the scantily-clad, twerking 11 year-olds of Cuties only have a two year wait before they can watch the movie-version of the abortion handbook that is UNpregnant.

UNpregnant is the story of Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson), a 17 year-old over-achiever in Missouri who asks her misfit former friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to give her a ride to New Mexico for an abortion.

Missouri and its surrounding states all have laws against minor’s getting abortions without parental consent, and Veronica is afraid to tell her “Jesus freak” Catholic parents, so she needs to hit the road to the Land of Enchantment for the no-strings, underage abortion at the end of the rainbow.

In mythical girl power fashion, Veronica and Bailey’s journey is undertaken in a Pontiac Firebird, because like a phoenix, these girls will rise from the ashes of the patriarchal society that oppresses them…or something like that.

Unfortunately, UNpregnant is a painfully conventional and relentlessly dull film. It’s ironic that a movie burdened with such flaccid performances and impotent comedy should be about a pregnancy borne out of unrestrained virility.

The film’s dreadful script, which is in part written by Ted Caplan and Jenni Hendriks and is based upon their book of the same name, reads like the exposition Olympics, and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s direction is abysmally amateurish.

The two leads, Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira, try as hard as they might, lack any comedy chemistry whatsoever. Both of them push so hard to make something funny happen that you’d think they were actually in labor…but the fruits of that labor never appear as apparently the comedy in their performances was aborted too and never had the chance to grow beyond a miniscule fetus.

UNpregnant wraps itself so tight in liberal political correctness it could pass for a social justice mummy. The movie has all the right heroes and heroines and all the proper enemies to appease the woke faithful.

For instance, the film exerts a great deal of energy proving it isn’t racist by having every single black person in the movie be wonderful allies to the abortion cause.

Yes, these black people, like Peg, the pawn shop owner with the heart of gold, Jarrod, the local cowboy with the heart of gold, and Bob, the apocalyptic conspiracist with the heart of gold, are all edgy and dangerous, but ultimately, due to their previously mentioned hearts of gold, end up being kind and extremely helpful to Ivy league bound, suburban white girl Veronica in her abortion quest. 

And just in case viewers were confused about the cultural politics of the movie, there’s a superfluous lesbian romance thrown in too.

As for the villains, there’s Kevin, Veronica’s white, empty-headed yet controlling, stalker boyfriend, who intentionally failed to reveal the condom broke. Like all straight white men in Hollywood movies nowadays, Kevin is simply no good.

The most deplorable villains in the movie though are a family of pro-life, white Christians who are the personification of evil. This family is meant to represent the pro-life movement, as unsubtly indicated by their secret “pro-life” room in their home, and by their mobile pregnancy and ultrasound equipped recreational vehicle, which they use to chase down Veronica and Bailey.

The sequence with the evil pro-life family is so farcical and tonally out of step with the rest of the movie, it feels like it is intentionally placed there for no other reason than to denigrate and inflame Christians.

Needlessly ridiculing Christians is not exactly a sound marketing strategy if, like UNpregnant, you are trying to make a popular movie and not some niche arthouse film. Proof of this is that UNpregnant currently has a 40% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes total sense since 65% of Americans identify as Christian.

The film does currently boast an 85% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, but I think that has everything to do with it being a shameless advertisement for abortion and woke utopian wet dream of anti-Christianity for establishment liberals rather than any honest analysis of its artistic or entertainment merits.

As a cinematic venture, as a comedy and as a piece of entertainment, UNpregnant fails miserably, but as a piece of agitprop that normalizes abortion, which I believe is the movie’s ultimate intention, it thoroughly succeeds.

Abortion in UNpregnant is depicted as a gateway to freedom and truth and an undeniable good. Abortion is portrayed as this wondrous and physically, mentally and emotionally painless procedure that leaves girls emphatically relieved and joyously buoyant in its wake. As post-abortion Veronica sums up to her mother at movie’s end, “I don’t feel bad…”

I’m glad at least someone didn’t feel bad at the end of the movie, because I sure did, and not because of UNpregnant’s political stance on the complex issue of abortion, or its ham-handed cultural politics, but because it is an unfunny, cliché-ridden, mess of a movie that is poorly written, acted and directed.

In conclusion, UNpregnant is a stillborn cinematic dud that should have taken its own advice and aborted itself in the first trimester of its creative process.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Cuties: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The deviant, under-aged sexuality in Cuties doesn’t make the middling movie an art house gem. It’s incredible some critics are blind to its toxic depravity just to score political points.

Cuties premiered on Netflix this week amid much controversy and fanfare. As a film critic, I am willing to give the artistic benefit of the doubt to most any movie, so as I sat down to watch Cuties I was conscious of the controversy surrounding the film, which started three weeks ago after Netflix’s marketing material made the movie look like it was sexually exploiting 11 year-old girls. But I was also open minded enough to think the film might not match the marketing.

Cuties starts off with an intriguing premise that is bursting with dramatic potential as it tells the story of Amy, an 11 year old immigrant from Senegal, as she navigates the clash between her old world, Islamic family, and the modernity and libertinism of her new French friends.

Unfortunately, Cuties pretty quickly devolves from its powerful premise and becomes licentious and lurid rather than dramatically lucid. Director Maimouna Doucoure makes the egregious error of trying to make a social commentary about how modernity hypersexualizes young girls by actually hypersexualizing young girls. It is like making a social comment on animal cruelty by actually torturing animals on film.

I am a cinephile, not a pedophile, so I found Doucoure’s repeated and extended shots of 11 year-old girl’s scantily clad, gyrating pelvis, buttocks and groins to be gratuitous, shocking and frankly, repulsive.

It is amazing that there are people out there, like highly respected film critic Richard Brody of The New Yorker, in a lather vehemently defending the film. Brody’s review is not so subtly titled, “Cuties, the Extraordinary Netflix Debut That Became the Target of a Right-Wing Campaign” praises the film but ultimately indicts the critic.

Brody boasts, “I doubt that the scandal-mongers (who include some well-known figures of the far right) have actually seen “Cuties,” but some elements of the film that weren’t presented in the advertising would surely prove irritating to them: it’s the story of a girl’s outrage at, and defiance of, a patriarchal order.”

I’ve seen Cuties and I’m not a right-winger, and yet I’m able to see the insidiousness of exploiting little girl’s sexually under the guise of being against the “patriarchy”…why isn’t David Brody? Brody and his ilk are so eager for a culture war fight they are completely blind to the striking malevolence of Cuties.

For Brody, Cuties is just another opportunity to signal his alleged liberal virtue as evidenced by his statement, “The subject of “Cuties” isn’t twerking; it’s children, especially poor and nonwhite children, who are deprived of the resources—the education, the emotional support, the open family discussion—to put sexualized media and pop culture into perspective.”

It would seem Brody is over estimating the power of education, as he is a Princeton grad and yet he is incapable of putting the deviant sexuality of Cuties into proper perspective. Brody’s review comes to a close by stating, ““Cuties” dramatizes what people of color and immigrants endure as a result of isolation and ghettoization, of not being represented culturally and politically… it’s enough to give a right-winger a conniption.”

To Brody and other Cuties defenders, and there are plenty of them as the film has a 90% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, Cuties is just another gateway drug to the cultural narcotic of racism, sexism, xenophobia and all the rest, and is just another cudgel against “right wingers”.

The beauty of it is that Brody is chastising “right-wingers” for politicizing Cuties by politicizing his review of Cuties, just like the film comments on the hypersexualization of kids by hypersexualizing kids. This is Matrix level, multi-dimensional chess of the highest order.

On a purely artistic and cinematic level, Cuties is a decidedly middling affair. Director/writer Doucoure makes some rudimentary structural and character development errors that undermine the film to a great degree.

In addition, despite its one good shot, which is its final one, the film has no distinct visual flair and only seems capable of mimicking the style of those creepy American Apparel ads that were shot by…not surprisingly…famous photographer and alleged sexual predator Terry Richardson. 

There is one scene where 11 year-old Amy is basically possessed by some evil, uncontrollable twerking demon, where in close-up she is sprinkled with water and gyrates in skimpy underwear, that was particularly reminiscent Richardson’s lascivious style.

What struck me as I watched Cuties was that there was a much more interesting, complicated and artistically worthy subject hiding in plain sight and that would be a story where one of the truly awful little girls in Cuties, who dresses like a whore and twerks and watches porn, actually leaves her religion of libertinism and becomes enamored and engrossed in an old world religion like Islam, Catholicism or Orthodox Christianity, or Orthodox Judaism. 

Brody and his companions in the elite establishment would despise that version of the movie because it would show the depravity of the chaotic libertine world they cheer while showing a viable, and although not perfect but much more ordered, alternative.

In conclusion, being a film critic is sometimes a good job and sometimes a bad one. On the good days you get paid to watch a Terrence Malick film…on the bad days you are forced to endure Cuties. I highly recommend you do yourself a favor and skip Cuties and spare your mind and soul from being subjected to the toxic depravity of little girls being drowned in the most repugnant of cinematic sexual stews.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 23 - Richard Jewell

On today’s podcast Barry and I take a look at the 2019 Clint Eastwood film, Richard Jewell. On the episode we discuss the hopefully soon-to-be discovered, glorious genius of the film’s star Paul Walter Hauser, as well as the reliable acting brilliance of Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell. In addition we wrestle with the often-times frustrating nature of Clint Eastwood’s directing approach and the never ending mystery of Jon Hamm.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 23 - RICHARD JEWELL

Thank you for listening!

©2020

The Old Guard: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an idiotically dreadful piece of movie junk.

The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Greg Rucka (based on his comic book of the same name), tells the story of a group of centuries old “immortals” - warriors who cannot be killed, and their leader Andromache, as they navigate a hostile modern world. The film stars Charlize Theron as Andromache, with supporting turns from Mathias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kiki Layne and Harry Melling.

As the coronavirus cinema void continues unabated, Netflix has attempted to meet movie demand with some of its original content…such as the action/sci-fi film The Old Guard.

The Old Guard is not a movie I would ever venture out to see in the theatre even in the best of times, but Netflix now has leverage over me since I’ve not been able to get my cinema fix for over four months now…and so…I succumbed and rolled the dice on The Old Guard.

To be fair, my bet on The Old Guard wasn’t entirely a long shot as Charlize Theron has proven herself to be a formidable action movie protagonist…the glorious Mad Max: Fury Road and the entertaining Atomic Blonde being proof of that. The movie also boasts two actors I have long admired, Matthias Schoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among its cast. So while I didn’t have my hopes up, I also wasn’t expecting it to be abominable.

Boy was I wrong.

The Old Guard is an awful movie.

It is also as ineffectively directed as any major motion picture you’ll come across.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose only claim to fame was the egregiously overrated Love and Basketball (2000), lacks any and all requisite skill or talent to tackle a film of this nature. It is stunning to think that this movie had a $70 million budget and yet at best looks like a flimsy Sci-Fi channel throwaway movie and more often than not looks and feels like amateur hour at the local cable access station.

The action sequences are dull, derivative and repetitive. The visuals are stale and flat. The character development and performances are insipidly vapid. Oh…and the story is utterly imbecilic…just completely nonsensical and idiotic. But beyond that it I guess it was ok.

One mystery I have yet to figure out is why the film has two cinematographers in its credits. Barry Ackroyd and Tami Reiker are both listed in the credits, but having two DP’s is a surefire recipe for disaster. One can’t help but wonder if one of them started the film and was replaced. Ackroyd is a serious guy, having received an Oscar nomination and winning a BAFTA for The Hurt Locker. Reiker is much less accomplished, but the notion that Ackroyd was potentially mentoring her doesn’t hold water as she has been working in the industry for over twenty years. Regardless of why there are two cinematographers, the bottom line is that whoever shot this movie ought to be ashamed of themselves.

As for the directing, you might think that since Prince-Bythewood is not good at action sequences she might at least be good at drawing solid performances from her cast. You’d be wrong.

Make no mistake, Charlize Theron is a terrific actress and a potent action movie presence, but in The Old Guard she not only looks terrible but lacks any dynamism or magnetism at all. I understood what she was trying to do with her character - create a deeply wounded soul battered by the slings and arrows of such an egregiously long life without end, but she is so poorly photographed and directed she ends up being nothing but dour, shallow and unconscionably boring.

Kiki Layne, last seen giving an uneven performance in the equally uneven If Beale Street Could Talk, plays a new member of the Immortals gang and is embarrassingly lackluster and awkward. The wooden Layne is woefully miscast as she is painfully uncomfortable with the action sequences and seems unable to even remotely connect with the dialogue or drama of the less physically demanding scenes.

Both Matthias Shoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor are two enormous talents wasted as their characters are so poorly written as to be incoherent.

And finally, Harry Melling gives a dinner theatre murder-mystery level performance as the bad guy from big pharma. Good Lord, all Melling was missing was a mustache to twist as he laughed maniacally.

What is frustrating to me is that the plot of The Old Guard could potentially be turned into an interesting cinematic venture, but Netflix handed to keys to what they thought might be a new signature franchise to Prince-Bythewood and she (and Reiker/Ackroyd) proceeded to fill the gas tank with maple syrup and paint the interior with raw sewage. The car may still be able to run after this…but it’s gonna need a lot of work before that can ever happen.

In conclusion, The Old Guard isn’t just a missed opportunity, it is a cinema abomination. Only movie masochists need ever glimpse a second of this dreadful film. If you want to see Charlize Theron in all her action movie glory, skip The Old Guard and go watch Mad Max: Fury Road. You’ll be glad you did.

©2020

The Vast of Night: A Review

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

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well directed film that starts slow but once it gets going is well worth the wait.

The Vast of Night, written and directed by Andrew Patterson, is the science fiction story of two teenagers, Fay and Everett, and the very strange night they experience in New Mexico in the 1950’s. The film stars Sierra McCormick (Fay) and Jake Horowitz (Everett).

I had not heard of The Vast of Night until my podcast co-host Barry told me to give it a watch. I had no expectations and even less information about the movie before I watched it on Amazon Prime streaming…but boy am I glad I did watch, as it is a little gem of a movie.

To be clear, The Vast of Night isn’t going to change your life, and it isn’t a perfect movie…but it is an exceedingly well made one that highlights a confident filmmaker with a distinct vision and the skill to pull it off.

The movie is set in a small town in 1950’s New Mexico and perfectly captures the rhythm and pace of that time and place. One of the struggles of the film is that the pace of the first half hour is very deliberate, and that may be off-putting to some viewers conditioned on the more frenetic style of modern day entertainment. I would recommend viewers who feel this way stick with the movie…it ends up being worth it.

Speaking of the modern day, the movie is very effective in re-creating the sense of community but also the palpable isolation of the 1950’s, particularly in a rural area, due to the lack of technology. Patterson plays up this dearth of technology by having Fay work the switchboard in town and preferring to run from place to place rather than drive. She also reads science magazines with predictions of the future’s technology (where is my flying car by the way?) and has an acute interest in tape recorders - which seem horrifyingly primitive to us iPhone addicted fiends but that were marvels in their time.

Part of what makes the The Vast of Night so compelling is that it is visually so striking. It is absolutely stunning that this film was made for $700,000, as it looks like it has a budget a hundred times that.

They used a small town in Texas to shoot the film and it is just the perfect set, and the costumes and the props are equally fantastic as every detail in the film is deliciously specific.

The film also looks more expensive because of the clever and courageous Andrew Patterson uses complex camera movements and extended scenes that are remarkably well-done. In multiple sequences Patterson does extended and elaborately choreographed camera movements that cover vast swaths of ground and large numbers of actors and movement. It is really something to behold, and anybody who has ever worked on a movie will appreciate the extraordinary technical difficulty of what Patterson pulls off.

Patterson also extracts outstanding performances from his cast of unknowns.

Sierra McCormick in particular is outstanding as the switch board operator Fay, who is plugged into the town and maybe the truth. McCormick has some extended scenes where it is just her in a close up talking on the phone…and they are mesmerizing. She is able to perfectly embody the clash between the innocence of 1950’s youth and the burden of adult responsibility thrust upon her.

Jake Horowitz plays Everett, the hot shot radio guy, and does terrific work as well. There is one scene in particular, which I won’t give away, where he enters the scene with one distinct expectation and then you watch him transform as his expectation is met, yet he is left unsatisfied. It is a stunning scene to watch and he is complex work in it is outstanding in it (you’ll know the scene when you see it).

Gail Cronauer has a small, but pivotal, role and she is utterly magnificent. Cronauer (and Patterson) make the wise choice to embrace a centered stillness in her scene, and she fills this stillness with a vibrancy and dynamic inner life that is palpable.

At times this movie felt like a gloriously bizarre amalgamation of The Last Picture Show, a Robert Altman movie and a Twilight Zone episode. That cinematic stew was mostly well executed, but there were a few minor bumps. For instance, the Altman-esque scenes of overlapping dialogue were done with aplomb but the dialogue in them was not as technically crisp (in part due to Horowitz having a cigarette in his mouth) as it needed to be and thus was a bit muddled. Also, The Twilight Zone part of the this cinematic science fiction concoction was a storytelling device that Patterson uses throughout, that frankly I felt didn’t work particularly well and could have been eliminated entirely.

That criticism though is just splitting hairs, as once the movie got rolling it was entirely engrossing and really a joy to behold as Patterson uses multiple savvy maneuvers to wring as much tension, suspense and drama out of his story as possible.

Andrew Patterson is obviously a director to watch, and could very well be the next big thing. If he can pull off what is essentially a stage play, in such a visually intricate and dynamic way with such a tiny budget, then goodness knows what he can do when Hollywood opens the coffers for him.

One can’t help but worry though that he will get sucked into the Hollywood machine and end up swimming up stream in a river of shit on some big budget Jurassic World sequel or something, where the studio suffocates his creativity while filling his pockets.

My hope is that Patterson will, like Darren Aronofsky before him, turn his small budget success into a mildly larger budget, with bigger names, for a film that still speaks to his vision. Aronofsky followed up his indie hit Pi, with Requiem for a Dream. Requiem for a Dream wasn’t a box office smash, but it was a cinematic statement that cemented Aronofsky’s status as an artistically powerful filmmaker who told original stories in a unique way. I hope Andrew Patterson is a similar type of creative force with an equal amount of artistic integrity.

In conclusion, The Vast of Night was a glorious little cinematic surprise to stumble upon in these dark days of retreads and repeats. The movie is not perfect, and its slow opening pace may feel impenetrable to those not accustomed to it, but it is well worth the wait if you can stick with it. If you are desperate to escape the suffocating madness of our current moment and want to go to a seemingly simpler time that wasn’t quite as simple as we think it was…then you should escape to 1950’s New Mexico via the delightfully intriguing The Vast of Night.

©2020

Hamilton: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!1 THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Recommendation: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Might be worth seeing just to get it out of your system, but truly, it is not worth the two hours and forty minutes.

Hamilton, written by Lin Manuel Miranda and directed by Thomas Kail, is a live recording of a 2016 performance of the stage musical of the same name. The show tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, and stars Lin Manuel Miranda in the lead role, with supporting turns from Leslie Odom Jr., Renee Elise Goldsberry, Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs and Jonathon Groff among many others.

Hamilton hit Broadway back in 2015 and was met with universal adoration, which included eleven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The mainstream media fawned all over the show and deified its creator and star, Lin Manuel Miranda, to a striking degree…he even won a MacArthur Grant for his alleged genius. Similar to Rent, which debuted twenty years before it, Hamilton became an unabashed pop culture phenomenon and was the hottest, and priciest, ticket in any town in which it appeared.

I think the slavish adoration of Hamilton (and Miranda) by the media was a function of their aggressive affection for President Obama…as the show, with its diverse cast and devout optimism in America and its ideals, is a sort of a theatrical manifestation of Obama-ism.

The establishment’s instantaneous exalting of Hamilton was stunning to behold and raised very serious propaganda red flags for me. For that reason, and the fact that tickets were exorbitantly expensive and exclusive, I have never seen the musical on stage.

I was curious to check Hamilton out though when, thanks to Mickey Mouse shelling out a record $75 million to Mr. Miranda for the privilege of showing his work, it premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service.

In my appraisal of the show, let’s start with the good first.

Among the cast the highlights begin with Tony winner Renee Elyse Goldsberry…who absolutely crushes her songs with a vocal dexterity, ferocity and power. Even though she plays Angelica Schuyler, a somewhat secondary character in the bigger picture of things, Ms. Goldsberry is the beating, and at times bleeding, heart of the show.

Tony winner Daveed Diggs plays Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and delivers with a palpable charisma, comedic sense and charm that lights up the stage whenever he’s on it.

Okieriete Onaodowan plays Hercules Mulligan and James Madison and brings a subtly powerful presence and striking rap style to his role, which could easily have been lost in the shuffle in the hands of a lesser actor.

Christopher Jackson’s robust voice and dramatic skills animate the role of George Washington and in the second half he nearly steals the whole damn show.

And finally, Jonathon Groff actually does steal the show in the minimal role of King George. Groff may very well be the best singer in this ridiculously talented bunch, and he belts out his songs “You’ll Be Back/What Comes Next?I Know Him” with such a delirious vigor and aplomb that it is simply intoxicating. (Groff is also excellent in Netflix’s Mindhunter!)

Now for the bad news.

By far the biggest problem with Hamilton is that the show is populated by a plethora of very talented people…but its lead, Lin Manuel Miranda, is definitely not one of them.

A musical simply cannot be worthwhile if its lead is uncharismatic, a dreadful singer, an embarrassment as a rapper and a truly atrocious actor.

I cannot tell you how shocking it was for me to behold Miranda’s severe limitations as a performer after having heard for four straight years that he was a once-in-a-generation genius. Miranda really is a stark naked emperor and it seems no one wants to admit that obvious but uncomfortable truth.

Let’s start with his singing. It is always going to be a problem when the lead of a musical can’t sing, and so it is with Miranda and Hamilton. Miranda has an extremely limited vocal range, and his voice is…and I am being extremely generous here…weak and pedestrian. The fact that Miranda is surrounded by a cast of ridiculously talented singers only accentuates his vocal impotence.

Hamilton’s big claim to fame is that it is, in its own way, a hip-hop musical, so maybe you’d think Miranda’s numerous short comings as a singer wouldn’t be that big of a deal…you’d be dead wrong. Miranda’s rapping is, unbelievably, even worse than his singing. Miranda raps with a whiny, nasally voice and comes across like a nerdy history teacher trying to be “hip” for the young people in his classroom. Watching him rap is like watching a grandparent dirty dance at a wedding…it is just a viscerally uncomfortable embarrassment.

Add to this the fact that Alexander Hamilton is supposed to be this dude that the ladies adore, and yet he is played by the ultra-anti-masculine, doughy dullard Miranda. Whenever one of the female characters are professing their love or attraction for Hamilton it made me cringe.

The funniest thing of all was in the second half of the play watching Miranda try and cover his really abysmal singing by pretending to act. Miranda repeatedly forced a fake cry in order to disguise the glaring weakness of his flaccid voice. What made this so amusing is that Miranda is just a staggeringly terrible actor…I mean he is pulling some junior high school drama class level stuff on stage.

I couldn’t help but think of Christopher Guest’s fantastic 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman while watching Hamilton. In that film the brilliant Christopher Guest plays Corky St. Clair…the writer/director and eventual star of a play he puts on in Blaine, Missouri.

Go watch Waiting for Guffman to see Corky’s dance moves, and his stunning duet, A Penny For Your Thoughts, and you’ll see Lin Manuel Miranda in Hamilton in a nutshell.

Despite Corky being hysterically untalented, he is still adored by the rural rubes who don’t know any better. Lin Manuel Miranda is the Corky St. Clair of Broadway.

Of course, the media, like the know-nothings in Blaine, give Miranda a pass for his weakness as a performer because they think he is some sort of musical theatre genius. I obviously disagree. But even if that is true, the bigger problem to me is that the only reason Miranda stars in the play is due to his obviously over-sized ego. Even Miranda fans must admit that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of Broadway performers who could do a better job in Hamilton than he did. Hell there are a handful in this actual production who could do the part better than him…like Leslie Odom Jr.…or Daveed Diggs…or Anthony Ramos…or Christopher Jackson and on and on.

Also, in terms of Miranda’s ego…Steven Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Weber didn’t star in their musicals…so what kind of ego must Miranda have to think he needs to star in his, especially when he lacks the requisite skills to pull it off?

In regards to the music in the show…well…there is not a single memorable song to be found in Hamilton despite the fact that there are numerous performers giving memorable renditions of the material. Not one. Part of that, but not all of it, can be written off to the use of rap, which is an art form that generally does not age even remotely well. (Here is another comedy that I thought of while watching Hamilton - The Simpsons Planet of the Apes Musical, which uses rap music about as effectively as Hamilton…so Lin Manuel Miranda is both Corky St. Clair AND Troy McClure!)

As for Miranda’s creative genius…I don’t get it. I mean, I guess it is clever to adapt Ron Chernow’s book Alexander Hamilton into a musical…but it feels like he just put history to rhymes. Does that rise to the level of amazing? Count me unimpressed.

So basically, everything wrong with Hamilton falls on Miranda’s shoulders and boils down to an egotistical, self-reverential and underwhelming songwriter trying to carry a pop-music/rap musical despite being an insipid and abysmal performer.

But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? (See I can use historical references too! Where’s my MacArthur Grant!)

Hamilton has been praised for its color conscious casting…in other words, its decision to cast of actors of color in the roles of white people of history. This is obviously a grand symbolic gesture…but of what? Diversity? Sure. Inclusion? Ok. But this soft gesture of inclusion and diversity, which won over rich, white, Obama-ite neo-liberals, also has a shadow to it, as the only white actors with prominent roles in the show play the villains, King George and the cowardly and incompetent Charles Lee. Both King George and Lee aren’t just villainous, but also clownishly effeminate…much in contrast to the actors of color surrounding them who are robustly masculine. One can’t help but conclude from the evidence presented that Hamilton is not only pro-diversity and inclusion, but insidiously anti-white, particularly anti-white masculinity (not to mention that no white woman at all appears in any roles but the ensemble).

Hamilton has not aged well in its five years of existence, and as previously mentioned that could be a function of using rap and popular music as its backbone. This is heightened by the fact that even politically the show has gone from darling to doubted among the media, which now has seconds thoughts about Hamilton, which is likely a result of the media’s succumbing to the cult of wokeism.

You see, it is difficult to cheer the tearing down of statues of Washington and Jefferson for being slave owners, and then celebrate them in a musical even if they are played by black actors. In this way, Hamilton is, like Obama himself, painfully outdated for the era of rabid social justice and, ironically, Black Lives Matter.

Also outdated is the notion of celebrating the founding fathers and their accomplishments which include quaint ideas such as freedom of speech, which were radical in their day and have, incredibly, become radical once again in our own. In the era of cancel culture, BLM and SJW’s, free speech is anathema, and the founding fathers are criminals to be posthumously punished, not heroes to be celebrated and humanized.

After sitting through the seemingly endless two hour and forty minute run time my conclusion is this…I found Hamilton to be little more than Sesame Street social studies for rich, self-loathing white neo-liberals who want to bask in the warmth of their own self-righteousness and self-deluded coolness. It is a sterile, vanilla, Disney-fied piece of dramatic preening that poses at intellectual depth but is as shallow as a kiddie pool.

In terms of its cinematic worthiness, the staging of the play does seem impressive in a sort of “wow the drama club did a really nice job this year” sort of way, but it, like nearly every stageplay ever photographed, does not translate well to film.

The bottom line is this, I am glad I finally got see Hamilton if for no other reason than I now know I do not need to see Hamilton. I am also glad that I never got suckered into the Hamilton hype and got fleeced for a ticket, and instead only had to pay $4.99 for my Disney Plus subscription to find out that the show is a glittering piece of musical theatre fool’s gold. For all the folks who fell for its alleged, in the moment, 2016 charms…the joke is on them, as history once again has the last laugh.

©2020

365 Days: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Holy shit this is a bad movie. It deserves zero stars on the merits, but I gave it one star because it has a pretty naked lady in it…and it goes against every fiber of my being to give a pretty naked lady zero stars…so on principle alone I refuse to do it.

Language: English, Italian (subtitled) and Polish (subtitled)

365 Days, directed by Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes, is the steamy saga of the unorthodox relationship between mob boss Massimo and Laura, the Polish woman who captures his attention. The film stars Michele Morrone as Massimo and Anna-Maria Sieklucka as Laura.

Watching movies for a living can be a strange experience. Sometimes you are tasked with watching a movie that you would never in a million years consider watching on your own accord. Thus was the case with 365 Days…a Polish erotic romance movie that has been among the most popular on Netflix since it was added to the service in June.

I knew next to nothing about 365 Days before I watched it except that it was “controversial” because of its explicit sex scenes which may or may not be endorsing rape. As someone who can appreciate sexually explicit material in a film, I fall closer to pervert than prude when it comes to this sort of thing, I was intrigued to see what the kerfluffle was all about.

Then I saw the movie.

Jesus Titty Fucking Christ.

This thing is a cinematic abomination. Just absurdly, abysmally atrocious.

Imagine a Twilight Zone episode where you are stuck in an incoherent Italian fashion advertisement that is placed deep inside a Penthouse magazine which has been thrown into a hot dumpster filled with week old egg salad, all accompanied by a pop music holocaust of a soundtrack…and you can scratch the surface of what it is like to endure 365 Days.

The plot of this film is so ludicrous that I actually had to restart the movie to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Sadly, I wasn’t…but the filmmakers definitely were. I won’t even try and explain what the plot is as I think I would actually do irreparable harm to my self by attempting to do so.

Character development was not exactly a top priority for the filmmakers either as the only thing I learned about the characters throughout the movie is that Massimo aggressively enjoys receiving oral sex…I mean he REALLY, REALLY enjoys it…and that Laura is prettier as a brunette than a blonde.

The film is basically an exercise in watching two impossibly beautiful people in various stages of undress engage in sexual simulation. There are worse things to capture on film I suppose. But the sex scenes are so ridiculous as to be laughable. The big sex scene takes place, predictably enough, on a giant yacht, and it is so off the charts on the unintentional comedy scale that it easily outdoes Tommy Wiseau’s unintentional comedy classic The Room.

Between the soft core Skinemax level porn scenes, the movie sprinkles in some other porn…like capitalism porn. There are so many derivative shopping montages where Laura tries on sexy outfits in front of mirrors at luxury shops that I literally lost count…and I was not going to go back and re-watch to keep a tally.

Of course, after trying on clothes, there are the montages of her security guards following her from shop to shop, burly arms filled with bags of high end merchandise. Oh…there is also this really clever montage of two gay guys giving Laura a make-over! So many montages!!

Matching the repeated shopping montages are the numerous scenes of Massimo angrily grabbing Laura and demanding satisfaction and Laura, in turn, being sexy and defiant toward him. These two types of scenes, shopping and faux fighting, are repetitiously repeated repetitively in a redundant fashion…over and over and over again.

The movie also has other scenes…like the erotic scene in a night club, the erotic scene in a different nightclub, the erotic scene at a formal ball and the erotic scene on a private jet…among many other erotic scenes in erotic locations. In case you were wondering, yes there is a lot of eroticism in the movie as it is very erotic and filled with erotic things that are highly eroticized in an erotic fashion. So erotic!

The film is not buoyed by great performances either. While both Morrone and Sieklucka are easy on the eyes, English is not their strong suit…and neither is acting. They aren’t helped by the Gouda level of cheese that is the dialogue either. Yikes! Beaucoup stinky.

It isn’t just the dialogue that smells, as the script is so dramatically, cinematically, emotionally and sexually baffling it actually made my head ache.

The film also boasts the worst soundtrack in recent cinematic history. The soundtrack is filled to the brim with one pop music disaster after another and is so cloying and saccharine it actually gave me multiple cavities.

As for the the bottom line of the film…its titillation factor…well…I guess that is an individual thing. For me the movie seemed to be an escapist fantasy geared toward horny middle-aged women (which are definitely my favorite category of horny woman!). Since I am not a horny middle-aged woman, the sex appeal of it all escaped me entirely. Of course, your mileage may vary.

On the bright side, Anna-Maria Sieklucka really is gorgeous. I also assume from the success of the movie that women and gay men are big fans of Michele Morrone…so at least there is that.

In conclusion, watching two hours of 365 Days felt longer than spending 365 actual days in a cardboard box in a remote storage facility. Unless you are being held hostage and are literally forced to watch this movie, I recommend you skip it. Even if you are in a hostage situation, you may very well be better off decapitating yourself, lighting your detached head on firer and then throwing it into the ocean rather than watching this steaming pile of stylized excrement. Except, of course, if you’re a super horny middle-aged woman…then you should definitely check it out and unabashedly embrace your guilty pleasure.

©2020

Man of Steel: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Monotonous

Superman is a great American myth and archetype.  It is ripe for a quality re-telling of the story, just as Christopher Nolan re-told the Batman myth with his iconic Dark Knight films.  I was hoping Man of Steel, directed by Zack Snyder and written by David Goyer, was going to be to Superman as Dark Knight was to Batman.  Alas, 'twas not to be. 

Let me say, the collection of actors in this film is a pretty impressive list. Russell Crowe, Amy Adams, Kevin Costner, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane and Laurence Fishburne have 11 acting Oscar nominations between them.  The failure of the film is not the fault of these actors.

Henry Cavill plays Superman and is perfectly cast.  He is impossibly handsome and is as ripped as you'd expect a Superman to be.  I first saw Cavill on the Showtime TV show The Tudors.  He is a fine actor with a subtle charm and dynamic presence, so I hope he doesn't get tainted by the stink of Man of Steel.  He has the makings of a movie star, but this is a bad film to kick off his climb to the top.  Henry Cavill is not the problem with Man of Steel.

As for the film itself, I won't go into the painful details, so no need for a spoiler alert, the only spoiler alert would be that the film is a steaming pile of excrement atop a flaming pile of even more excrement.  The main quality of the film is that it is relentlessly LOUD, for no other reason that I can gather except to make sure you don't fall asleep from it's suffocating monotony.  The story is at best incoherent and at its worst schizophrenic.

My best guess as to why the film is so awful, is that the director Zack Snyder wanted to make one film, the studio wanted to make another film and the producer wanted to make a yet another film.  I can only hope that none of them wanted to make THIS film.

In conclusion, this film is a wasted opportunity.  A great collection of acting talent along with an iconic character and storyline were not enough to make Man of Steel even remotely entertaining or interesting.  Superman Returns was an even more horrible Superman film from 2006, followed seven years later by the atrocious Man of Steel, so if history is any guide we won't have to wait very long for another horrendous Superman film.

The bottom line is that Man of Steel is more like Man of Steal…Audiences Money.

If you at the studios have any interest in making another Superman film, I ask that you please contact me.  I have a lot of ideas which may or may not be any good, but lucky for me lack of good ideas has never stopped you from making a Superman film before.  You have my number and my rates are reasonable....for now. 

©2013