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

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

My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for the all-star cast…hoo-boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GRIME AND GRIT UNDER THE GLITZ AND GLAMOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALL LIGHT, NO HEAT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022

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

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

On this episode, Barry and I jet off to a private Greek island to try and solve the mystery of who murdered cinema as they talk all things Glass Onion - A Knives Out Mystery, the new star-studded Rian Johnson movie on Netflix. Topics discussed include the structure of successful whodunnits, the absurdity of Daniel Craig's egregious Foghorn Leghorn impression, and the tragic lowering of cinematic standards.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 88 - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Two Pinocchios in one year? You better believe it! On this episode, Barry and I don our wooden shoes and head to Geppetto's workshop to debate the merits of Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion animated Pinocchio, available on Netflix. A bevy of heavy topics are discussed, including death, religion, and Barry's shocking Christmas confession.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 88 - Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 87 - Sr.

On this episode, Barry and I chat about the Netflix documentary Sr., which examines the life and times of enigmatic filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. and his relationship with his superstar son, Robert Downey Jr. Topics discussed include, fathers and sons, on death and dying, and the power of forgiveness and the yearning for closure.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 87 - Sr.

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: A Review - A Wooden Puppet on a Wooden Cross

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dark but timely and profound version of the old classic that features glorious stop-motion animation.

2022 is apparently the year of Pinocchio directed by Academy Award winners.

First this year was the live-action remake of the 1940 Disney animated classic Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio hit Disney + on September 8th and was promptly skewered by none other than little old me for being an absolute piece of shit. After watching this true cinematic abomination, I wrote, “when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin for Zemeckis and Hanks’ insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.”

Zemeckis’ career has been in a downward spiral ever since he fell in love with motion-capture technology on The Polar Express in 2004 and Pinocchio would seem to be his hitting the very bottom of the worst toilet in Hollywood.

Director Guillermo del Toro on the other hand, seems to be only growing into more of a singular artistic genius. Coming off his Best Picture and Best Director winning efforts on The Shape of Water (2017), he gifted us with last year’s under-appreciated gem Nightmare Alley.

Now del Toro is back with his own take on the Pinocchio story – now streaming on Netflix, and it’s a testament to his artistry, vision and originality, not to mention proof of his vast filmmaking superiority to Robert Zemeckis.

Del Toro’s Pinocchio, inspired by Gris Grimly’s illustrations in a 2002 version of the original Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a stop-motion animated musical film that is an existential dream/nightmare which wrestles with such unfathomable topics as mortality, humanity, fascism, war and love.

The movie certainly looks inviting to kids with its gloriously lush and detailed stop-motion animation, but its tone is undeniably dark. I watched with my 7-year-old son and he said afterward that it had “too many bombs and stuff for kids”.

That said, when he originally saw the preview for the movie, he said he didn’t want to watch it at all because it looked “terrible”, and he encouraged me to write a negative review of it without even seeing it. After a long and probably fruitless conversation about the ethics of professional film criticism, I convinced him to watch it with me and, despite some philosophically weighty subjects, he did really enjoy it, as did my wife and I.

It's not surprising that a story about the tumultuous but unbreakable love between a father and son would resonate with a father and son attached at the hip, but what made this Pinocchio even more poignant for us, and profound in general, was its focus on death and the fleeting and fragile nature of life, as we have been grappling with those perilous and ponderous topics in our home of late.

It's not surprising that del Toro would imbue his Pinocchio story with such profound existential depth, since his 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, also dealt with a young child confronting the most onerous of topics, such as death and fascism.

Del Toro, ever the idiosyncratic artist, makes the wise decision in his Pinocchio to replace the Pleasure Island storyline from the original with a striking examination of militarism and fascism that is remarkably insightful in our hyper-militarized culture.

Instead of little boys eschewing discipline in pursuit of bodily pleasures, del Toro’s boys eschew bodily pleasure in favor of fascism and its discipline, militarism and pursuit of battlefield glory. This is a tale as old as time about how young men (and their parents) are blindfolded by a waving flag and surrender to a thoughtless conformity which results in their fighting wars for the rich against other poor people in far off lands.

Considering Hollywood is in reality the propaganda arm of the Pentagon and intelligence community – which has an iron grip on what movies and tv shows get made and which don’t, it’s shocking to see such a fearless anti-war message front and center in a mainstream movie.

In addition to the fascism storyline – which seems as relevant as ever as the drums of war against Russia are mindlessly and relentlessly beaten on a daily basis across American culture, del Toro adds some of his uniquely morbid flair to the festivities with a visit to the afterworld/underworld, which is both amusing, alarming and unnerving.

Besides those specific changes, del Toro also plays a little fast and loose with some other parts of the story, but despite this his Pinocchio still manages to ring spiritually true to the original.

Speaking of which, what makes del Toro’s Pinocchio so very interesting is that it features religion – Catholicism. Worship of Christ is seen in a few scenes, and the moral foundations of Catholicism are present thematically throughout the film.

In our supposedly secular age where moralistic therapeutic deism and identity politics pass for religion, traditional religion is usually used in entertainment only to convey the inherent evil of its adherents, but del Toro masterfully weaves the magic and mystery of Christ into his tale, thus giving his film a profundity and depth unimaginable in something like Zemeckis’ version, which was a virtue-signaling affair dedicated to the shallow, putrid waters of political correctness.

The voice cast in del Toro’s Pinocchio, which consists of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, David Bradley as Geppetto, Tilda Swinton as the Wood Sprite, Ron Perleman as Podesta and Cate Blanchett as Spazzatura the monkey, are all fantastic.

And yes, there are songs in the film, but thankfully the music never overwhelms the movie and the songs are actually quite good.

The best thing about the film though, besides del Toro’s visionary script, is the stop-motion animation. Stop-motion, for those unfamiliar, is the type of animation used on movies like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, or on those great old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and A Year Without a Santa Claus which run every year around Christmas on tv. It is a painstaking art form but it creates a unique visual experience by making the setting and characters three dimensional.

I’ve always loved stop-motion animation, and del Toro’s distinctive vision, which is on display in all his films, and the artistry of the animators, makes for a truly captivating cinematic experience.

I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for cinephiles and normal folks alike. The film is as compelling a version of this story as has ever been produced.

I think kids (and adults for that matter) mature enough to handle dipping their toes into the cold, deep waters of existentialism, and who are able to consider the fragility of life without melting down into despair, ought to watch del Toro’s Pinocchio as it’s as profound as any movie made in the last three years.

©2022

The Banshees of Inisherin: A Review – Journey to the Irish Heart of Darkness

****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 well-written and well-acted dark comedic fable that speaks to our current hyper-polarized time.

The Irish are often caricatured by outsiders as a bunch of rosy-cheeked, pseudo-leprechauns blessed with a persistent good-nature and the relentless gift of the gab.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Irish are not jolly jig dancing leprechauns, they’re a complicated people inflicted with a deep-seated darkness and melancholy that confounds psychiatry and could swallow universes whole.

Yes, the Irish are blessed with the gift of the gab but they’re also cursed with the impulse to jab. Wherever two or more Irishmen are gathered, a fight is more likely than not.

Which brings us to The Banshees of Inisherin, the new dark comedic fable written and directed by acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh which stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, with supporting turns from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan.

The film, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, tells the story of Padraig (Farrell) and Colm (Gleeson), two men living on a small island just off the coast of civil war torn Ireland in 1923, as they navigate the end of their friendship.

The troubles (pun intended) start when Colm decides one day that life is too short to spend another moment in the presence of the dull and dim-witted Padraig. Fiddle-player Colm wants to leave his mark on the world by writing a great Irish song, and believes Padraig’s company is holding him back by taking up too much of his time. Colm would rather cut off his nose to spite his face than to spend another minute of his life chatting inanely with Padraig.

Padraig, who really is dull and dim-witted, is blindsided by this turn of events and simply can’t wrap his head around Colm’s behavior. Padraig is nice and only aspires to be nice, so Colm’s rather rude demand that they not be friends anymore is a shock.

The story of Colm and Padraig’s progressively uncivil civil war unfurls from there but I’ll refrain from sharing any more details to avoid spoilers except to say that things escalate to literally absurd extremes.

The Banshees of Inisherin has a lot going for it. For one, it is simply but beautifully shot, the setting is glorious and the costumes are sublime.

In addition, Colin Farrell gives a phenomenal performance as the doe-eyed dumb-ass Padraig. Farrell has discovered himself as an actor in recent years under the direction of both McDonagh and Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer). Hell, he was even terrific in the Ron Howard nothing burger that was Thirteen Lives from this past Summer.

Padraig’s character arc gives Farrell a great deal to sink his teeth into and he makes the absolute most of it. I would assume that an Oscar nomination is in his future and he’s definitely deserving of a win.

Brendan Gleeson too is superb as the determined yet despondent, gruff but good-natured Colm. Gleeson is a fantastic actor and the more we get to see of him the better. Make no mistake, The Banshees of Inisherin is Colin Farrell’s movie, but none of it is possible without the subtle and sublime work of Brendan Gleeson.

Kerry Condon plays Siobhan, Padraig’s sister and she is captivating as she perfectly captures the tortured and tormented existence of the Irish woman stuck on an isolated island with the hell that is Irish men.

Barry Keoghan gives an uneven but at times spectacular performance as Dominic, the lonely and desperate son of the local brutish policeman. Keoghan sometimes gets lost in histrionics, but when he slows down and stills himself, he is capable of immense dramatic power and that is evident in his work as Dominic.

I’ve enjoyed Martin McDonagh’s plays but I’ve not been a huge fan of films. I thought In Bruges (2008) was good but not that good, and found his most recent effort, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri to be a steaming pile of donkey shite.

The Banshees of Inisherin is by far his best film as it tells a bleakly funny, layered and complex allegory about the nature of men, Irish men in particular, and the perilously polarizing nature of our fractious time.

Men like Padraig and Colm, are designed to communicate shoulder-to-shoulder, whether it be in a foxhole, the fields, an assembly line or at a bar. Shoulder-to-shoulder. The problems start when Colm forces a face-to-face discussion, which is unnatural to men. When men are face-to-face, they’re squaring up to fight…and that’s what occurs with Colm and Padraig…and with all men who attempt to deny their masculine nature no matter how suffocatingly self-destructive it may be.

As for the more current notions addressed in The Banshees of Inisherin, the recent trend of celebrating the banishing of friends or family over the differing of opinions, is front and center.

Nowadays as a cold civil war rages in America, disagreement over politics, of all stupid, fucking useless things, is punishable by exile, which is lustily cheered on by the cacophony of clowns manning the echo chamber of social media.

Like Padraig I’m a dim-witted dullard, and like Padraig I’ve been cast out of the garden by friends. Unlike Padraig, I don’t give a flying fuck. Like Colm I prefer to be alone, and do not want to waste my time or disturb my peace with inane chit-chat with dopes, dipshits and douchebags.

This is part of the brilliance of The Banshees of Inisherin as Padraig and Colm are two parts of the masculine Irish psyche that are forever in and out of accord with one another. Colm’s newfound, fear-of-being-forgotten inspired ambition and Padraig’s yearning for comfort coupled with his fruitless hope to be remembered as nice, are the two clashing desires in the heart of all Irishmen, and maybe in all men.

Ultimately, what Martin McDonagh understands is that the thing to remember about the Irish is that they are the best friends and the worst enemies. They’re happy to talk your ear off or rip your head off, either one, you decide. They have short-tempers and long memories and they don’t hold grudges, they ARE grudges.

The Banshees of Inisherin understands all of that and all of the darkness in the Irishman’s heart, and that’s why it’s both amusing and gloriously insightful that this movie feels like a prequel to some epic grudge inspired feud that will burn the fictional island of Inisherin to the ground in the years and decades to come…which is a wonderfully Irish thing to do.

The Banshees of Inisherin is possibly the best movie of the year, but to be clear, it isn’t a great movie. It’s good, and interesting, and insightful, but it isn’t great. But in the current cinematic drought in which we suffer, I guess I’ll have to drink from the well of the pretty good while I dream of greatness past.

If you’re Irish or of Irish descent, you’ll probably recognize yourself in The Banshees of Inisherin. But regardless of your connection to the Emerald Isle, be forewarned, The Banshees of Inisherin is a subtle but dark…very dark…comedy. If that’s not your thing, then this is won’t be your thing.

©2022

Tar: A Review - Beware of Women in Pantsuits Behaving Badly

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: Cate Blanchett gives a phenomenal performance, but it might not be enough to elevate this movie above its massive third act failures.

Lydia, oh Lydia, have you heard about Lydia? Lydia the conductor lady.

The Lydia in question is the self-destructive, megalomaniacal, world-renowned, superstar conductor/composer Lydia Tar, the fictional lead character played by Cate Blanchett in the new movie Tar.

The film chronicles Tar’s balancing act atop the classical music world as she navigates her darker nature as well as cancel culture and the #MeToo movement. That Tar is a lesbian woman in a male-dominated field who abuses her power, is either a clever or cowardly twist on the story…but more on that later.

Tar is the first film for acclaimed director Todd Field in sixteen years, unfortunately, it fails to live up to all of its intriguing and tantalizing possibilities, but it does feature moments of brilliance that are deliriously enticing and highlight the art of cinema at its best.

For example, the very best scene in any movie this year is a ten-minute tour-de-force from early on in Tar. The scene, which has no cuts, revolves around Lydia Tar, one of the greatest living conductor/composers in the world, teaching a conducting class at Julliard. In the class, she interacts with a sheepishly overwhelmed but defiant “pan-gendered, BIPOC” student who mindlessly regurgitates the current cultural buffoonery regarding the “evils” of the canon of white European “cis” males…like Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This student doesn’t like Bach because he was a “misogynist” who fathered twenty children, and therefore refuses to study him or examine his work.

Tar tries a variety of tactics to get this young student to abandon their myopic, identity-fueled, anti-intellectual position but to no avail. Then out of frustration, or fury, she drops her considerable intellectual hammer on him and exposes his personal idiocy for all to see. Then, in typical modern fashion, the “pan-gender, BIPOC” student does not engage Tar in debate or defend himself, but just storms off in a huff.

Watching this scene, which features a bravura performance from Blanchett, brilliant writing and deft camera choreography, was pure joy. So much so that I’ve gone back and watched just this single scene more than five times since I finished the film…it’s that good.

Part of what makes that scene so compelling is that Blanchett is simply one of the great actors and she’s on the top of her game in Tar.

Blanchett’s performance is mesmerizing because it’s so complex and layered. Blanchett is performing as Tar, who is someone who is constantly performing. Lydia Tar wears a mask incessantly in order to maintain the cult of artistic greatness she has built up around herself. Blanchett’s ability to maintain Tar’s deception and self-deception, is a testament to her expansive talent and enormous skill.

I’ve no doubt that Blanchett will be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and most likely will win it, and deservedly so, and that single, extended scene of her teaching at Julliard should be required viewing for any actors or actresses or aspiring actors or actresses.

But as glorious as that Julliard scene is, it’s also a sign of how far the film falls in its third act. I won’t give details to avoid spoilers, but this scene is visually referenced later in the movie in such a ham-handed, cheap, ‘Lifetime Movie of the Week’ way that it truly tarnishes and diminishes the entire film.

The first third of Tar is a truly engaging and phenomenal piece of arthouse moviemaking that skillfully pulls you in. But the final third is so rushed, and filled with a bevy of unearned narrative and character developments, that it scuttles the entire venture.

For example, the nadir for Lydia Tar comes in the third act when she humiliates herself in public (once again I won’t give details to avoid spoilers), but this scene is so poorly conceived and executed as to be absurd. It’s the height of unintentional comedy and the depths of cinematic malpractice.

The film’s devolution away from reality into hyper-drama, which includes the previously mentioned exploitation of the Julliard scene, as well as the over-the-top dramedy of Tar’s ultimate breakdown, destroy its cinematic and dramatic credibility. Ultimately, this renders the film an overly long, dramatically inert enterprise that is conspicuously devoid of artistic satisfaction.

One of the more intriguing themes of Tar is the notion of the cult of the great artist. Tar may or may not be supremely talented, but she deftly builds around herself this persona of great artistry and masterfully navigates the political landscape of the music world to make it manifest.

In this way Tar is reminiscent of her creator, writer/director Todd Field. Field was a middling actor before he became a director, and his great claim to fame was playing the supporting role of Nick Nightingale in Stanley Kubrick’s last movie Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick died before that movie came out in 1999, but two years later Todd Field’s first feature film, In the Bedroom premiered. The marketing around Field and In the Bedroom dealt a lot with the notion that Field learned filmmaking at the foot of Kubrick, like he was Kubrick’s protégé or something. This narrative was untrue but it was clever, after all Field did act in a Kubrick film and Kubrick was no longer around to refute the notion of being his mentor.

I thought In the Bedroom was massively overrated and it seemed to me that critics, and the Oscars, loved the film and Field because they were, by extension, paying homage to the late, great Kubrick.

By constructing this Kubrick creation myth around his directing career, Field had successfully built a brand critics would support going forward. To be clear, Field is not some fraud, he did get his MFA from AFI after all, which is so small feat. And his movies, both In the Bedroom and Little Children, are not bad movies, but they also aren’t remarkable in any way. The point being that Field and his films simply are not worthy of the critical love they’ve received.

It's this theme of the cult of the great artist that I found to be the most alluring in Tar because it rings the most-true, as I’ve seen it up close and personal in its various stages in London, New York and Hollywood.

Other themes, like the cancel culture/#MeToo stuff, actually feel a little too cute by half. What I mean by that is that telling an abuse of power/sexual predation story but putting a lesbian woman as its protagonist is self-defeating and an act of artistic cowardice.

Audiences love Cate Blanchett and are willing to give her character a benefit of the doubt. Certain audiences, like the target audience of coastal elites who will be more likely to see Tar, are reflexively forgiving of “minorities”, like a gay woman in a male dominated field, Like Tar. This makes Lydia Tar, no matter her faults and failings, very redeemable in their eyes.

These audiences in turn would be automatically repulsed by a man who did the same things as Tar, because in their belief system and in our culture’s eyes, men are, simply put, irredeemable.

Because of this, it seems to me the more difficult, but ultimately more worthy and satisfying story to tell, is that of a man abusing his power like Tar, and trying to make that deemed irredeemable, redeemable.

For example, I couldn’t help but think that, as great as she is, if Cate Blanchett’s Tar were a man played by say…Robert Downey Jr., this film would’ve been infinitely more interesting, and much more controversial, which in turn would’ve led it to be at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.

No one is talking about Tar now. Normal people haven’t and won’t see it, and the talk shows and all the rest of the media world aren’t buzzing with debates over its merits or failings, its morality or immorality.

If Robert Downey Jr. was playing Tar, a charming yet arrogant musical genius (is anyone better at being arrogant and charming?) while Harvey Weinstein and Danny Masterson’s rape trials were on-going, people would have very strong opinions about it and not be afraid to share them.

But instead, we get a sort of soft peddling of a woman abusing her power, which feels like the equivalent of dipping a toe into the swamp that is sexual exploitation, instead of taking a deep dive.

To be clear, there’s a bunch of stuff I liked in Tar. Blanchett’s performance, Florian Hoffmeister’s subtle but powerful cinematography and Hildur Guonadottir’s score are worth the price of admission.

But unfortunately, the movie’s third act failings and its reluctance to get its hands too dirty on the #MeToo manure pile, neuter its artistic and narrative power and render it ultimately a rather unsatisfying and frustrating cinematic experience.

Regular audiences more at home at the cineplex, will be bored to tears by Tar’s deliberate arthouse pacing and its more symbolic storytelling devices.

Afficionados of the arthouse should give Tar a try, but I recommend if they wait until it hits streaming, as shelling out big bucks, either at the theatre or on Video on Demand, will feel like a bad decision in hindsight.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

On this episode, Barry and I don our coat and tails, grab a baton and orchestrate a discussion about Tar, the new Todd Field movie starring Cate Blanchett. Topics discussed include the ghost of Stanley Kubrick, the brilliance of Blanchett, self-marketing and the cult of the great artist, and the pain of a promising start followed by a failed finale. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 86 - Tar

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 85 - Thirteen Lives

On this episode, Barry and I get trapped in a cave and watch Ron Howard's Thirteen Lives, now streaming on Amazon. Topics discussed include the raging mediocrity of company man Ron Howard, the dangers of spelunking and the joys of anesthesia.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 85 - Thirteen Lives

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Wonder: A Review - If You Hate the Irish, You'll Love This Film

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Some solid performances and beautiful cinematography are tainted by the film’s Hollywood narrative and truly ugly anti-Irish ideology.

The Wonder, directed by Sebastian Lelio and written by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue based on Donoghue’s novel of the same name, is a new Netflix film that tells the story of an English nurse sent to a rural Irish town in 1862 to investigate the supposed miracle of a young girl who hasn’t eaten in four months.

The nurse, Elizabeth “Lib” Wright (Florence Pugh), must struggle against patriarchal forces, local custom, and deeply-ingrained religious belief to try and find the truth about what exactly is happening to Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Kassidy), the allegedly miraculous young girl.

The Wonder has a lot of things going for it in attempting to keep me interested. First of all, the film stars Florence Pugh, an actress of great talent and skill who thus far has never failed to impress me. Even in the recent cinematic disaster that was Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh delivered a worthy performance. No small feat in such a bad movie.

Secondly, my grandfather grew up in an impossibly tiny, rural village in County Mayo in the West of Ireland which was very close to the town of Knock. Knock, for those who don’t know, is a religious shrine and place of pilgrimage because in 1879 apparitions of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist all appeared to a group of villagers.

The Catholic Church has long since put its stamp of approval on the Knock incident and such notables as Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa and arguably the most Holy and most notable Catholic of all, me, have visited the shrine.

The Wonder reminds of the mystery at Knock because of the question of religious validity at the heart of its narrative as well as the rural and somewhat foreboding and forbidding nature of the setting.

All of this is to say that The Wonder had me intrigued simply from its premise, but unfortunately it makes certain choices, some odd, some predictable, some rather vicious and ignorant, that greatly diminishes its value.

For example, the film opens with the shot of a movie soundstage accompanied by a voice-over telling viewers “This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. And so we invite you to believe in this one.”

The camera then turns its attention to a movie set populated by actors, and through voice-over the narrator sets the scene telling us that its 1862 and English nurse Elizabeth Wright is headed to Ireland and the story begins…but not without a small comment that speaks volumes about the film’s ugly ideology – but more on that later.

I found this attempt at an unorthodox artistic opening to be painfully patronizing and distracting as it needlessly creates a hurdle to suspending disbelief while speaking down to its audience. The detached narrator later resurfaces in the film but not enough for it to be profound or to make any sort of narrative or artistic sense.

Once the actual story begins, we are treated to two positive things, firstly, Florence Pugh once again proves her worth as she gives a very solid performance as the lead “Lib”.

The rest of the cast all do solid work as well, with Brian F. O’Byrne, Ciaran Hinds, and Toby Jones doing dutiful work in supporting roles. Kila Lord Cassidy is also good as the young girl in question, Anna.

In addition to the acting, the film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Ari Wegner, who makes the most of the Irish setting and the candlelit era. Wegner scored an Oscar nomination for her work on The Power of the Dog last year and I wouldn’t be surprised if she snags another this year with The Wonder.

The problem though is that the window dressing of Wegner’s crisp and luscious cinematography and Pugh’s pointed performance are overshadowed by the smug, deplorable politics of the film and the pedestrian nature of its narrative, which ultimately spirals into preposterousness and banality.  

I’ll refrain from going too much further into the plot of The Wonder so as to avoid spoilers and conserve the viewing experience for those interested, but I will say that the Hollywood nature of the narrative ultimately fails to live up to the artistry of Pugh and Wegner.

The surface politics of the film are predictably trite with the usual misandry and anti-religious (more accurately anti-Catholic) sentiments of our vacuous era front and center. Pugh’s “Lib”, like every female protagonist nowadays, struggles against the all-powerful patriarchy which infects the entirety of the world with its singular evil. Yawn.

To give an indication of the film’s intellectual vapidity and political crudeness, “Lib” is the female “liberator” – how subtle - trying to free a young woman, Anna, from the grips of backwards Irish-Catholicism and bring her to a progressive utopia. Eye roll.

As formulaic as the ‘patriarchy as villain’ storyline is, the thing that really repulses is the unabashed anti-Irishness of the film.

Now for that small but revealing voice-over comment I referred to earlier. It was made by the narrator at the tail end of the unorthodox opening to the film. The narrator explains that “Lib” is an Englishwoman traveling to Ireland while the potato famine of the previous decade is tapering off, and then we are told with a seemingly straight face that “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation.” Ummm…No shit. “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation” BECAUSE THE ENGLISH WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT DEVASTATION!

What makes it even worse is that the narrative of the film is such that it doesn’t just minimize The Great Hunger, which killed a million Irish and displaced twice as many, its sub-text is that the famine was the fault of the Irish – to the point of being their choice. I mean, this is a story about a girl who doesn’t eat – and thus may be starving herself for ulterior motives. That’s pretty explicitly saying the Irish are liars responsible for their own starvation – which is obviously historically wholly inaccurate.

Imagine if a film about Jews in Europe in 1948 opened with a voice-over stating that in regards to the Holocaust “Jews hold Nazis responsible for that devastation” and then dramatized how Jews were actually the ones who caused the Holocaust, and the protagonist is a Nazi sent to liberate a Jew from other Jews. Or a film about former slaves in the American South in the wake of the Civil War describing slavery with “blacks hold white southerners responsible for that devastation”, and then dramatized that blacks were actually responsible for slavery and a white Southerner is the intelligent protagonist trying to free a black man from stupid and backward black people.

People in our current culture of outrage would be apoplectic at such an insidious and insipid twisting of history being imposed on those two groups that are officially-approved as victims. But with the Irish no one bats an eye at their attempted extermination first being downplayed and then actually blamed on them.

The Netflix show The Crown is currently getting some heat because Queen Elizabeth II recently died and they aren’t being adequately respectful to her or something, but The Wonder minimizes and Brit-washes the genocide of the Irish, and then blames the Irish for it, and no one says a word. Yes, let’s respect the Queen, symbol of British colonialism that murdered millions not just in Ireland but across the globe, and let’s portray these victims of the British Empire, like the Irish, as the true brutal monsters who brought the horrors upon themselves. Insane.

The Wonder maintains this aggressive anti-Irish attitude throughout, portraying the Irish as a cruel, backwards, barbaric and utterly savage people with Lib being the English voice of reason/saviour.

The film, not surprisingly, does the same with Catholicism. Of course, audiences are so conditioned to hate the Catholic Church in modern film (and culture) that I doubt anyone will care. And to be clear, it’s not like the Catholic Church over the years hasn’t dutifully earned the scorn it receives. It’s just that singling out a specific religion as an abominable institution, while whitewashing the evils of the British Empire, is a bit much and feels ever so slightly hypocritical.

Director Sebastian Lelio, a Chilean, may very well be ignorant of the history of Ireland, the British responsibility for the genocide of The Great Hunger and for centuries of violence and oppression across the globe. But if you’re going to make a movie about Ireland you might want to read up a bit on the place and the people. Lelio’s ignorance is on him. And if it isn’t ignorance, and if he really thinks this way, then that says more about his moral and ethical depravity than it does about the Irish and Catholicism.

The film’s co-writer Emma Donoghue, who authored the book it’s based upon, is an Irish woman. Her take on Ireland, the Great Hunger, and the relationship with the English is stunning for its imbecility. Donoghue’s Irish self-loathing is no doubt fueled by her having grown up a lesbian in Ireland, which at the time was a robust Catholic country. I assume that wasn’t easy, but hating Catholicism for its sins is still no excuse to ignore history and reflexively lick English boots.

It's fascinating to see Lelio and Donoghue’s hierarchy of beliefs play out in real time in their movie. I’ve no doubt both are devout liberals and believe they are profoundly expressing those beliefs with this story. But their blind spot is that they’ve placed anti-Catholicism, and by extension anti-Irishness, higher on their hierarchy than anti-British colonialism, which is both astonishing and revealing. This choice speaks to the current tortured state of the bourgeois, capitalism-addicted liberal mind and its accompanying depraved and trans-actional morals and ethics.

Despite the rancid ideology of the film, The Wonder is bursting with cinematic possibilities, but unfortunately the potential complexity of the premise is scuttled on the rocks of simplicity due to acute artistic vacuity and story-telling conventionality.

To the film’s credit, it did keep me captivated for a good portion of its 103-minute run time, but ultimately left me deeply dramatically and narratively unsatisfied at the end. In addition, it’s aggressive anti-Irishness left me aggravated and agitated.

The Irish have been through a lot through the years, from conquest to occupation to subjugation to discrimination to genocide to civil war to terrorism and all the rest. We’ve survived it all, and goodness knows we’ll survive some rather forgettable anti-Irish movie streaming on Netflix too.

©2022

My Policeman: A Review - Welcome to Blokeback

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly acted and executed, knock-off Brokeback Mountain for Brits.

My Policeman, directed by Michael Grandage with a screenplay written by Ron Nyswaner based on the 2012 book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, tells the story two gay men, their forbidden love and the woman stuck between them in 1950’s Brighton, England.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, stars Brit-pop superstar Harry Styles as the aforementioned gay policeman, as well as Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Linus Roache, Gina McKee and, since it’s a gay British movie, Rupert Everett is legally required to appear…and he dutifully does.

My Policeman is not a good movie for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it’s so painfully derivative – it’s basically Brokeback Mountain for Brits but without the cinematic skill or quality acting.

In fact, My Policeman was such a dull slog I spent much of my time watching it thinking of cheeky British tabloid headlines to describe it. The best I could come up with was “BUM-LOVING BRITISH BOBBIE GOES FULL BLOKEBACK!” Yes, I agree…I AM clever.

Back in the early 90’s Kurt Cobain sang the lyric “what else can I say? Everyone is gay!”, and if you watch tv and movies nowadays you’d think he was right. It seems every tv show and movie now prominently features a gay character, and every commercial has either an interracial couple, a gay couple or an interracial gay couple.

Despite gays and lesbians being roughly 5% of the population, gayness is so omnipresent in our culture that last week I was watching a hockey game and a commercial for some HIV drug that featured a cavalcade of gay men in various forms of homosexual embrace ran approximately a dozen times. I couldn’t help but think of another song when I saw this ad, which was “Everyone has AIDS” from Team America: World Police. This begs the question…who exactly do they think is watching hockey nowadays?

The reality is that you can’t take two steps in our culture without tripping over some movie, tv show or commercial that is all about gayness. For example, just last week I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway, and in it, for no explicable reason whatsoever, Lawrence’s character was a lesbian. The thing that made this character choice so odd was that her lesbianism actually worked to defuse the drama, rather than heighten it. Oh well.

Just recently there was a much-hyped gay rom-com, Bros, and even kid-friendly pop culture fair like Star Wars and Marvel movies now feature gay characters. Hell, there was even gayness in the most recent Toy Story movie…you’ll be glad to know I’ll be refraining from making any Woody jokes.

This is all to say that in our aggressively progressive culture that in the last forty years in general and last ten years in particular, has changed at hyper-speed, being gay is no longer a big deal. Nobody in our very modern times cares if, to quote Spartacus, you prefer to “eat oysters or snails”. Which is why it’s so bizarre that while gays sit comfortably on the throne of pop-culture they’re so adamant to wear the crown of victimhood as they do so.

The recurring theme of popular gay films and tv shows in recent years, from The Imitation Game to Call Me by Your Name to My Policeman and of course the granddaddy of them all, Brokeback Mountain, is oppression. Another thing these films all share is that they must go back in time to find said gay oppression because it doesn’t exist in the modern Western world.

This recurring theme, a sort of sad-sack, woe-is-me, self-pitying, martyr-making view of homosexuality by homosexuals, is a sign of deep-seated insecurity from a gay community that is reflexively uncomfortable with its astounding cultural success, and has, in my mind, become a very tired trope used to avoid seeking deeper meaning and purpose, not to mention artistry, in gay film and tv.

Brokeback Mountain was a stunning piece of cinema, but what made it so astonishing is that it basically obliterated the need for this gay oppression storyline to ever be examined again, as it did it to perfection.

Unfortunately, My Policeman shamelessly mimics Brokeback Mountain. It even, rather blatantly, references Brokeback twice. Once when young Patrick Hazelwood (played by David Dawson) mentions that men often go on “fishing trips” together, wink-wink, and also when he recounts how his gay lover was beaten to death by thugs, which is exactly how Jack Twist came to his demise in Brokeback Mountain.

Patrick Hazelwood is the Brit Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) of My Policeman, as he’s the “gayer” of the two men and the one who is unable to control his “urges” which society deems depraved. Harry Styles and Linus Roache play young and old Tom Burgess respectively, and Tom is to My Policeman what Heath Ledger’s Ennis is to Brokeback Mountain.

The similarities don’t stop there as Emma Corrin plays young Marion Taylor, and Gina McKee plays the older version of the character, and Marion is basically a more educated version of Michelle Williams’ Alma character from Brokeback Mountain.

You get the point, My Policeman is literally a very, very cheap British rip-off of Brokeback Mountain.  

Unfortunately, Harry Styles is no Heath Ledger. I am sad to report, since I was so sure it was going to happen for him, but movie stardom is not in the cards for Harry Styles. Styles is a wooden, dead-eyed actor who brings absolutely nothing to the screen. It seems as though Styles has either gotten too little or too much acting coaching at this point as he’s lost whatever charisma he had in the first place.

Yes, he does have his legion of loyal teen girl fans, and no doubt a bevy of gay male fans too, and they all might appreciate handsome and hunky Harry’s homosexual hump-fest in My Policeman, but his acting is, pardon the pun, hard to take.

Emma Corrin does decent work with a pitifully under-written character, Marion. Corrin was brilliant in The Crown as Princess Diana and here she shows the same dexterity and commitment. She certainly has the makings of a solid actress and one can only hope she gets better material to work with next time.

David Dawson is supposed to be some sort of irresistible gay Svengali in the film but he lacks the presence of…ironically…a young Rupert Everett, to pull it off. This leads to Dawson and Styles seeming mismatched as a gay couple due to their decided lack of chemistry.

The older versions of the characters, Gina McKee as Marion, Linus Roache as Tom and Rupert Everett as Patrick, appear lost in another movie entirely. The “older” storyline is almost entirely incomprehensible and illogical. These characters behave in completely nonsensical ways and the entire premise of the venture seems lost in some sort of dementia fog.

Director Michael Grandage, comes from the theatre and it shows, as the film lacks any and all visual style and is utterly incapable of showing instead of telling.

I’ve not read the book My Policeman, and it will come as no surprise that I never intend to, but I can only assume it’s as trite and cliché-ridden as the screenplay for this movie by Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner, it will not shock you in the least, also wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia…which reminds me again, “Everybody has AIDS!”

The bottom line is that My Policeman, and frankly most gay-themed movies, are stuck in a rut of unoriginality where vapid cultural messaging is more important than profundity or dramatic meaning.

At the moment it seems that gay culture bursting out of the closet in recent decades has stripped it of its dramatic and artistic power…and My Policeman is damning evidence of that.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

On this episode, Barry and I hop on one leg down to New Orleans to talk all things Causeway, the new Jennifer Lawrence movie now streaming on Apple TV +. Topics discussed include my shameless name-dropping, J-Law's lost mojo, and the basic fundamentals of film-making missing from this movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 83 - Causeway

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

On this episode Barry and I man the trenches and do battle as we discuss the new Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front. Topics discussed include Barry's unhealthy obsession with Spartacus, the troubling paucity of anti-war movies and the powerful dichotomy of cinematic beauty and wartime brutality.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 82 - All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Don't Worry Darling - A Review: Cinephiles should definitely worry darling!

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An absolute mess of a movie.

Don’t Worry Darling, the much-hyped and much-discussed sophomore directorial effort from actress Olivia Wilde, premiered with a resounding thud in theatres back on September 23rd and is now available to stream on HBO Max…and I just watched it.

My three-word review of Don’t Worry Darling would simply be, “definitely worry darling”. Unfortunately for you, brevity has never been my strong suit, and therefore neither has wit, so I’ll expound further upon my thoughts.

Don’t Worry Darling was actually deemed an Oscar contender heading into this year because Hollywood had crowned Olivia Wilde as the new “it” girl moviemaker after her first film Booksmart (2019) received positive reviews but underwhelmed at the box office.

I was less enthused about Booksmart and Ms. Wilde’s alleged directing abilities than my brethren in the critical community. It seemed to me that Booksmart, a middling rip-off of Superbad, was, like Lady Bird (2017), vastly overrated because Hollywood and weak-kneed critics wanted to celebrate a female filmmaker even when they made an at-best mediocre movie.

Booksmart and Lady Bird, and their directors Olivia Wilde and Greta Gerwig, were hyped beyond all proportion as a result of Hollywood and the access media being desperate to show allegiance to the #MeToo mania gripping Tinsel Town. Hollywood’s obsession post-2016 election and post-Weinstein scandal has been to hire as many female and minority moviemakers as possible, the overwhelming majority of which have been completely devoid of talent, skill and craftsmanship. If you want to understand why the movie industry and the cinematic arts are suffering so much right now, look no further than this blind addiction to diversity, representation and inclusion over talent, skill and craftsmanship. That’s not the only reason for the recent drought of good films, but it’s certainly a major reason for that shortage.

It was due to this current female filmmaker hype and hysteria that Don’t Worry Darling got labelled as an Oscar contender before anyone even saw it. But then the discussion about the film quickly shifted from the female empowerment of it all to the various “scandals” surrounding the production.

There was the alleged feud between the film’s star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde. There was the rehashing of the firing of Shia LeBouf which included a back and forth about exactly why he was fired, the result of which revealed Olivia Wilde to be a bit of a liar. And then there was the allegation that Ms. Wilde was having an affair with LeBouf’s replacement, cast member and co-star Harry Styles, during filming…while she was married to Ted Lasso…oops, I mean Jason Sudeikis. Oh dear.

That’s a lot of negative press swirling around a movie. The problem though is that those gossipy stories are infinitely more compelling than anything that actually happens in Don’t Worry Darling.

Describing the plot of Don’t Worry Darling is a difficult if not impossible thing to do, not because I want to avoid spoilers but because it’s so ridiculously convoluted and incoherent.

The basic premise, I guess, is that there’s a couple, Alice and Jack, living in what someone suffering from #MeToo induced mania would describe as some sort of banal precursor to the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale disguised as a 1950’s supposed utopia in the California desert named Victory. Victory – a less than subtle declaration of victory for the patriarchy, is a company town where all the men work on the mysterious, top secret “Victory Project” for their boss Frank (Chris Pine), who seems more like a cult leader than anything else.

While Jack (Harry Styles), a bargain basement looking James Bond with the fancy car to match, and his fellow employees go off to work every day, their cadre of beautiful housewives stay home and cook, clean and gossip.

Alice, played by the ever-captivating Florence Pugh, is one of these sexy housewives who gossips with the other sexy housewives in between making sumptuous dinners, keeping a tidy house and having Harry Styles perform oral sex on her.

But something seems off. Alice can’t quite put a finger on what it is but she keeps having dreams and flashbacks to…something…that is not of this neat and controlled world she finds herself inhabiting.

As the plodding movie progresses and the plot further unfurls, all of the supposed promise of that premise evaporates into thin air. Eventually there’s absolutely nothing of any note left to hold onto.

The film is a D-level Stepford Wives for the modern generation as it’s obviously trying to make some profound statement about the patriarchy and the inherent evil of men, but to call the film’s gender politics trite would be the most profound of understatements.

To be fair to the film, there are some positives. For example, Florence Pugh is terrific. I remember the first time I see Pugh in a film, it was 2016’s Lady Macbeth, and I instantly recognized what a special actress she was, writing, “Pugh…has stardom written all over her. She is a beautiful woman, but her beauty never overshadows her talent. She is blessed with the skill of being able to convey her character's intentions and vivid inner life with the slightest of glances. Pugh is a charismatic and powerful screen presence who exudes an intelligence and strength that few young actresses possess. I am willing to bet that she has a most stellar career in front of her.”

Pugh is such a dynamic, magnetic and charismatic screen presence in Don’t Worry Darling that she’s able to overcome the albatross of the moronic script and middling moviemaking and avoid embarrassing herself.

Cinematographer Matthew Libatique also does notable work as he gives the film an appealingly crisp visual style and luscious, cinematic flair.

As for everything else…oh boy…its bad.

Screenwriter Katie Silberman needed at least three more drafts of this script as it simply makes absolutely no sense as currently structured.

Wilde also drops the ball consistently as the film’s pacing is relentlessly lethargic yet the plot also moves too fast in the second half to be remotely comprehensible.

Pugh aside, Wilde is incapable of drawing solid performances from her cast, most obviously from herself in a supporting role. Wilde’s acting is just as bad as her directing, as there’s a lot of posing and preening and histrionics but nothing believable.

I remember the first time I ever saw the film’s co-star Harry Styles. I had never heard of, or seen, his boy band One Direction, because, you know, I’m a grown man and not a teenage girl. But then while watching Sesame Street with my young son I saw this group of absurd pretty boys singing some song about the letter “U”. I had no clue who these people were or the tune they were using, but I immediately noticed this one guy who jumped off the screen. Upon further investigation I learned it was Harry Styles. As silly as this sounds, Styles’ Sesame Street performance impressed the hell out of me because it oozed with an effortless charisma and lack of self-consciousness that you just can’t teach. In addition, he seemed to innately understand how to fill a screen, another skill not easy for people to pick up.

I then saw Styles in Christopher Nolan’s magnificent movie Dunkirk, where he played a desperate British soldier trying to survive and escape France as the Germans closed in on Dunkirk. Styles’ role was pretty minimal in the movie, but once again I was impressed by him.

The next time I saw Styles was in a post-credit scene for the truly unwatchable Marvel monstrosity Eternals. I have no idea what Styles was doing in that moronic scene, and frankly, it looked like he had no clue either.

And now Styles, who is currently dating Olivia Wilde to much fanfare, has two movies out. The first is Don’t Worry Darling and the second is My Policeman, a film I intend to see very shortly.

As much as I had high hopes for Styles’ acting career, I see them fading very, very fast as the bloom is definitely off the Harry Styles acting rose. He’s truly, abysmally awful in Don’t Worry Darling. I’m rooting for this guy to be good and goddamn he is just one cringe after another in this movie. There are scenes where his amateur acting status is laid so bare as to be uncomfortable. And his girlfriend/director Olivia Wilde does him no favors as it seems he wasn’t “directed” at all but rather left to his own rather limited devices.

That said, I did find it somewhat amusing seeing pretty boy pop star Harry Styles with glasses, bad skin and greasy hair in one of the movie’s flashback/dream sequences.

The bottom line regarding Don’t Worry Darling is that the various controversies surrounding the film have nothing to do with how bad it is. To be clear, I don’t care who Olivia Wilde is sleeping with, unless of course she wants to sleep with me, something I’d be more than happy to accommodate.

What I want from Olivia Wilde is not juicy gossip but a good movie, something she seems incapable of delivering. On Don’t Worry Darling Wilde’s bloated ambition vastly exceeded her minimal talent, and the end result is a movie that is so poorly put together that it’s actually embarrassing.

My hope for Wilde’s next film, and she’ll definitely get another one, is that she reins in her inflated ego, loses the infatuation with trite cultural politics and instead focuses on the fundamentals of storytelling and the art of cinema. A man can dream.

©2022

Causeway: A Review - New Apple TV movie another wrong turn in Jennifer Lawrence's once-stellar career

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW…BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS AWFUL AND YOU SHOULD NEVER WATCH IT!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Abysmally amateurish movie that is entirely and utterly forgettable in every single way.

I’m old enough to remember when Jennifer Lawrence was a solid and sometimes spectacular actress who also happened to be the most captivating and compelling movie star in Hollywood.

In 2010, at the tender young age of 20, she had proven her acting bona fides by giving an absolutely scintillating, Oscar-nominated performance in the uncompromising arthouse gem Winter’s Bone.

She then made some extremely savvy career moves. First, she joined an existing popular film franchise, X-Men, as Mystique, and then originated a franchise as Katniss Evergreen in The Hunger Games. These moves, which made not only Lawrence but a lot of other people a lot of money, solidified her standing in the industry and with younger audiences, and set her up to consistently have high profile work with a built-in fan-base for the foreseeable future. Very smart.

She also made a savvy move to continue to reinforce her status in terms of prestige by following up her artistic success in Winter’s Bone by teaming with Hollywood auteur and Oscar darling David O. Russell for three films. The result of this collaboration was a Best Actress Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook (2012), which she won at 22 years old, followed by a Best Supporting Actress nomination for American Hustle (2013). Pretty impressive.

Back then Lawrence was a charming presence and a luminous beauty, with impressive acting chops and artistic bravado. She was also sexy yet approachable because she was goofy, grounded and genuine. She was the woman other women wanted to be and the woman guys didn’t just want to have sex with but hang out with.

But then things started, slowly but surely, to fall apart.

The Hunger Games franchise lost steam after the first two movies as budgets expanded and box office diminished. The final two movies of the four-film franchise continued to make money, but they failed to capture the cultural imagination of the earlier films.

The collaboration with Russell hit a snag as well with the 2015’s Joy, which saw Lawrence miscast and resulted in the movie being a misfire. Lawrence and Russell have not worked together since.

The X-Men franchise found new life with Lawrence in the cast for her first two movies, X-Men: First Class (2011) and Days of Future Past (2014), but then immolated with the abominable X-Men: Apocalypse  (2016) and the catastrophic to the point of ending the franchise, Dark Phoenix (2019).

Between Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix another auteur tried to use Lawrence to elevate an arthouse film. That auteur was Darren Aronofsky and the movie was Mother! (2017), a mindbogglingly ambitious cinematic enterprise that ended up being an epic disaster despite Lawrence’s noble efforts in it.

She also tried to start another franchise with Red Sparrow (2018), a spy thriller about a Russian woman trained in the art of sex and seduction. The movie garnered some headlines because Lawrence was naked in it, but unfortunately her nudity was the only good thing to be found in this dreadful dud.

This stretch of bad movies resulted in Lawrence stepping back from the industry for a bit. In 2019 she got married and in 2022 she gave birth to her first child.

This brief pause in her career could have been a reset, and Lawrence could’ve come back and reclaimed her title as the biggest star, or the best actress, or both. But that’s not what happened.

In 2021 she co-starred in Adam McKay’s apocalypse comedy Don’t Look Up. What was remarkable about Don’t Look Up is that it’s easy to forget that Jennifer Lawrence is in it. She isn’t bad in it, she just isn’t very memorable, which is not something you’d ever expect to say about Jennifer Lawrence.

The film is remembered, if it’s remembered at all, as a Leonardo DiCaprio movie first, and an Adam McKay movie second. Lawrence never comes into the equation.

Which brings us to Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence’s new film which is streaming on Apple TV +.

The movie is almost instantaneously forgettable for a variety of reasons, such as the meandering script and the amateurish direction. But what makes Causeway so alarmingly bland is that Jennifer Lawrence seems utterly lifeless and charisma-free in every scene she inhabits.

Yes, her character, Lynsey – who was wounded in Afghanistan and is now back home in New Orleans and trying to get back to Afghanistan, isn’t supposed to be some dynamic presence, but what is striking about Lawrence ‘s performance is that she is so dead behind her eyes. There is no internal life, no fire in her eyes, or belly or anywhere else. It was unimaginable to me that I would ever feel like Jennifer Lawrence was just going through the motions of a role, but here we are.

This dead-eyed performance is accentuated by the moribund script which gives Lynsey essentially zero character arc, but still, Lawrence used to be the type of actress that could fill this character with something…extraordinary. And now she’s unable to bring the most minimal bit of life to her.  

A great actress would’ve created something out of the nothing that is Lynsey. A movie star would have brought a boatload of charisma and magnetism to the Lynsey and made audiences root for her. As much as it pains me to say, Lawrence is no longer a great actress or a movie star, as she is incapable of doing either.

Another actor considered top-notch by some people in the know is Brian Tyree Henry, who plays James in Causeway, a local mechanic who fixes Lynsey’s truck and strikes up a friendship with her.

I’ve never thought Henry was as great as everybody else says he is…and his trite work in Causeway reinforces my skepticism.

To be fair to Lawrence and Henry, the acting is the least of the problems of Causeway.

The script is atrocious as the story goes nowhere, the characters have no arc and the drama is non-existent.

The biggest problem of all though is director Lila Neugebauer. Neugebauer is a theatre director and this is her first feature film…and it shows. The most rudimentary aspects of moviemaking go awry in Causeway. For example, a freshman film student knows to never put somebody smack dab in the center of the frame and yet this happens so consistently in Causeway as to be maddening.

In another scene, Henry’s James reveals an important piece of information about his body, that he has a prosthetic leg. In the scene James tells Lynsey about his leg and then lifts his pant leg up and shows it to her…but the director never shows  this to the audience either in the wide shot or in a close-up. It’s as if they couldn’t afford to just get a prosthetic leg and shoot it in a cutaway or something. What makes this all the more bizarre is that later in the film there’s an entire sequence showing that James has no leg. This is just the most rank amateur filmmaking possible.

In another scene, Lynsey visits her brother in prison and we find out her brother is deaf. Of course he’s deaf because everyone in this movie has to be either handicapped, gay, or gay and handicapped. Anyway, Lynsey and her brother have a long and seemingly important conversation through sign language at the prison, but for some inexplicable reason halfway through the scene the sub-titles disappear. I assume this is some artistic choice on the part of Neugebauer, and it’s a laughably bad one.

The bottom-line regarding Causeway is that it’s not just a dull, languid, listless misfire of a movie, it’s that it feels like the end of the line for Jennifer Lawrence being a relevant actress and movie star.

Lawrence could’ve gotten away with playing this type of role back when she was the life of the Hollywood party in 2013 or 2014. She could’ve been Lynsey and brought her vivacity and vibrant inner life to the work and screen and it would’ve been accepted by the audience and notable to critics, with the caveat that a different, much better, director were at the helm.

But now, with Lawrence having lost her movie star mojo and also apparently her acting chops, this role and this movie come across as nothing but an artistically anemic, dramatically lethargic, narratively meandering exercise of which there is no meaning or purpose.

I personally think the world is better when Jennifer Lawrence is a relevant movie star and actress, and I sincerely hope that happens again someday. But if I’m being honest, after watching Causeway and ruminating on the downward trend of her movies over the last decade, I’m not optimistic.

©2022

All Quiet on the Western Front (2022): 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 fantastic film that tells a story that is as relevant today as it’s ever been.

It is morbidly ironic that as German director Edward Berger’s bleak and beautiful new remake of the classic World War I film All Quiet on the Western Front begins streaming on Netflix, that all is most definitely not quiet on Europe’s Eastern front.

It’s not insignificant that the movie, a remake of the 1930 Academy Award Best Picture winner based on the 1929 novel of the same name, which recounts the tale of a group of young German men intoxicated by the fantasy of fighting in World War I who are then eviscerated by the brutal reality of it, should premiere while a vicious war rages on Europe’s Eastern front between Ukraine and Russia.

The lesson of the book and all film iterations of All Quiet of the Western Front is that war is a fruitless, savage endeavor that, like an insatiable, gruesome beast, devours men’s bodies as it mangles their spirits and souls.

Of course, we know all of this to be true about war, and yet, we in the West, in the U.S. in particular, are such thoroughly disinformed, misinformed and propagandized Russo-phobic war fetishists and superhero fantasists that we convulse with glee at the notion of escalating the war in Ukraine – a war which we started via the U.S. backed Maidan coup and ensuing slaughter of ethnic Russians in the Donbas, up to and including calling for more muscular American military intervention and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is all madness…but as All Quiet on the Western Front teaches us, all war is madness, and some form of extreme psychosis is required to participate in it. Berger’s two-and-a-half-hour film effectively captures this madness, from the young men’s giddy rush to enlist at all costs to their grim death sprint out of the open air coffin trenches and across the hell of no man’s land.

The movie is exquisitely and exceptionally photographed, and that cinematic beauty juxtaposed against the inhuman brutality of the behavior captured in the frame is jarring and deeply unnerving.

Berger also uses a technique which I almost always find off-putting but which works here, which is using modern music in a period piece. The music is a grinding, industrial guitar that accompanies the young German men as they take their first few steps out of the fantasy of war and into the reality of it. This music is used sparingly throughout, but it is remarkably effective in conveying the sense of this war, as is true of all wars, as being a mindless meat grinder, industrial in its level of dehumanization and carnage.

The opening of the film, of which I will refrain from revealing the specifics, is simple yet extraordinary in transmitting this same sensation of war as mass murder incorporated, and it sets the stage for the rest of the film to expound upon that thesis.

The battle scenes in All Quiet on the Western Front are realistic, disturbing and exceedingly well-executed. Director Berger and his cinematographer James Friend are able to maintain audience orientation while never sacrificing artistic vision. The battles look, and therefore feel, grounded, gritty and gruesome.

Cinematographer Friend masterfully lights and composes his frame not only in the battle scenes but in the quieter moments. There are shots of landscapes, trees and the sky in this film that would look right at home in a Malick movie or framed in a museum.

The acting, particularly Felix Kammerer as the lead Paul Baumer and Albrecht Schuch as Kat, are terrific as both men bring quiet intensity and sensitivity to their roles. Kammerer’s mastery of the thousand-yard stare and Schuch’s innate humanity elevate their performances and the movie.

The rest of the cast are subtle and superb as well, bringing life to what in lesser hands would be well-worn war movie stereotypes.

The film is not perfect though, as the narrative break aways to follow the ceasefire negotiations among the German contingent of bureaucrats, headed by the great Daniel Bruhl as Matthias Erzberger, feel like they should be in a different movie. These sections are interesting, but they break the spell of the film by removing the viewer from the myopic madness in the muck and mire of the front lines. I understand the desire to want to take a glimpse of things from 10,000 feet so to speak, but in this case, it works against the film’s better interests and drama.

That said, the rest of the movie is glorious as it vibrates with a sort of dramatic Malickian chaos mixed with existential inevitability that is captivating, compelling, exhausting and unnerving.

This movie should be mandatory viewing for Americans, the majority of whom are vociferous cheerleaders for the current war in Ukraine. These American idiots with Ukrainian flags in their Twitter bios are no different that the young German men at the center of All Quiet on the Western Front eager to prove their worth and courage, except, of course, that those Germans didn’t just pose and preen about war on social media, they actually went and fought and died in it.

The neo-con, armchair tough guys who’ve gotten us into every war of my lifetime, of which we’ve won none, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq and now Ukraine, are like the bloated and bloviating military bureaucrats in All Quiet on the Western Front as they’re eager for other men to pay dearly for the exorbitant faux-nationalist checks that their flag-waving egos were so excited to write. The neo-cons con is to destroy their host nation from within as they accuse dissenters from the self-destruction of being traitors (or in the case of Ukraine - Putin shills and apologists) . These nefarious neo-cons always demand other, more masculine, working class men sacrifice their bodies, minds and souls for the sake of the neo-con’s fragile eggshell egos and deep-seated genital insecurities.

If you follow media narratives throughout history, this war in Ukraine has all the markings of America’s typical modern war psyops/propaganda playbook. There’s scaremongering using the delusional domino theory about some expansionist enemy/ideology, be it communism (Vietnam), Islamism (Afghanistan/Iraq) or Putinism (Russia), that will conquer the earth if the U.S. don’t role play as Churchill to some new Hitler. And there’s always a new Hitler, an alleged madman who is a history breaking tyrant that is simultaneously an evil genius and an incorrigible, bloodthirsty idiot. Today it’s the media-crafted Bond villain Putin. Before him it was the madman Saddam, or the madman Qadaffi, or the madman Bin Laden, or the madman Ho Chi Minh and on and on and on.

Will watching All Quiet on the Western Front wake up American morons from the establishment media’s Russo-phobic propaganda spell and remove from the memory hole the U.S.’s and Ukraine’s role in starting and enflaming this war? No, probably not. Nor will it disabuse Americans of the notion that they are the good guys and that this is a good war, as there are no good wars and there are no good guys fighting in them.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a fantastic movie, but it’s not a miracle worker and it would take a miracle for America and the rest of the West to wake up from their propaganda-fueled dream of the war in Ukraine as history-making hero machine and to see it for what it really is, a senseless, money-making meat grinder, which contains within it the possibility of a worldwide war of unimaginable carnage.

All Quiet on the Western Front is Germany’s submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. It most definitely deserves to be nominated, and in my mind is thus far the number one contender for the award.

You should watch All Quiet on the Western Front because it’s an excellent film, and also because it contains lessons that we in the West should already know but apparently need to learn over again, and fast…namely, that war is hell and only devils want it.

©2022

Barbarian: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but smart and original horror movie that keeps you on your toes. If you like horror, you’ll love this.

I must confess that I don’t consider myself to be much of a horror movie afficionado. That’s not to say that I dislike horror movies, just that a horror movie has to be very good movie for me to enjoy it. I know people who just adore the genre and watch every horror movie and love it just because it’s a horror movie, but that’s not me.

My taste in horror is pretty specific, I love supernatural horror movies like The Shining, The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, and I also like classic horror films. For example, this year on the week of Halloween I watched George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead as well as the Universal Monster Movie classics Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and thoroughly enjoyed them all for their originality, craftsmanship and artistry.

In contrast, I didn’t watch the most recent and allegedly last movie in the seemingly endless Halloween franchise, Halloween Ends. I loved the original Halloween (and most John Carpenter films) but I just don’t see the need to ever watch another Halloween movie.

In the wake of Halloween, the holiday not the movie, I did sit down and watch a new horror movie that has generated some buzz recently and which is now streaming on HBO Max. That movie is Barbarian, which is written and directed by Zach Cregger, and stars Georgina Campbell, Bill Skarsgaard and Justin Long.

Barbarian was released in theatres in September and despite having the most minimal of marketing budgets, it generated an impressive box office of $43.5 million against a $4.5 million budget.

I knew nothing about Barbarian prior to seeing it and the HBO description simply says that it tells the story of a woman who gets stuck sharing an AirBnB with a strange guy. Red flags immediately went up for me when I read that description as I assumed the movie was going to be just another flaccid #MeToo-men-are-monsters movie. As a devout kidnapping enthusiast who over the years has kept a multitude of women captive in my incredibly creepy basement, the last thing I want to watch is another scolding “men are awful” movie, thank you very much.

Fortunately, Barbarian masterfully plays with that expectation, and while it most certainly is a meta-textual meditation on #MeToo and the menace of men, which at times gets a bit too heavy-handed, it’s also a sophisticated sub-textual criticism and fascinating deconstruction of the #MeToo archetype.

I will not even begin to delve into the plot of Barbarian in order to avoid any semblance of spoilers, but will only say that, thankfully, the movie is so deftly directed and written by Zach Cregger that it’s never what you expect it to be. In fact, the film uses viewer’s preconceived notions, assumptions and cultural conditioning against them to always keep them off-balance. The film keeps its audience on its toes and is always one step ahead.

The film is structured in three acts with each successive act luring viewers deeper and deeper into the disorienting maze that is Barbarian.

The first act, starring Campbell and Skarsgaard, is so well-done as to be astonishing. Cregger plants various notions into the audience’s mind as to what type of film this is going to be…a Detroit-based Amityville Horror? A mixed-race The Sixth Sense or a mixed gender Single White Female? A straight-forward rip-off of Saw? Or is it an homage to all of the above and more?

Just when you think you know what’s going on in Barbarian, Cregger nudges you in a different direction and leads you by your nose down into a very dark and disorienting path.

Act two features the criminally under-appreciated Justin Long in a fantastically Long-ian role that spotlights his likeability and immense talent. Once again, I will not get into specifics of plot, but the jump from act one to act two is so jarring as to be cinematically glorious.

I admit that act three is the weakest of the three, and I found it to be considerably less engaging, intelligent and challenging, but, once again without giving anything away, I think that has to do with the type of horror movie that act three is paying homage to…which is my least favorite type of horror.

The thing I enjoyed the most about Barbarian is that while it’s certainly a #MeToo movie, it never panders and or signals its socio-political virtue too much. It tackles that complex topic with a nuance and complexity that is shocking for a low budget horror film.

Also tantalizing is how Cregger turns the film into a profound statement not just on the predatory nature of men but also on the apocalyptic results of Reaganism on America and the dehumanizing nature of poverty.

While there were certainly some flaws in Zach Cregger’s directing, most notably in a scene shot in dim light that fumbles perspective (to avoid spoilers I won’t say anything more than that) and act three’s many mis-steps, he’s obviously a filmmaker with some interesting ideas. One can only hope that Barbarian is a stepping stone for Cregger to make even better things.

The bottom-line regarding Barbarian is that if you are a horror afficionado you’ll love this movie as it operates from a deeply well-informed position in the genre. If you are, like me, a rather fair-weather horror fan, or are less-inclined to enjoy the genre, Barbarian is good enough to be worthwhile even though it sort of loses its way in act three.

The reality is that 2022 has thus far been an utterly abysmal year for cinema, so Barbarian, despite its glaring act three flaws, stands out because it’s a well-crafted, original piece of work, and that is reason enough for me to recommend it.  

©2022