Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

On this weeks episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I hop in a van and hit the road with Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland starring Frances McDormand. This episode contains discussions on grief and the meditative nature of the film, the required arthouse mindset, and the power of non-actors on-screen. Also featured are scintillating conversations about Jeff Bridges' Snicker bar diet, Chocolatey Chocolate Balls, Amazon's nefariousness and a live blow-by-blow account of a Wild Kingdom moment in Mike's backyard.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Coming 2 America: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie proves that Eddie Murphy’s comedy fastball is a faded, distant memory, which transforms this movie from a limp comedy into a devastating tragedy.

There was a time when Eddie Murphy was the biggest comedian and movie star on the planet. In the 1980’s he had a string of comedy blockbusters, 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Coming to America (1988), that made him the epicenter of comedy culture. Back then it was Eddie’s world and we were all just living and laughing in it.

Murphy’s meteoric rise to fame began on Saturday Night Live , where he debuted in 1980, at the tender young age of 19, and hilariously held court until 1984. Murphy was a electrifying presence on the show and an equally dynamic stand up comedian, as evidenced by his stand up comedy specials Delirious (1983) and Raw (1987).

Coming to America (1988), directed by John Landis, was an intriguing film as it showcased Murphy’s scintillating talent, his abundant charisma and his remarkable versatility. The film was rated R so Murphy’s more profane comedic edge could be spotlighted, but it also had a love story at its heart, which allowed Murphy to mine his more sweet and good-natured side.

Coming to America was an original and captivating comedy that seemed to portend Murphy’s star growing even larger. But unfortunately, instead of being the launching pad to even greater heights, Coming to America ended up being the last good thing Eddie Murphy has ever done. Yes, there were some mildly acceptable movies that came after it, such as The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) and Bowfinger (1999), but these banal efforts pale in comparison to Murphy’s glorious mid-80’s apex.

33 years later Eddie Murphy and company are back with a Coming to America sequel. Coming 2 America, which premiered on Amazon Prime Friday, March 5th, is the 30 years too late Coming to America sequel that no one was asking for and that none of us deserve.

The film, directed by Craig Brewer, is a rehashing of the 1988 original, with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall back reprising all their iconic roles. The problem though is that Eddie Murphy long ago lost his comedy fastball and his comedy caddy Arsenio Hall never had a fastball to begin with.

Another obstacle for the film is that cultural shifts over the last 33 years have created an audience of fragiles too delicate to handle any raunch, so the bare breasts and R rating from 1988 are history and now Eddie Murphy is forced to live in a rather tepid PG-13 world which is woke approved.

The end result of all this is that Coming 2 America is egregiously and remarkably unfunny. The lone bright spot in the nearly two-hour endeavor is the brief scene when Murphy and Hall don the make-up and bring back their famous barbershop alter egos and take some digs at the absurdity of the woke world we all inhabit, but besides that minor bit of humor, there isn’t a laugh to be found.

A big reason why there are no laughs is because there are a lot of painfully unfunny people in the movie.

For example, Leslie Jones plays a long lost and forgotten one night stand from Prince Akeem’s old days, and she is beyond dreadful. Ms. Jones’ career success is one of the great mysteries of the modern age as she has never, ever been funny…not even by accident. To her credit, at least she is consistent in being aggressively awful.

Jermaine Fowler plays Akeem’s bastard son LaVelle and seems like a survivor of charisma bypass surgery. Fowler is so uninteresting and embarrassingly unfunny on-screen I would rather watch my own autopsy than suffer through watching him “act” again.

The gorgeous Kiki Layne plays Akeem’s princess daughter, and spearheads the girl power narrative that drives this jalopy right off the cliff. Layne is a beauty but she is as wooden and dull an actress as you’ll ever come across. Every scene she appears in comes to a resoundingly screeching halt as her dead eyes act like black holes sucking the life out of everything in their orbit.

There is no point in criticizing any of the forced plot points or the film’s groveling social politics, because none of those things would have matter if the damn thing were just funny. But sadly, Eddie Murphy is just not able to reignite that elusive comedy and charisma spark that propelled him to the heights of the entertainment industry nearly forty years ago.

Murphy is unimaginably rich, so he didn’t make Coming 2 America because he was short on the mortgage payments. I think Murphy made Coming 2 America and 2019’s underwhelming Dolemite is My Name, because he actually wanted to do something worthwhile once again.

I think the wheels began to come off the Murphy wagon when he stopped doing stand up comedy back at the end of the 80’s. Murphy was such a star that he became detached from real people and reality and it was easier not to do the hard work of being good at stand up…which takes a lot of hard work.

For years I’ve heard stories from dozens of people about Murphy’s could not care less work ethic on films in the 2000’s and early 2010’s. It’s not uncommon to hear actors and crew bitch about a star they’ve worked with, but the stories I kept hearing all told the same story. According to these folks Murphy was a lazy, entitled, ego maniac who did barely the bare minimum on movies. He even used to insist that a double be used for every shot he was in where he didn’t have dialogue…we aren’t talking over the shoulder stuff, we are talking Eddie wide shots and reaction shots stuff. Even for spoiled movie stars, this sort of thing is outrageous. T be clear, I don’t know if these claims are true - they might just be the result of the usual jealous sniping and bitching against stars, I just know I’ve heard them quite a bit.

In this context, it becomes apparent that Eddie Murphy stopped giving a shit about thirty years ago and only started giving a shit again in the last few years because his star had faded to the point where he wasn’t telling punchlines, he had become one. But during those decades of aggressively not giving a shit, Murphy lost the spark that made him so special back in the day, and now he can’t reignite it.

I think that sucks because the world is a better place when Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy and not some comedy eunuch churning out flaccid garbage like Coming 2 America. Sadly, I don’t think we are ever going to see Eddie Murphy be great again, and Coming 2 America is a prime exhibit making that case.

In conclusion, I really wanted Coming 2 America to be great but I would’ve been thrilled if it just boasted some quality Eddie Murphy moments. Sadly, the film isn’t anywhere near great, in fact, it is terrible. And worst of all Eddie Murphy looks entirely incapable of being Eddie Murphy anymore, which transformed Coming 2 America for me from being a bad comedy into being a profundly sad tragedy.

©2021

The Mauritanian: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A great story but not so great movie. Not worth paying to see but its subject matter is crucially important and makes the film worthy of a watch when it becomes available on a streaming service for free.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, tells the true story of Mohamedou Salahi, who in the wake of 9-11 was tortured and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years without charge.

The film, which as of March 2nd is in theaters and available on Video-On-Demand, is adapted from Salahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary, and stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodly and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Mauritanian is a great story, but unfortunately not a particularly great film. Despite some effective moments, particularly the torture sequences, and a solid performance from Tahar Rahim as Salahi, it’s a mediocrity that’s not nearly as good as I wanted it to be or that it needed to be. One can’t help but wonder what a better director could have done with such dramatically potent material.

The film suffers because it looks like a tv movie. This rather flat and dull aesthetic keeps the story dramatically constrained and so we are never drawn into it.

The performances are equally middling, with the lone exception being Rahim, who plays the riddle that is Sahir with a charm and humanity worthy of note.

Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for her work as a defense attorney Nancy Hollander in the film but I found her performance to be rather banal. Shailene Woodley gives an equally lackluster performance as another lawyer Teri Duncan.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Marine Corps lawyer Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who was assigned to be the prosecutor on Sahir’s case. Cumberbatch deploys a Southern accent to his Couch (who is a real person) and it is egregiously awful. When British actors miss on American accents, particularly New York and Southern accents, it is so mannered and lifeless as to be painfully distracting, and Cumberbatch’s butchering of the dialect is gruesome to behold. As I watched Cumberbatch lose his wrestling match with the Southern drawl I couldn’t help but wonder…were there no American actors available to play this part?

That said, while the movie isn’t worth paying $20 to see On Demand, I still recommend The Mauritanian when it becomes available for free if for no other reason than it is an important story that contains some vital lessons for our current turbulent time.

As Orwell taught us, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”, and in the United States of Amnesia, our prodigiously propagandized populace is conditioned to be myopic in the moment and utterly blind to the past. This makes for a pliable citizenry that can be led around by their noses by a mainstream media designed to do just that. This is heightened by gullible Americans lacking the intellectual vim and vigor to swim against the powerful current of establishment narratives in a search for some semblance of truth.

Thankfully The Mauritanian is at least a visual aid to remind America of that which it is consistently capable, namely, brutal authoritarianism fueled by frantic emotionalism.

The film does a service by reminding viewers of a few critical things.

First that Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and people still languish there, despite Obama’s promises to close it when he became president in 2009.

Second, that al-Qeada and the U.S. were allies in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It doesn’t get into great detail or anything, but even that little bit of information might be shocking to those who’ve conveniently forgotten that fact (or never knew it in the first place) and other much more damning facts about America and al-Qaeda’s fruitful relationship, then and now.

And third, that war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Barrack Obama, and their immoral minions, have never been punished for their atrocities, which is an abomination considering those that exposed their crimes, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, rot in prison or are forced to live in exile.

As The Mauritanian highlights, post 9-11 America went into a full-blown hysteria. The result of this hysteria was the Patriot Act, massive surveillance, rendition, torture and the mass murder and mayhem of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 America has only gotten more hysterical in the following two decades. In recent years we’ve had one mindless panic after another. There’s been the Russia panic, the #MeToo panic, and the racism/white supremacy panic…all of them delusions and illusions built on minimal evidence and fueled by irrationalism and self-righteous fanaticism.

These panics have been used to distort reality and manipulate people into fighting for draconian and totalitarian measures to combat them.

The most alarming hysteria is the new “domestic terrorism” panic that sprung up in the wake of the Q-Anon Capitol riot of January 6th.

In reaction to this Q-Anon clownshow the political establishment and media have gone full Spinal Tap and upped the hyperbole to 11…9-11 that is.

The delusional discourse that the Capitol riot was a 9-11 level event has led to politicians demanding a “9-11 Commission” type of investigation. I wonder if the new Q-Anon Commission, maybe headed by the new “Reality Czar”, will be as toothless as the contrived show trial that was the 9-11 Commission?

Watching The Mauritanian I couldn’t help but think that Washington and the mainstream media want to do to troublesome “conspiracy theorists”, traditionalists, Christians and Trumpists what Bush, Obama and company did to Mamadou Salahi…make them suffer and disappear. Unfortunately, many regular liberals who have either sold their souls or lost their minds, moral compass and way after years of being heavily propagandized and indoctrinated, wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.

This furor and frenzy over “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacy” is inversely proportional to the actual threat from these manufactured shadows dancing upon America’s cave wall. 

9-11 was a savage and heinous attack, but the U.S.’s over reaction to it brutalized innocent people and ended up transforming the brush fire of Islamic radicalism it was meant to extinguish into an inferno that engulfed the world and torched the Constitution. It seems very likely that a similar over-reaction to the Capitol Riot will result in the same counter conflagration on American soil, and the phantom threat of “right-wing radicals” and “white supremacists” will thus be made manifest.

In conclusion, The Mauritanian isn’t great but is worth watching because it serves a noble purpose, which is to remind Americans of their unquenchable thirst to demonize and dehumanize those they deem as terrorists. Though the targets are now different, America’s evil impulse is as powerful as ever, and so is its susceptibility to hysteria and rampant emotionalism…and that portends a terrifyingly dark future indeed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Nomadland: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An exquisitely crafted film that boasts a powerful yet grounded performance from Frances McDormand.

Oscar front-runner Nomadland chronicles the working class despair wrought by American capitalism, but still manages to kiss Amazon’s ass.

The film gives a gritty glimpse into the struggle of the working poor but genuflects to corporate power instead of exposing it.

Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and written and directed by Chloe Zhao, tells the story of Fern, an older woman who lives in a van and survives as a seasonal worker in various locales across America.

The film, which is currently in theatres and streaming on Hulu, is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century and uses some of the real people from the book to play themselves in the movie.

Nomadland is fantastic and an Oscar front-runner, but it’s not for everybody as it’s an arthouse, verite style film with a loose narrative structure that lacks predictable dramatic beats. It is less a straightforward story than it is a melancholy and mournful meditation.

It is the topic of that meditation - American capitalism, impermanence and grief that makes Nomadland such an intriguing piece of cinema.

The story begins with Fern being forced to leave her long time residence in Empire, Nevada after the town’s US Gypsum plant closes and the once bustling area is abandoned.

Fern then takes to the road to run from her grief over losing Empire and her husband and travels throughout the west searching for seasonal employment.

She makes friends with fellow travelers, all suffering in similar circumstances, as she lives out of her van while working menial jobs in Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Chloe Zhao’s deft directorial touch gives the film a looser pace which results in a narrative with great space to breath. Zhao allows space, silence, framing, lighting and a very effective soundtrack work in unison to finely cultivate the drama instead of imposing it upon viewers.

The sense of isolation and desperation felt by Fern is heightened by cinematographer Joshua James Richards’ gorgeous panoramic shots of the vast and beautifully bleak western landscape.

Like the desolate landscapes, the deep lines in McDormand’s gloriously cinematic face also tell the story of all the hardships and heartbreaks throughout the years that have brought Fern and her working class kind to the brink of extinction.

Speaking of extinction, the film repeatedly refers to dinosaurs, and the sub-text is clear, the meteor of globalization, financialization and anti-unionism has hit and Fern and the working class in America are dinosaurs destined to aimlessly walk the darkened earth searching for scraps until they drop dead from exhaustion.

The film also frequently references carnivores, the symbolism of which is that American capitalism eats up and spits out working class people like Fern. In one scene Fern is horrified watching a crocodile in a zoo devour skinned rabbits for lunch, her primordial horror is driven by the fact that American capitalism is the crocodile, and she and all the poor people she loves are the rabbits.

Fern and her friends all bought into the lie that is the American dream, and now they find themselves older with dwindling energy and resources, alone and vulnerable living out the American nightmare. They’ve worked hard their whole lives and have nothing to show for it except for the existential terror of life without any safety net.

Despite the finely crafted filmmaking, McDormand’s powerfully grounded performance and the film’s chronicling of the wandering underclass and rightfully bemoaning the Titanic-esque economic state of America, it disappoints because it refuses to name or chastise the corporate villains hiding in plain sight.

For example, Fern works every Christmas season at an Amazon warehouse. The film actually got permission to shoot in a real Amazon fulfillment center, and that undoubtedly compromised its integrity.

The Amazon related scenes seem as if they were scripted by the company’s human resources and marketing departments as they’re basically shameless ads for the corporate behemoth.

Fern is shown leisurely meandering down vast warehouse walkways smiling and waving to other employees, and having fun in the break room with new friends, and telling others about how much money she makes and how the company covers the cost of her long-term van parking while she is an employee. The reality of employment at Amazon is much different, as the union busting, worker exploiting Bezos beast brutally cracks the whip on its employees like a frantic pharaoh building a pyramid one box at a time.

On its surface Nomadland is a descendant of the Sean Penn directed film Into the Wild and John Ford’s famed adaptation of Steinbeck’s working class masterpiece Grapes of Wrath.

Fern is somewhat a cross between Into the Wild’s free-spirited protagonist Alexander Supertramp and The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad. The problem though, as highlighted by Nomadland’s shameless acquiescence to Amazon, is that Fern is Supertramp without spirit and Joad without spine.

Maybe the film’s lack of testicular fortitude in regards to Amazon is just another piece of sub-text, surreptitiously alerting viewers that the real problem is the modern demonization of masculinity and the feminization of America. In this way Fern is a castrated Tom Joad, not only unable, but unwilling, to fight against oppressors, instead preferring to collaborate in her own exploitation and denigration. 

More likely though is that the film’s Amazon ass-kissing is a function of that corporate monstrosity’s massive influence over Hollywood. Amazon is now a major movie and tv studio, and the suck ups and sycophants in Hollywood know that to get on Amazon’s bad side is a potentially fatal career move…so they pucker up and play act at caring about working class concerns rather than actually doing something about them.

Nomadland will probably win a bunch of well-deserved Oscars, but unfortunately the film is The Grapes of Wrath without the wrath, as it ultimately genuflects to the corporate power that created the working class tragedy it masterfully chronicles.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amend: The Fight for America: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Judas and the Black Messiah: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that vibrates with a formidable vitality that also features two Oscar-worthy performances by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12th, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.

The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, which makes it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.

I have never been much impressed by Daniel Kaluuya as an actor. I thought Get Out was ridiculously overrated and thought his performance in it was too. But as Fred Hampton, Kaluuya utterly disappears into the role and creates as charismatic and compelling a character as has graced screens all year. Kaluuya’s Hampton vibrates with a natural magnetism and intensity that is glorious to behold.

As great as Kaluuya is, and he is great, LaKieth Stanfield actually has the harder job and does equally outstanding work. O’Neal is a tortured and tormented soul, and Stanfield masterfully shows us all his shades. Stanfield’s subtle, complex and detailed work is most definitely Oscar-worthy, and is a testament to his impressive skill and craftsmanship.

Other performances don’t fare quite as well as Kaluuhya and Stanfield though. Jesse Plemons, an excellent actor, does the best he can with a terribly under written role as an FBI agent, and Martin Sheen, also an excellent actor, is so dreadful as J. Edgar Hoover it is like he’s acting in a different, and much worse, movie.

The biggest issue with the film is that its secondary narratives, one which involves Hoover and the other involves Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson, lack a dramatic cohesion and power, and they distract from the main story and scuttle much needed momentum. The Hoover angle is distractingly cartoonish and the love story between Hampton and Johnson is uncomfortably lifeless, as Dominique Fishback is, to put it mildly, underwhelming in the role of Johnson.

Other issues with the film are that Shaka King’s direction was not quite as deft as I would have preferred. The script and the editing also could have been a bit tighter, but with that said, the film definitely has an undeniable energy to it and pulsates with a power that is impressive.

One final issue was the sound mixing. I watched the movie on HBO Max and the sound mix was utterly abysmal. Much of the dialogue, Daniel Kaluuya’s most of all, got lost under the music in the mix. This could be a function of HBO Max, which unfortunately is a horrible technical streaming service, or it could be I am going deaf, or it could be the sound mixing was atrocious…who knows…but it was irritating.

Predictably, most critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panther movement of the 1960’s spotlighted in the film.

This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.

The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race, it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it and maintain the status quo.

Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” for among other reasons because their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids but for all kids.

In response Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.

As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers/Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the U.S. because they worked to bring all poor and working class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.

Hampton, MLK and Malcolm X weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were working to bring all peoples together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting poor and working class in America and across the globe.

In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.

The FBI obviously don’t see BLM as a threat, hell it is such a collection of useful idiots the feds probably started it in the first place. The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race…conveniently divided and conquered.

This is how something as innocuous as “All Lives Matter” is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving they’d rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.

There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.

For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the capitol building turned riot it was immediately labeled an “insurrection” and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media and the feds hunted down the perpetrators, but these same feds and media supported the BLM “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings and took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned other cities into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.

Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (Defund the Police!) and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness or homicide rates.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, have always been the frontline workers for American fascism and their victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.

This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the “hope and change” charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.

The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah…not just for the film’s cinematic dynamism or the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bullshitters.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Glitch in the Matrix Documentary: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2.5 our of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Little Things: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A derivative and abysmally dull movie that is devoid of any redeeming qualities.

The Little Things, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, is a neo-noir cop movie set in 1990 that tells the story of Joe Deacon, a Kern County Deputy Sheriff, who returns to his L.A. roots and teams with L.A. County Detective Jim Baxter to try and find a serial killer. The film, which premiered on Friday January 29th, 2021 in both theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max, stars three Academy Award winners, with Denzel Washington as Deacon, Rami Malek as Baxter, and with Jared Leto as Albert Sparma, the suspected serial killer.

In 1995, David Fincher’s neo-noir cop movie Seven, starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, became a smash hit and propelled Fincher, Pitt, Kevin Spacey and Gwyneth Paltrow into the stratosphere of the Hollywood A-List. In an interesting what-could-have-been twist, Denzel Washington, who was already a mega-star in 1995, turned down the role in Seven which eventually went to Pitt. One can’t help but wonder how different the movie and the history of Hollywood, would’ve been if Denzel and not Brad were the centerpiece of Seven.

It seems Denzel thinks about that too, since he chose to do The Little Things, which is a very cheap knock off of Fincher’s iconic 90’s noir masterwork. Unfortunately, The Little Things is no Seven, hell…it isn’t even a decent episode of Law and Order, if such a thing exists.

The Little Things is a painfully derivative, cliche ridden, visually stale, dramatically stilted, narratively incoherent mess filled with ridiculously preposterous character choices and even more preposterous plot twists…but besides that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

The trouble with The Little Things is most definitely writer/director John Lee Hancock. Hancock’s filmography, which includes such notable pieces of mundanity as The Rookie, The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks, is a who’s who of forgettable films. Hancock is one of those Hollywood company men who make a very good living churning out middle of the road drivel that is pointless and meaningless. Hancock’s summit is mediocrity, and he never clears base camp with The Little Things.

If you thought that with a cast of three Oscar winners you’d at least get some interesting performances…you’d be very wrong.

Rami Malek is absolutely atrocious in the film as the wrapped too tight detective Baxter. Malek is so uncharismatic, dull and lifeless it’s quite remarkable. Malek’s stilted and uncomfortable performance is filled with so many bizarre side glances and preening it feels like he has either never acted before or can only act as Freddie Mercury.

The great Denzel Washington is also out of sorts, and never finds a rhythm or purpose to propel his character. It is jarring watching Denzel, one of the best actors and movie stars of his generation, flail so fruitlessly and wander so aimlessly through a film so obviously beneath him.

Thankfully, Jared Leto really stretches himself and plays a wild-eyed weirdo who may or may not be a serial killer. I am kidding of course, Leto is forever playing weirdos and this one is his least interesting. There isn’t anything remotely compelling about this forced and contrived performance.

In conclusion, much to my shock and chagrin, The Little Things is a frustrating and aggravating viewing experience that was an utter chore to sit through. I’d rather be tied up and slashed to death by a second rate serial killer than watch this third rate movie. I cannot imagine anyone with any semblance of taste or half a brain in their head would ever enjoy this movie in the least.

©2021

Royal Family Documentary: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Promising Young Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This flawed, very dark comedy has a certain cinematic vitality to it that is compelling, and it also features a stellar performance from the beguiling Carey Mulligan.

Promising Young Woman is a #MeToo revenge fantasy that is both galling for its hatred of men but glorious for its artistry

****This article contains spoilers for the film Promising Young Woman****

Sometimes a movie says something you intensely dislike, but it says it so well you have to tip your cap. A case in point is the darkly comedic #MeToo revenge fantasy Promising Young Woman,

The film, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, tells the story of Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a med-school dropout consumed with grief and anger over her best friend’s rape and death.

In search of cathartic revenge, Cassie spends her time trolling bars pretending to be drunk to the point of incapacitation so that predatory men will attempt to prey upon her. Once they try and take full advantage of her she transforms to reveal herself to be a sober social vigilante shaming men for their repulsive behavior towards women.

Not surprisingly considering the subject matter, Promising Young Woman seethes with vicious misandry that is as disturbing as it is relentless. The film is an unabashed girl power polemic and propaganda piece that espouses the imaginary boogeyman of a pervasive “rape culture” that has only ever existed in the warped minds of Woman’s Studies majors and feminist fanatics. 

The film’s approach re-imagines the misogynistic tropes of Hollywood’s old male dominated storytelling by replacing it with an aggressive man-hating that manifests itself as every male character in the film being an utterly irredeemable predator, a sniveling coward, or both.

In this way it is like a feminist dark comedy version of an old Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sly Stallone, Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood movie where one identity group, be it blacks, Mexicans, Russians or Arabs are reduced to stereotypes and are all the bad guys, except in this movie every guy is the bad guy.

Another movie that I kept thinking about while watching Promising Young Woman was Falling Down, the flawed but intriguing 1993 Michael Douglas film directed by Joel Schumacher. In Falling Down Douglas plays William Foster, a rampaging regular guy who keenly feels that modern life is unjust toward him. Promising Young Woman is the #MeToo version of Falling Down in that it takes a person’s frustrations at perceived injustice and pushes it to absurd extremes.

Besides finding all men deplorable, Promising Young Woman film does have some other flaws. For instance it runs about a half hour too long in an attempt to find a satisfying conclusion, but the ending is ultimately unsatisfying because it tries so hard to be satisfying. 

The film’s yearning for ultimate girl power catharsis also transforms it from biting satire into pure revenge fantasy, which ironically ends up neutering the film’s feminist/anti-male social commentary. 

When Cassie finally gets her revenge at the end of Promising Young Woman, this actually proves the alleged problem of a dominant patriarchal rape culture is just an imaginary dragon slain by Cassie in a Quixotic fantasy. But if the film had stuck to its artistic guns and let Cassie fail and be left to stew in her rage, fury and failure until the end of time, then the movie would’ve succeeded in highlighting the prevalence and power of the patriarchal rape culture its premise so adamantly claims.

It may come as a surprise after reading what I’ve already written that while I found the cultural politics of Promising Young Woman to be as repulsive as the film finds my gender, I also found that the movie possessed a rage-fueled vitality and artistry that at times was intoxicatingly entertaining, which is a credit to first time feature director Emerald Fennell.

My appreciation of the film is also a testament to the beguiling work of Carey Mulligan. Mulligan gives an incisive and insightful Oscar-worthy performance that is stunning to behold for its dynamism and detail. Mulligan masterfully imbues Cassie with a seething and righteous fury that animates her every action and it results in a gloriously magnetic performance.

Supporting actor Bo Burnham is also terrific as Ryan, a man with a crush on Cassie. Burnham, a comedian and director himself, is compelling as he tries to be both charming and passive in Cassie’s presence. The chemistry between the two actors comes across as grounded and genuine, and it elevates the film considerably.

It may seem odd that I am praising a film that has such a pronounced cultural and political perspective that I find distasteful and with which I vehemently disagree. But unlike so many writers and critics of today who find it impossible to tolerate anything or anyone in life that doesn’t agree with them fully, I am not only able to tolerate things I disagree with, I can actually appreciate them.

Promising Young Woman is both a testament to the worst totalitarian and draconian instincts of modern feminism and the #MeToo movement but also a glorious monument to Emerald Fennell’s bold direction and Carey Mulligan’s mesmerizing acting.

I recommend you see the film and judge it for yourself, and even though it viciously judges all men, audiences should have enough integrity to honestly judge it on its merits, not just on its pernicious cultural politics.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

One Night in Miami: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed film but worth seeing because it boasts strong performances, most notably from Kingsley Ben-Adir.

One Night in Miami, which is streaming on Amazon, is generating critical adoration for its powerful performances and for its supposedly timely social commentary on race and racism in America.

The movie, written by Kemp Powers and directed by Regina King, tells the story of a fictionalized meeting between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown in a Miami hotel room in 1964 immediately following Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston to become Heavyweight Champion of the World.

The movie is adapted from the play of the same name and features a series of long conversations and monologues talking about “the struggle” for civil rights and about how “black people are dying in the streets…you must choose a side.”

Unsurprisingly, critics are calling it “timely” and that it “shines a light on present-day America” because of the Black Lives Matter protests last Summer.

These are culturally cheap, socially easy and intellectually shallow lessons to glean from One Night in Miami. The movie strikes me not as an opportunity to highlight how much racism allegedly still exists in America today, but instead as a testament to the staggering amount of progress made in the last 56 years.

The civil rights movement of the 20th century dramatized in One Night in Miami was one of the most extraordinarily successful endeavors in American history.

From 1964 to 2008, black people went from being second-class citizens protesting for voting rights to successfully voting for a black man for president. That black man, Barack Obama, won both of his presidential elections resoundingly.

The Civil Rights Act became law in 1964, and although it certainly didn’t happen overnight, over the course of the last 56 years anti-black discrimination has receded in America to the point where it is now deemed legally, morally and socially repugnant.

Case in point is an early scene in the movie where Jim Brown visits a family friend, an older white man played by Beau Bridges, in his home town in Georgia in 1964. After some lemonade and congratulatory conversation on the front porch, Brown offers to help the man move a piece of furniture inside the house. The man declines, telling Brown without a hint of shame that they “don’t let niggers” into their home.

That scene is so shocking and jarring because it is inconceivable in modern day America.

Cassius Clay, who shortly after the events dramatized in the movie becomes Muhammad Ali, is a perfect example of the massive change in American perspective from 1964 onward.

In 1964, Clay/Ali was reviled by most Americans for being a loud mouth, malcontent and Muslim. By 1974 he was celebrated as an iconic hero for his courageous victory over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. By 1996 he was a living legend and avatar for the very best of America as he carried the torch for the U.S. at the summer Olympics in Atlanta.

Objectively, by nearly every measure, discrimination has been so reduced as to be nearly non-existent. Subjectively though, the ghosts of oppression still haunt black minds and guilt still infects white minds. This transforms the fight against racism from an external struggle against discrimination to an internal one against perceived prejudice (which still exists among all races) and that is a much more complex, complicated and confounding battle to wage.

The chains of slavery are long gone, as are the legal discriminations of the Jim Crow era…and yet the need to project the subjective issue of prejudice into a struggle against the phantom of an external “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” in order to identify as both a noble victim and brave resistor is extremely powerful and intoxicating.

There is a certain sense of cos-playing in the current “anti-racist” movement. It is an existential yearning for purpose and meaning by trying to emulate the greats of the civil rights movement who succeeded in changing the country.

Every woke poseur, be they white or black, thinks they’re John Brown, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton all rolled into one. They aren’t, they’re puffed up toddlers ranting and railing against the imaginary monsters hiding under their bed.

The subjective, self-serving yet self-defeating woke hyper-racialization of recent years has turned demands for equal treatment into the cries for special treatment, and has transformed MLK’s dream of judging people by the content of their character into racism, and judging people by the color of their skin into enlightenment.

This immoral madness puts us on a downward trajectory that only leads to calamity in the form of a catastrophic conflagration.

As for One Night in Miami, I recommend it as it is a flawed but captivating film that boasts two Oscar level performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X and Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke.

Near the end of the movie there’s a scene where Sam Cooke sings his civil rights anthem, “A Change is Gonna Come” on the Tonight Show.

The song’s soulful chorus is, “it’s been a long, long time coming, but I know, a change gonna come”.

Thanks to men like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke and countless courageous others, change has come… and One Night in Miami is an excellent opportunity to acknowledge it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

MLK/FBI: A Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Run Hide Fight: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie could have been much worse. It may appeal to adolescents and those with adolescent tastes in movies, but for everyone else it isn’t worth seeing.

Run Hide Fight, written and directed by Kyle Rankin, is a new action thriller film that tells the story of Zoe Hull, a female high school student fighting back during a school shooting.

The movie, which stars Isabel May as Zoe and Thomas Jane as her father Todd, is basically Die Hard but set in a high school with a female protagonist.

Run Hide Fight has garnered some media attention due to its being the first film distributed by The Daily Wire, the conservative media outlet founded in 2015 by political commentator Ben Shapiro. The movie is available for streaming exclusively on The Daily Wire for paid subscribers beginning on Friday January 15th.

As Andrew Brietbart once said, “politics is downstream of culture” and with this in mind Shapiro is leading the charge for conservatives to make a more concerted effort to be involved in popular culture, long a bastion of liberal domination.

Conservatives have for decades railed against liberals’ control of entertainment, decrying the impact it has in shaping public sentiment. But despite all the handwringing, conservatives have never really made a serious move to compete in that arena, just complain about it.

Conservative filmmakers have traditionally lacked the talent, skill and craft to make worthwhile conservative art or entertainment, which is usually so politically heavy-handed, artistically obtuse, intellectually trite and emotionally infantile as to be ridiculously unwatchable.

Run Hide Fight sets out to reverse that trend.

As someone more arthouse than action movie, more cinema than politics and who has zero interest in Ben Shapiro, his whiny politics and his even whinier voice, my expectations going into Run Hide Fight were very low, and my assessment is as follows.

The film is most definitely derivative, formulaic and predictable as it borrows liberally from the Die Hard blueprint. The structure of the narrative and the character archetypes are almost identical to Die Hard…but not as good.

For example, one-dimensional bad guy Tristan Voy and his henchmen are pale imitations of Die Hard’s deliciously devious villain Hans Gruber and his collection of monstrous minions.

The film also suffers from some sloppy directing and flimsy storytelling as director Kyle Rankin is no master craftsman like the criminally under valued John McTiernan.

Rankin’s decision to juxtapose the realistic and viscerally unnerving school shooting violence with the action hero fantasy violence of Zoe’s John McClain-esque counter-attack is definitely tonally jarring, disorienting and off-putting.

But there are also some bright spots.

The well paced film runs an hour and forty-nine minutes and kept me engaged the whole time.

The film’s politics are pretty subtle, with conservative values just a back drop, not the main attraction.

And finally, Isabel May does a terrific job in carrying the whole movie. May is not Bruce Willis, but she is a formidable force and flashes moments of genuine brilliance in the movie.

Is Run Hide Fight a great movie? No. But it also isn’t a bad movie. To its credit, it is, like the vast majority of Hollywood’s output, just a plain old regular movie…but that is a huge first baby step for conservatives trying to get into the pop culture game.

The problem is the film is only streaming on The Daily Wire and to see it you must pay to subscribe. I understand what Shapiro is trying to do with this business plan, but I think it’s terribly flawed.

This film is definitely geared toward a teen audience and what Shapiro wants to do is bring young adults to his website to see his lone film, and then stick around to read and listen to right-wing news in the hopes of bringing them into the conservative fold.

This single film alone just isn’t good enough though for some teenager to expend enough time, mental energy and money to actually subscribe to a website they’ll only use once to watch a middling movie in a market already flooded with a cornucopia of middling movies.

Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or the myriad of other streaming services are teeming with a plethora of similarly mediocre, mildly entertaining films, whereas The Daily Wire only has this one.

Sure, the people who already subscribe will be happy to have access to Run Hide Fight, but by limiting who can see the film, Shapiro is just reinforcing his echo chamber and not expanding his reach, which if conservatives want to get into the pop culture war should be his ultimate goal.

If Run Hide Fight were available on video-on-demand and anybody could rent it for $5 or buy it for $15, thousands of young adults would watch it and it could maybe help The Daily Wire build a relationship with an untapped audience. If VOD services refused to carry the film, that would only generate free publicity and rebel cache for the movie.

Shapiro’s current business model loses out on the money from expanded access via video-on-demand and myopically cuts off his right-wing nose to spite his liberal-hating face by letting only true blue conservatives see it.

As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and Run Hide Fight is a decent enough teen action thriller that it would make a good impression on young adult audiences, if only they had an easy opportunity to see it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Crack: Cocaine, Corruption and Conspiracy - A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Dissident: A Review

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Pieces of a Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. After the first thirty minutes the film isn’t very good but Vanessa Kirby is very good in it.

Pieces of a Woman is a story of forgiveness… so why is Netflix so keen to cancel its star, Shia LaBeouf?

Pieces of a Woman, the new arthouse film starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf that is garnering some Oscar buzz, premiered on Netflix on January 7.

The film, written by Kata Wéber and directed by Kornél Mundruczó tells the story of a Boston couple who suffer a traumatic home birth of their daughter. 

The film’s theme is the power of forgiveness, even for the most egregious of injuries. This would seem a prescient and poignant lesson in our current age of relentless cancel culture and shameless embrace of victimhood. Unfortunately, while that is a theme we need right now, this muddled misfire of a movie is not an adequate delivery system.

Pieces of a Woman starts off spectacularly, with a masterfully executed, compelling and captivating opening thirty minutes. But after that it quickly deteriorates into a maudlin, melodramatic exercise chock full of every dramatic cliché imaginable.

On the bright side, the film is an actor’s showcase and the luminous Vanessa Kirby makes the very most of the opportunity. Kirby, best known for her work on Netflix’s The Crown, gloriously transcends the mundane script and middling direction by giving a subtle, specific, dynamic and magnetic performance as the grieving yet resilient Martha.

Netflix is pushing for Kirby, already a Best Actress winner at the Venice Film Festival, to get a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

Netflix is also promoting the rest of the cast to get awards consideration… well, almost all of the rest of the cast. Every cast member is featured on Netflix’s “For Your Awards Consideration” webpage, except for Shia LaBeouf.

Why has LaBeouf, the main supporting actor in the movie who some critics – not me – claim is “remarkable”, been excluded from Netflix’s awards consideration material?

The answer is that LaBeouf’s former girlfriend, singer FKA Twigs, filed suit against him in December of 2020 for past sexual, physical and emotional abuse. In the wake of this lawsuit other women, including singer Sia, have come forward making varying claims of mistreatment.

In response LaBeouf wrote to the New York Times, “I’m not in any position to tell anyone how my behavior made them feel. I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years…I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I'm ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt."

He later stated that many of the allegations were not true but that he owed the women “the opportunity to air their statements publicly and accept accountability for those things I have done.”

He added that he was “a sober member of a 12-step program” and in therapy. “I am not cured of my PTSD and alcoholism, but I am committed to doing what I need to do to recover, and I will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way.”

So, in a surreal twist, LaBeouf’s character in Pieces of a Woman is an at-times abusive alcoholic and in real life the actor is now accused of being an abusive alcoholic.

This is obviously a complex situation, one that requires a foregoing of our culture’s compulsive and muscular Manichaeism. But it would seem Netflix has not absorbed the nuanced message of forgiveness highlighted in Pieces of a Woman and are, ironically, purging LaBeouf from promotional material for a film about the power of radical forgiveness.

LaBeouf is not alone in being tossed into the memory hole by Netflix over allegations of past misdeeds. Johnny Depp recently lost a libel case against The Sun whom he sued for calling him a “wife beater”. In response, Netflix removed all of Depp’s films from its service.

It’s important to note that neither LaBeouf nor Depp have been proven to have committed any crime, they’ve only been accused. And yet Netflix didn’t hesitate to swiftly punish them anyway.

It’s also curious that Depp’s former wife and alleged victim, Amber Heard, has also been accused of abuse (by Depp) but has faced no public consequences from Netflix or anyone else.

Another indicator of our culture’s victimhood bias is in nearly every internet article I’ve read detailing FKA Twigs’ lawsuit against LaBeouf and Netflix’s punitive actions, there was a notice informing readers of specific resources available to them if they ever “experience domestic violence”.

This is a commendable public service, but it’s striking that despite these articles also referencing LaBeouf’s alcoholism and mental health issues, none of them ever direct readers suffering from those conditions to equally helpful resources.

The reality is that these notices and Netflix’s punitive disappearing of LaBeouf and Depp are simply exercises in virtue signaling and pandering to the online outrage mob.

LaBeouf and Depp may be terrible people who’ve done terrible things, but dispensing punishment and condemnation before accusations are proven is unwise and unhealthy. Even after findings of guilt, we should attempt the difficult but imperative task of foregoing vengeance and victimhood in favor of cultivating repentance and forgiveness, which would have longer lasting effects and be a path to a more decent, kind and compassionate culture.

In conclusion, Pieces of a Woman doesn’t live up to the stellar work Vanessa Kirby does in it, just like Netflix doesn’t live up to the enlightened principle of forgiveness at the heart of the film.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 27 - Wonder Woman 1984

In this tension-filled episode Barry and I discuss the much anticipated Wonder Woman 1984. Highlights include shared frustrations over the movie‘s missed opportunities, multiple mispronunciations of Gal Gadot’s name and an enraged me viciously assaulting Barry over a misunderstanding.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 27 - Wonder Woman 1984

Thank you for listening and Happy New Year!!

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 26 - Mank

In this episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I debate David Fincher’s polarizing new film Mank. Topics discussed include Gary Oldman’s brilliance, Fincher’s frustratingly complex genius and an obscure old movie named Citizen Kane.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 26 - Mank

Thank you for listening!

©2020

Death to 2020: A Review and Commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Pixar's Soul: A Review and Commentary

Pixar’s first “black-led” movie ‘Soul’ isn’t about being black, it’s about being human

Pixar went to great lengths to make sure Soul would be acceptable to black people, but that won’t stop the woke from conjuring racial criticism of it.

Soul, the new film from esteemed animation studio Pixar that premiered on the streaming service Disney + on Christmas Day, has gotten a lot of attention for featuring the first black protagonist in Pixar’s history.

The film tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a good-hearted jazz musician (who happens to be black) making a living teaching music at a New York City middle school.

On the day Joe’s life is about to change following an audition with a famous saxophonist searching for a piano player, things end up taking an unanticipated twist.

What follows is a very existential and mildly entertaining metaphysical magical mystery tour through life, death, art and New York City. 

In this era of aggressive wokeness and cancel culture, Pixar and Disney went to great lengths to make sure Soul was not deemed racist and was acceptable to black people.

According to the New York Times, “Knowing their work would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Doctor, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.”

So the question is how could these artists, who are members of a race (white) so despicable the New York Times refuses to capitalize it, believably create a character whose race (Black) is so superior that it is always capitalized in the New York Times?

As the Times informs us, the first step in this Herculean task was Pixar’s vice president for inclusion strategies Britta Wilson building a “Cultural Trust” made up of the company’s black employees.

The second step was that the production “talked to a lot of external consultants and black organizations...”

And finally the production brought in black writer Kemp Powers as a screenwriter who then got promoted to co-director, the first black director in Pixar history.

If all of that corporate pandering, from having a vice president of “inclusion strategies” to a “Cultural Trust” to hiring racial consultants, seems transparently ridiculous, repulsively shameless and downright griftery, you are not alone. But thankfully the film somewhat succeeds despite, as opposed to because of, all of this human resources inspired nonsense.

Ironically, the end result of all of Pixar’s gratuitous genuflecting to black people is a film that is strikingly color blind in a gloriously unwoke, old-fashioned and beautifully rational Martin Luther King-esque kind of way, as Joe’s race is actually entirely incidental to the story in Soul.

To the film’s great credit it doesn’t tell a black story, it tells a human story. Soul transcends race, or any of our other superficial differences like ethnicity and gender, and highlights the fact that we are not “white” people and “black” people, but rather, just people…all of us filled with hopes, fears, dreams and heartbreaks.

The funny thing though about Pixar being so scared of being called “racist” that it bent over backwards to make Soul acceptable to black people, is that it wasn’t black people it needed to be worried about…it was the woke.

Case in point, Kirsten Acuna, a non-black, woke film critic for the Insider, was deeply disturbed by Soul’s racial politics, so much so that the rather harmless film left her “cringing up until the very last minute”.

Acuna’s specific woke complaints contain too many spoilers to share in detail, but one of her non-spoiler issues was that “Pixar’s first Black-led film should celebrate a Black man’s experience and solely focus on his dreams and desires. Instead, Joe’s life takes a backseat in order for a white woman to figure out what she wanted from life.”

Contrary to Acuna’s complaint, there is actually no “white woman” character in the movie at all. Even though the alleged offending character, “22”, is voiced by white actress Tina Fey, a major premise of the movie is that “22” is a spiritual entity capable of taking any form.

Acuna was also dismayed that Soul has a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, declaring that the majority of critics who have reviewed the movie are white, and “shouldn't at least half of the reviews for Pixar's first film with a Black lead come from critics of color?”

So if we studiously apply Ms. Acuna’s race-based test for film critics, then the obvious question becomes…why didn’t Ms. Acuna let a black critic write a review of Pixar’s first black-led film instead of writing one herself?

This is why wokeness is so insidious and why trying to appease it is a Sisyphean venture, because it is an inherently irrational, emotionally fueled exercise in grievance seeking and virtue signaling…case in point – the vacuous and vapid woke fools like Kirsten Acuna lamenting Soul’s allegedly troublesome racial politics.

As for my opinion, Soul wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn’t bad. It’s an at times entertaining, thought provoking, visually gorgeous and interesting movie.

My biggest issue with Soul was that it wasn’t quite as philosophically profound as it could have been, but to my surprise and to its credit, it also wasn’t heavy-handed and politically preachy…and for that I was very grateful, and you should be too.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A mildly entertaining movie that takes a unique look at life, death and art. Not perfect by any stretch but compelling enough to keep you engaged.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020