Obi Wan Kenobi (Disney +) : A TV Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The first three episodes of this pile of crap feature some of the very worst writing, performances and direction in Star Wars history. So much so that I have lost all hope that the final three will be even remotely worthwhile.

We need to talk about the new Disney Plus series Obi Wan Kenobi. I just watched the first three episodes (the only three released thus far) of the six-episode series and holy shit. It isn’t just bad, it’s absolutely, ridiculously, insanely fucking atrocious. It is a gigantic monument to artistic, creative and narrative incompetence.

To set the context of my thoughts it should be noted that I am not a Star Wars fanatic or fanboy. I am not particularly well-versed in Star Wars mythology and lore but I do find it compelling and fascinating. That said, I have seen all the films and live-action tv shows but more out of pop culture duty and/or work obligations than anything else.

My aggravation over Obi Wan Kenobi has nothing to do with some betrayal of Star Wars canon, no my anger is because the writing, casting, directing and acting (save for Ewen McGregor – who, not surprisingly, does solid work in it) is so beyond amateurish as to be offensive. I mean, how can Disney pass this steaming pile of horseshit off on audiences and expect anybody to take it, or them, seriously?

Let’s begin with the basic premise of the show. Set in between The Revenge of the Sith (the third prequel film) and A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie), the series tells the tale of Obi Wan (Ewen McGregor reprising his role from the prequel films) as he watches over young Luke Skywalker, and eventually, young Princess Leia.

As a basic storytelling venture, Obi Wan Kenobi is already at cross-purposes with itself because if you put Obi Wan and Leia in danger in the show, viewers already know they’ll survive since there are mountains of movies in the storyline set after this mini-series that audiences have already seen which proves that point. As a big wig writer in Hollywood recently told me during a discussion about the show, Obi Wan Kenobi is based entirely on “false jeopardy”, which sounds like a direct-to-video Bruce Willis action romp. So, there’s no drama created when Obi Wan and Leia are put in jeopardy in the series because we all know they aren’t really in danger because we’ve followed their storylines for forty years.

Speaking of danger, the action sequences In Obi Wan Kenobi are the worst I can remember in a film or tv series. Deborah Chow directed the entirety of the series and she is so hapless and hopeless in the director’s chair that she should not only be banned from directing ever again for the length of her natural born life, but also, as a punitive measure, be banned from watching any sort of entertainment ever again.

An example of Ms. Chow’s incompetence is a fight in episode three, the details of which I will refrain from sharing for spoiler reasons, that is so visually and viscerally anemic and so devoid of any sort of narrative logic, that it looked and felt like something a mental defective child in a North Korean prison created while playing with straw action figures.

There’s also the absurd and ridiculous sequence where ten-year-old Little Leia runs away from three adult male kidnappers and it looks like parents letting their toddler score a touchdown during a family’s Thanksgiving Day touch football game so as to avoid a tantrum. The men (who are truly dismal at pretending to chase someone) in the scene keep running into fallen trees while pursuing Leia, who is apparently the most unathletic girl in the universe, as she “runs” away from them like she’s running under forty feet of water.

The girl cast as the ten-year-old Leia is nine-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair, who besides running like a midget with polio also happens to portray the most annoying character in the Star Wars universe since Jar Jar Binks. I know Leia grows up to be a hottie in a bikini at the end of Jabba’s leash in Return of the Jedi, but I kept wishing Obi Wan would just pull out his lightsaber and slice this annoying brat in two and put us all out of our misery.

The casting of an annoying nine-year-old who looks (and runs) like a four-year-old to play a ten-year-old, isn’t the only casting atrocity in Obi Wan Kenobi.

Moses Ingram is cast as the villain Reva Sevander and is the worst adult actor to ever appear in a Star Wars film or series, which is saying a lot considering even in Obi Wan Kenobi alone film director-turned-actor Benny Safdie and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea give abysmal performances in supporting roles.

Ingram’s Reva is a critical role, she’s supposed to be the big bad villain but she has all the presence of a tumbleweed. Ingram’s line readings are elementary-school-drama-class-reject level of God-awful and her inability to even remotely conjure some sort of menace is staggering to behold. The character of Reva would’ve had considerably more life to it if they had cast a cigar store wooden Indian in the role instead. The bottom line is that Moses Ingram’s performance is an absolute and utter embarrassment, so much so that, as insane as it sounds, I actually feel bad for her.

Adding to my discomfort for Ms. Ingram is the allegation that she has received racist comments on Instagram from Star Wars fans. If true, that is revolting and reprehensible. But I must say, I have my doubts about the voracity of those claims, not because I have some undying belief in the goodness of humanity…I don’t, but because I don’t trust Disney or its culture warrior minions in the slightest.

In the plethora of articles I’ve read about the alleged racist comments from rabid Star Wars fans, all but one has failed to actually share what any of the racist comments are, so I’ve yet to see them. The one article that did quote them said that Ingram has received “"hundreds" of racist and threatening messages, with one telling her "you're [sic] days are numbered" and another using the N-word.”

I find this less than compelling evidence that there is a cavalcade of racism coming at Ms. Ingram. I’m sorry but someone commenting that “you’re [sic] days are numbered” is not necessarily a racist attack, it could be someone saying that she will be fired for sucking at acting – which she should be because she does in fact suck at it.

The “n-word” comment is obviously repugnant, repulsive, egregious and disgusting, but if those two comments are the worst of the “hundreds” of allegedly awful racist ones – which the article implies that they are, then that seems like Disney and its stenographers in the establishment media and online are making a mountain out of a molehill by conflating criticism with racism.

Now why would Disney conflate criticism and racism and promote the idea that one of their minority actors is being inundated with racist attacks online? Because that helps Disney signal its woke bona fides as a diverse and inclusive company, and also acts as a way to limit any criticism of the show, even non-racist criticism, by creating the paradigm that being negative towards Obi Wan Kenobi is racist and being a supporter of the show is a way to signal anti-racist virtue.  

I, of course, could not care less about the color of Ms. Ingram’s skin, I just care if she can act or not, and the evidence I’ve seen thus far is a very compelling indictment regarding her acting ability, or more specifically, her decided lack of it.

The Moses Ingram story aside, the reality is that Obi Wan Kenobi is an utter creative disaster for Disney and its Star Wars property. If this were a one-off error than you could brush it aside. But Obi Wan Kenobi being bad and boring comes on the heels of the series The Book of Boba Fett being bad and boring. The Mandalorian was a terrific series that I greatly enjoyed, but batting .300 will get you into the hall of fame in baseball, but in the Disney Star Wars universe will get you to the hall of shame…and this doesn’t even factor in the shitty the Star Wars movies of recent years.

The same is true regarding Disney’s Marvel behemoth, which, post Endgame, has been stumbling and staggering around like a barefoot drunk on a frozen lake. The Marvel tv shows have been mostly miss, and even the hits have been mediocrities, and Disney’s Marvel movies since Endgame have been relentlessly egregious misfires.

I could not care less about the health of Disney, but the truth is that they are perilously close to shitting all over themselves and both their Star Wars and Marvel properties, to such a massive degree that they’ll never be able to remove the stink.

If the next batch of Star Wars shows coming out this year, which include Andor and Ashoka, are on the same level of bad as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, then Disney is in deep doo-doo indeed.

That will suck for Disney, but it will suck even more for the legion of Star Wars fans, who, alleged racist assholes aside, deserve considerably better.  

©2022

Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

We Own This City (HBO): TV Review

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great cast and an important story for our troubled times.

It has been my experience that most, but not all, law enforcement professionals fall into two basic categories…bullies and blowhards.

Bullies seek out the job in search of power to try and quell their sense of inferiority, and are the types who frantically call for back up and then ruthlessly beat on an outnumbered suspect once they have the advantage.

Blowhards sign up for the job in order to impress others and gain a sense of self, and they love to talk about their police exploits to anyone within earshot, but when push comes to shove, they turtle dick and run for cover.

A wonderful example of blowhard cops are the cowards in Uvalde, Texas who did nothing as a lunatic shot and killed 19 kids in a classroom literally feet from where these allegedly rough and tumble bad ass cops impotently crouched in a hallway.

As for bully cops, their behavior is fully on display in the HBO mini-series We Own This City, produced by David Simon, the creator of The Wire. The series, which runs six episodes, is based on the true story of the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Gun Trace Task Force and its malevolent and malignant rule over the streets of Baltimore in the 21st Century.

Simon’s series The Wire, also set in the morally murky world of the crime ridden streets of Baltimore, was a masterpiece. But his series since then, including the likes of Treme, The Deuce and The Plot Against America, were, frankly, pedantic and pretentious dogshit. So, I was intrigued prior to seeing We Own This City if Simon’s return to Baltimore would rejuvenate his work…and thankfully, it has.

Make no mistake, the six-episode We Own This City is nowhere near the marvel that The Wire was over five seasons, but it is chock full of fascinating performances and the occasional larger insight that is so often lacking in this age of supposedly prestige TV.

The series follows the exploits of rah-rah, go-getter Wayne Jenkins, a Sergeant leading the charge of the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) who has a twisted view of justice, very sticky fingers, and a delusional sense of self.  

The GTTF under Jenkins is essentially the most effective drug gang in the city, as it uses its legal authority to cover its ass and line its own pockets while padding its overtime.

Jon Bernthal, one of the better actors of our time, is astonishing as Jenkins. He opens the series with a mesmerizing monologue that features his mastery of the extremely difficult Baltimore accent. Bernthal never drops the accent throughout the show, just as his Jenkins never gives up the ghost of his good-guy delusion.

Bernthal’s committed, energetic and relentless performance as Jenkins is DeNiro-esque in the best sense as he is both alive in every moment on-screen yet in total control of the minute details of the character.

Jenkins’ minions in the GTTF learn to rob, cheat and steal under his totalitarian tutelage, and even when they try and move on or stay away from the depravity, the cancer of Jenkins’ still infects them.

Another terrific performance comes from Jamie Hector as Sean Suitor, a cop who left GTTF and went to homicide. Suitor’s a good cop in a bad department and watching him try to navigate his impossible situation is a viscerally unnerving experience.

The luminous Wunmi Mosaku plays Nicole Steele, an attorney from the civil rights division of the Justice Department tasked with imposing a federal consent decree on the BPD. Steele’s confidence and competence emanate from her every pour, but, in the final episode when she’s confronted by the Sysiphean nature of her job, Mosaku’s performance, and the show, take on a deep sense of profundity.

Equally profound is a monologue by Treat Williams playing Brian Grabler, a retired Baltimore cop turned Police Academy teacher. Williams is excellent in the small role and his radically enlightened speech about the drug war is as compelling as television gets.

Despite the remarkable performances, the show is not perfect. It struggles with coherency because it keeps jumping around in time, from past to present and back again. I understand that this choice was necessary to adequately recount the exploits of the GTTF, but it is at times poorly executed and leaves the viewer wondering what the hell is happening and when is it happening.

That said, We Own This City, which ended its run Monday May 30, is well worth the time to watch, especially now with the cavalcade of police misconduct cases, the rise (and fall?) of Black Lives Matter, the demands to defund the police and even the deplorable cowardice on display in Uvalde.

The reality regarding policing is that the drug war has infected government from law enforcement on the street level, all the way up to the shills and shams in Congress and the White House.

The drug war has turned cops into an occupying force and citizens into the enemy. The fact that the drugs at the center of the drug war, and the guns that often accompany them, are a main source of income for the black budgets of our intelligence agencies, reveals the drug war to be a piece of Kabuki theatre meant to do little but destabilize the working class and poor and enrich the authoritarian agencies across government (local law enforcement as well as DEA, FBI, ATF, CIA, DIA, NSA etc.).

The obvious issues with police are further complicated by the fact that violent crime, especially in black neighborhoods, is a scourge. And while authoritarianism and police brutality and misconduct needs to be addressed and eliminated, that doesn’t negate the fact that black people are being killed at an ungodly rate not by police but by other black people.

The truth is that even today’s more popular opposition to police misconduct, namely Black Lives Matter, is infuriating because it is a corrupt movement meant as a ruse to turn discussions about our totalitarian and authoritarian police state into nothing but a fruitless and emotionalist debate about a nebulous, all-encompassing “racism”, which creates needless enemies out of potential allies.

BLM not only misses the forest for the trees regarding law enforcement, it is equally blind to the plight of black people stuck in crime-ridden neighborhoods, who need protection from the rampant criminality that surrounds them. How can we take the statement “black lives matter” seriously when the people killing blacks are themselves black?

The only conclusion to draw that makes any sense is that BLM is an intentional agit prop action conjured by the ruling elite to keep us proles divided, separated and distracted from the real issue, namely how cops protect and serve the interests of the oligarchy and aristocrats, not the citizenry.

For example, race means nothing to the cops in Baltimore’s gun trace task force. If Baltimore were a city of poor, lily white people, the GTTF, which is a very diverse and inclusive bunch of bastards, would still run rampant with its thuggery.

Policing in America isn’t about black and white, it’s about us versus them. The police are the muscle for corporate interests and the elite, and they make sure to use violence to control the working man and keep us all on a tight leash.

If the school shooter in Uvalde had gone to a private school in Brentwood, California, or Arlington, Virginia, or in Manhattan, do you think cops would sit around with their thumbs up their asses while nine-year-old kids were being massacred? Of course not, because those children of the rich are whom the police are meant to protect, and their parents are whom they serve.

The bottom line is that honest, genuine discussions about policing in America need to happen and rarely do, but thankfully We Own This City isn’t just a worthy series but also a good starting point for those discussions.

©2022

Slow Horses (Apple TV+): A TV Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a brilliant cast, this cliched spy thriller is a rushed and rather derivative piece of television.

Slow Horses, the British spy thriller which just finished its first season on Apple TV+, is an odd duck of a show.

The series, based upon the 2010 Mick Herron novel of the same name, tells the story of a group of MI5 misfits sent to a mind-numbing, soul-sucking, bureaucratic no man’s land called Slough House, where they are meant to waste away their careers on meaningless drudgery as punishment for their various failings.

The show, the first season of which runs six episodes, attempts to balance a somewhat comedic tone against the overloaded tensions of a spy story involving kidnapping, murder, double-crosses, triple-crosses, spy agency conspiracies and white supremacy.

The reason I navigated the labyrinth of Apple TV and tuned in to Slow Horses was because Gary Oldman, one of my favorite actors, was the series lead.

I was not disappointed with Oldman’s performance, though I was disappointed that his character was not as featured as I had hoped (or been led to believe). Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, an old school spy wasting away in the purgatory of Slough House for some undescribed mortal sin. Oldman’s Lamb is caustic, acerbic, odious, repulsive and gloriously funny. OIdman so embodies the disheveled anarchy that is Lamb you can almost smell his flatulent stench wafting through your living room.

Equally good is Kristen Scott Thomas as cold-blooded, clench-mouthed MI5 matriarch, Diana Taverner. Taverner is an uptight operator supreme and her visceral repulsion of Lamb tells you all you need to know about her own sense of superiority.

Jack Lowden plays River Cartwright, an up-and-coming young buck of an MI5 agent who steps in a pile of shit and finds himself in the stink that is Slough House. Cartwright is the most superficially constructed MI5 agent in the show but Lowden does a terrific job of making him compelling.

The acting across the board is excellent. The supporting cast, most notably Olivia Cooke, Dustin Demri-Burns and Rosalind Elazor as a group of Slough House agents, all do solid work.

What makes Slow Horses so odd though is that despite superb work from the cast, the show is painful to watch because the script is utterly abysmal.

I will avoid giving away any plot points or spoilers out of respect for those who may want to watch the show, but I will say that the six episodes of Slow Horses is so crammed full of spy cliché after spy cliché and absurd plot twist after absurd plot twist as to be ridiculous. None of it is remotely believable or, to be frank, very interesting. Slow Horses is so manufactured and derivative that it feels like…well…just another stupid TV show.

I kept thinking of the 2018 British drama Bodyguard as I watched Slow Horses. Bodyguard, which starred a very good Richard Madden, started off interesting but then quickly devolved into egregiously ridiculous spy shenanigans and became unbearably buffoonish. Slow Horses stumbles the same way, wasting its bevy of captivating performances with outlandish plot twists that come too fast and too often.

The six-episode arc of the first season felt abbreviated and rushed. The story may have, may being the imperative word, worked better if it were stretched over a 12-episode season, thereby spreading out the narrative and giving time for the drama, and the plot, to build and seem more believable.

The politics of Slow Horses is just as trite as the storytelling, as the show decides to use the allegedly edgy, but actually old and tired, trope of having white supremacist be the villains. I understand the urge to placate and pander to a certain segment of the audience with this sort of politically charged, and painfully politically correct, storyline, but that doesn’t diminish how vacant, vacuous and vapid it is.

And while the conspiracy angle of Slow Horses is, in theory at least, intriguing, in execution it falls decidedly flat.

At the end of season one of Slow Horses, they show clips from the upcoming season two, so the show will definitely be around for a bit longer. But if season one is any indication, despite the glories of Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott Thomas, this old spy dog just won’t hunt.

If you want to watch the show for the brilliance of Gary Oldman, I don’t blame you, just go into it with low expectations for the series and an understanding that Oldman isn’t the star, just a sterling piece is an otherwise terribly mismatched puzzle.  

©2022

Severance (AppleTV+): TV Review

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

SEVERANCE

SEASON ONE - NINE EPISODES - APPLE TV +

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dramatic and insighftul meditation on the cult-like nature and profound evils of corporate America.

Severance, Apple TV’s sci-fi psychological thriller which just concluded its first season, is one of those TV shows that is a joy to watch despite it being such a viscerally uncomfortable viewing experience.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of Mark (Adam Scott), a rather soul-sucked, dead-eyed worker at an ominous bio-tech firm named Lumen, who undergoes a procedure called “severance”, which implants a chip in his brain in order to separate his work memories from his non-work memories.

Every morning Mark steps into the elevator at Lumen and as it descends into corporate hell, his outside life is erased. Then as the elevator doors open at his assigned floor, he awakens to a repeating, Orwellian, work-day nightmare complete with torture chamber break rooms and mazes of endless white hallways leading to nowhere.

At the end of the work day Mark enters the same elevator and the process is reversed, and he returns to his regular, rather sad life, none the wiser as to what has been afflicted upon him, and what he’s been up to all day at Lumen.

Speaking of which, the job Mark and his three co-workers actually do all day at their computers is a mystery even to them as they do it, as they’re never told what exactly it is they’re doing, but considering the brutal cruelty beneath the fake-smiling façade of management, it is most likely profoundly nefarious.

I will avoid going any further into the plot and machinations of Severance because it is best experienced, ironically enough, with a “severanced” mind that is clear from bias and distractions.

And Severance most definitely should be experienced, because it’s a brilliant mediation and examination of the cult-like nature of corporate America, and the banality of evil that is big business bureaucracy.

Severance resonates because it is deeply in tune with the insanity that is America’s mindless and soulless corporate culture as it becomes, with every passing day, ever more deeply intertwined with the modern-day religion that are the socio-political movements du jour.

Severance expertly but subtly comments on the current cancer that is American corporate culture. Lumen is a stand-in for, among other things, big tech, with its yearning for a thought-reducing social credit system and its compliance-inducing addiction to cancel culture. It’s also commenting on the cavalcade of companies forcing Human Resources-inspired indoctrination seminars disguised as “sensitivity trainings” on their workers, as well as the relentless and vacuous public moral preening and pandering of corporations which they use to distract from their pernicious behavior in private.

Lumen, the morally self-righteous, ethically-challenged company at the center of Severance, is Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Pfizer, Walmart, Goldman Sachs or any other too big to fail behemoth that is above the law and runs our corrupt corptocracy as they exploit and brutalize their workers.

The show is so good at replicating what passes for life in the spirit-stomping, soul-crushing, mind-shrinking fluorescent hell of corporate America that it was at times physically uncomfortable to watch. Having in my younger years been a prisoner in corporate America’s suffocating gulag, Severance triggered my PTSD so severely it made my legs ache and my colon twinge.

The first season of Severance consists of nine episodes, six of which are directed by Ben Stiller. I’ve never been a fan of Stiller’s directing. His previous foray into tv was the Showtime mini-series Escape at Donnemara, which came in as a lion and went out like a lamb. That mini-series was a disappointment as it opened bursting with dramatic potential but ultimately ran out of steam mid-way through and then fell flat on its face at the finish line.

Severance is the exact opposite. The series starts slowly…so slow that I almost bailed on it. But after sticking with it through the first few episodes, I was rewarded for my patience. The series builds more and more dramatic momentum as it hurtles toward the final two episodes of the season which are gloriously nerve-wracking.

A large part of why Severance works so well is its stellar cast.

Adam Scott plays protagonist Mark with a morose aplomb. The great John Turturro is absolutely phenomenal as Irving, the straight-laced company man. Britt Lower is undeniably captivating as Helly, the enigmatic new employee. And Zach Cherry is terrific as Dylan, the master of the mysterious task the office is assigned.

Equally outstanding are Patricia Arquette, as Ms. Cobell, the steely-eyed boss, and Tramell Tillman as her ruthless henchman, Seth.

And last but not least, Christopher Walken gives a sterling performance as Bert, a worker at a different division of Lumen who befriends Irving.

The combination of a culturally relevant story, a well-crafted sci-fi script, deft direction and an impeccable cast, make Severance an alarmingly compelling series and one you should definitely check out. It starts slow, but stick with it, it’s well worth it.  

©2022

The Film 'Come and See', the Russian Psyche, and the War in Ukraine

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT NOW. Arguably the greatest war film, and greatest anti-war film, ever made.

‘COME AND SEE’ IS VITAL TO UNDERSTANDING THE RUSSIAN PSYCHE REGARDING THE WAR IN UKRAINE

A few years ago, in order to commemorate the 75th anniversary of V.E. Day, I wrote a list of the best war films ever made that was published at RT.com, an English-language Russian news outlet. I got a lot of feedback on my list, as readers shared their favorite war films and compared them to mine. Interestingly, I was inundated with emails and comments from Russian readers who were outraged I failed to have Come and See, the 1985 Soviet war film directed by Elem Klimov, not only not on my list, but not at the top of it.

The truth was I hadn’t seen Come and See because it isn’t widely or easily available here in the U.S. The film, which for years was nearly impossible to find on any streaming service, is now available on the Criterion Channel (which is wonderful and a must have service for any cinephile). Having finally watched the movie I can now say that those Russian readers were right and I was wrong…Come and See deserves to be on the top of the list of best war films ever made. It is a terrible injustice that the film has thus far remained mostly undiscovered in the West as it is an astonishing piece of cinematic art.

I think now, as the war in Ukraine rages into its second month, it’s most imperative that Westerners watch Come and See in order to better understand historical context and how it effects the collective Russian psyche regarding perceived enemies on its western border.

The dramatically scintillating Come and See is unquestionably a cinematic masterpiece, and I don’t use that word lightly. The film chronicles the odyssey of Florian Gaishun, a young teenage boy trying to survive the Nazi occupation of the Soviet Republic of Belarus in 1943.

Florian is eager to join a rag tag group of Soviet partisans in a guerrilla war against the Nazis. But his mother, afraid to be left alone in their small village with two young twin daughters, is adamant he stays home.

But once Florian discovers a discarded but usable weapon buried in the dirt, the partisans come to his house and officially conscript him into service.

Thus begins Florian’s coming of age story, which is a trial by fire where a Focke-Wulf 189 German reconnaissance plane haunts the skies above his head like a blood-thirsty vulture and Nazi savagery dominates and decimates the fragile world around him.

Florian is thrust into most harrowing journey through the brutality of war and the darkness of the human heart, and must endure the most hellacious of circumstances and devastating of tragedies.

It’s impossible to adequately describe Florian’s gruesome crucifixion upon the cross of war, and the ungodly horrors he must suffer. The viewer must simply bear witness to them too and suffer the same visceral anguish as Florian.

The film boasts two terrific performances, one from Aleksei Kravchenko as Florian, and the other Olga Miranova as Glasha.

Kravchenko’s face over the course of the film is a roadmap of the horrors he’s experienced. His ‘thousand-yard stare’ is a monument to the soul-crushing and heartbreaking ordeal he’s undergone.

Miranova is electrifying as Glasha, a young woman Florian meets in the early days of his time with the partisan guerrillas. Miranova is like a beautiful, gaping wound walking the earth, trying to avoid catastrophe but sentenced to an endless parade of calamities.

Director Klimov pulls no punches on Come and See, as he masterfully, using a variety of clever and intriguing filmmaking techniques, such as a split diopter lens and the use of reduced sound to heighten drama, tells Florian’s tale. Klimov’s brilliant direction immerses the viewer in the hell of war, as well as expresses the collective rage against the Nazis that unleashed a wave of brutality and barbarity against the Soviets that is staggering to contemplate.

This is why it’s so imperative that Westerners watch Come and See, because it so forcefully conveys the palpable fear, anxiety and angst left on the Soviet/Russian psyche by the barbarity of the Nazi invasion forty years after it happened, as well as today.

Hitler sent his very best divisions when he invaded the Soviet Union because he understood that to win the wider war the Nazis needed to destroy the USSR and usurp its plethora of resources, most notably oil and wheat, which would then fuel and feed Hitler’s war machine.

Hitler, like Napoleon before him, found out the hard way that invading Russia is never a good idea, as the winters are brutal and the people made of extraordinarily stern and resilient stuff.

Roughly 30 million Soviets died in World War II (compared to about 418,000 Americans), but their deaths were not in vain as it was the Soviets who broke the Nazi war machine’s back and won World War II. But there isn’t a Russian family that didn’t suffer immensely during the war and for generations after, and the psychological damage from that trauma still resonates today.

In the West, when we hear talk of Russia wanting to “de-nazify” Ukraine, it sounds like a vacuous talking point. To Russians it deeply resonates though because it’s driven by a palpable existential fear – a fear perfectly captured in Come and See.

My intention here is not to try and change any minds regarding the war in Ukraine, as I’m aware enough to know that when emotions are as inflamed as they are now, and the bullshit propaganda is piling up so high you need wings to stay above it, as it is now, appealing to reason and logic is a fool’s errand.

But what I am here to do is to try and get people to watch Come and See for its cinematic mastery, and its collective cultural insights, so that they can at least understand the deeper psychological and historical context of Russia’s actions and impulses.

For instance, most people in the US don’t know this but in 2014 the US backed a coup in Ukraine that overthrew a democratically elected government. The overthrown government was more inclined to Russia’s viewpoint, and the newly-installed government was beholden to the US.

To Americans, that bit of history is largely unknown, but to Russians it’s not only well-known, but deeply troubling and anxiety-inducing.

The same is true of the fact that the newly installed Ukrainian government sat idly by as 42 pro-Russian activists were burned alive in the Trade Union House in Odessa, Ukraine post-coup in 2014, something which most Americans don’t know but that Russians know all too well (and which is remarkably reminscernt of one of the more horrifying scenes in Come and See).

Another example, which most Americans don’t know but of which Russians are keenly aware, is that this same US installed Ukrainian government then banned the Russian language and went to war with ethnic Russians in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. Since that war started in 2014, nearly 14,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, including women and children, have been killed.

Another piece of historical context largely ignored in the US is that when Russia and Ukraine signed a ceasefire/peace agreement called the Minsk Agreements (Minsk Protocol signed in 2014, and Minsk II – a ceasefire signed in 2015), it seemed peace was possible, but Ukraine and the US ignored those agreements and the slaughter of ethnic Russians continued in the Donbass.

To watch Come and See gives Americans an opportunity to see the developments in Ukraine through the eyes of Russians. To Russians, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, which western media reported on extensively for years as a battalion of devilishly devout Nazis but which now ignores that context, is not an outlier, but the crux of the issue. As evidenced by the brutal wholesale slaughter of an entire Belorussian village in Come and See, which the film informs us was something that happened to 628 Belorussian villages at the hands of the Nazis during the war, Nazi bloodthirst isn’t a speculative talking point to Russians, it’s a historical fact and a traumatic trigger.

The way Russians see it, the US installed a Nazi friendly regime in Ukraine, and Russians remember what the Nazis did the last time they had power in the region…and it was genocidal in its scope and scale and demonic in its unabashed cruelty.

When Russians see pro-Russian activists burned alive in Odessa, and ethnic Russians massacred in the Donbass, the horrors of World War II as exquisitely captured in Come and See are conjured in all their grueling and gruesome savagery.

I understand that many Americans, fed a hearty diet of establishment media Zelensky worship as well as ludicrous propagandistic tales of the Ghost of Kiev and the Heroes of Snake Island, might watch Come and See and interpret it very differently. For instance, Americans might watch Come and See and believe Putin to be Hitler and the modern-day Russians in Ukraine the equivalent of the Nazis in Belarus in 1943.

I disagree with that assessment and find it to be historically illiterate and painfully myopic, but that said, I completely understand why, after years of relentless Russo-phobic propaganda, people would be conditioned to feel that way.

Regardless of how you interpret Come and See, I whole-heartedly encourage you to watch it. By being one of the greatest war movies of all-time, Come and See succeeds in being the greatest anti-war movie of all-time.

As for the war in Ukraine…like all wars, I hate it and vehemently oppose it. I understand why it’s happening, what triggered it, the wider forces at play in it and the stakes involved in it, but I despise war in all its brutality and callousness and inhumanity.

I know most people don’t believe in this sort of thing anymore, and frankly I don’t blame them, but I ardently and earnestly pray every day that the war in Ukraine ends and an everlasting peace is found and prospers. Ukraine is nothing but a boiling cauldron of suffering, and the last thing this world needs is more suffering, the brilliant Come and See is a testament to that fact.

©2022

James Gunn's Shockingly Unwoke 'Peacemaker' Finale

After demeaning and berating white men for the first seven episodes, in the season one conclusion, James Gunn flips the script.

This article contains spoilers for the season one finale of ‘Peacemaker’!!

The first season of James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’, the HBO Max series which follows the travails of the flag-waving, meat-headed DC superhero Peacemaker, played by John Cena, came to a somewhat surprising conclusion.

After the series spent the first seven, and the majority of the eighth and final episode, painting all white-men as, at best, adolescent buffoons, and at worst, unrepentantly racist and psychopathic Nazis, and all minorities and women as smart, savvy and tough, the show’s climax was downright shocking.

In the final episode, Peacemaker and his band of misfit special agents head to a farm to try and stop a giant alien caterpillar, which is the lone food source for a large population of alien butterflies that are embedding themselves in powerful people on earth, from being teleported to a safe location, thus ensuring that these butterflies take over the planet.

After a long battle scene, Peacemaker and the lead butterfly named Goff, which has embedded itself in an Asian-American female police officer Sophie (Annie Chang), stop fighting and talk.

Goff pleads with Peacemaker to help the aliens because they left their planet due to global warming, and have come to earth not seeking conquest but to save the planet from the same environmental calamity.

In Goff’s passionate monologue she rails against climate change deniers and those who “ignore science”, as well as the plethora of Neanderthals that see “minor inconveniences as assaults on their freedom” instead of as a way to save the planet. In our current age of Covid, this harangue by Goff sounds very familiar.

Peacemaker ponders Goff’s appeal, and it certainly seems like he’s going to be won over. As a viewer, I was rolling my eyes as I fully expected Peacemaker to follow the Hollywood blueprint and be fully redeemed through embracing the fight against climate change, a staple in storytelling in recent years.

But then, much to my surprise, Peacemaker shoots and kills Goff and uses a voice-controlled Peacemaker helmet being worn by Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), a black lesbian woman on his team, to use her as a missile that he launches into the giant caterpillar, killing it and ending the alien butterfly threat.

In the aftermath, Peacemaker helps Adebayo out of the caterpillar corpse, then picks up and carries his wounded, hard-nosed feminist compatriot Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and carries her to the hospital, but not before cursing out the Justice League.

At the hospital, as Peacemaker awaits word on Harcourt’s condition, he second-guesses himself and asks Adebayo, “Did I just kill the world?”

Adebayo responds, “Maybe you just gave us a chance to make our own choices instead of our bug overlords.”

She then asks him, “Why did you choose not to help? Because of your proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom?”

Peacemaker replies, “Because I knew they’d hurt you and the others if I did (help them).”

In the context of the show, which I often found amusing despite its incessant woke preening regarding the evils of white men and the glories of everybody else, Peacemaker’s ultimate heroism was a stunner.

Equally stunning was the inherent admission from creator James Gunn that all the woke preaching in the previous seven episodes was a pose. Peacemaker may have a “proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom”, but he wasn’t a bad guy or a racist or misogynist, it was the bevy of snarky minorities and women around him that projected racism and misogyny onto his buffoonish and brutish personality.

The bottom line was that it was Peacemaker, the questionable white guy, who not only saved the day, but revealed himself to be considerably stronger mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically, than all of the women and minorities who berated him for his barbarity throughout. And these women, like Adebayo and Harcourt, grew to love Peacemaker for who he is, and no longer hated him for what he wasn’t, and for the reflexive wokeness that he lacked.

In a way, this conclusion paints Peacemaker as the embodiment of the famous Jack Nicholson speech from the film ‘A Few Good Men’, where his Colonel Jessup declares, “You can’t handle the truth!...we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You?...You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know…and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.”

Peacemaker may be an idiot and a jackass, but the woke brigade on the show need him on that wall, as he is not only able, but willing, to do what needs to be done, and those that ridicule him for his prehistoric cultural politics are ultimately grateful for him because only he can keep them safe.

The irony of it all is that it’s uncouth, brutal men like Peacemaker, with their “libertarian ideas of freedom”, who do the nasty, dirty work that create the protected, safe spaces where the decadence of racial and feminist wokeness can be born and thrive.

‘Peacemaker’ isn’t a perfect series, and James Gunn’s writing and directing style can be grating at times, but to his and the show’s credit, Gunn cleverly turned the usual woke politics of entertainment on its head with ‘Peacemaker’s’ conclusion, which was a refreshing change in the suffocatingly uniform cultural politics of Hollywood.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

Everything's Gonna Be All White: Documentary Review and Commentary

Showtime docu-series ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’ fights racism with more racism.

The insipid series is an exercise in self-defeating hyper-racialization and a testament to the deplorable state of our culture.

It is common nowadays to hear some activist or idiot talking head on tv declare that “we need to have an honest discussion about race”. What that usually means is, “you need to shut up and agree with everything I say or you’re a racist.”

I find the best guide to judge whether what someone says about race is to be taken seriously or not is to ask, “if you reversed the races in question, would it be an acceptable thing to say?”

‘Everything is Gonna Be All White’, the new three-part docu-series by Sacha Jenkins on Showtime, is remarkable because it both wants you to shut up and agree with everything it says or you’re a racist, and also spectacularly fails the simple ‘reverse the races’ question.

For instance, in the series, black talking heads say things like “the defining characteristic of whiteness is ignorance” and declare “you know what I hate about white people? When they pretend to be the victim…and when they kill us.” There’s also the charming assertion “honkey see, honkey do”.

If someone said the defining characteristic of black people is “ignorance” or asked “you know what I hate about black people?”, or stated “’racial epithet’ see, ‘racial epithet’ do”, they would be rightfully scorned and run out of polite society, not aired on Showtime.

I wasn’t angered by the aggressive anti-white racism in ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’, instead I found it and its animating principle of fighting racism with more racism, to be disheartening, dispiriting, and depressing.

In our hyper-polarized world, the last thing we need is another vapid polemic fueled by emotionalist racial rhetoric to fan the flames of hatred and aid the ruling class in keeping working class people thoroughly divided and conquered.

Fortunately, anyone with half a brain in their head who watches the three, hour-long episodes, as well as an extra, bonus discussion episode, can see that this thin, toxic gruel of a documentary, that pathologizes white people, celebrates victimhood and spouts vacuous racialized talking points, is an unserious exercise that is nothing but the neo-liberal equivalent of a Dinesh D’Souza documentary. In case you’re wondering…that’s not a compliment.

Director Sacha Jenkins’ arrogant claim that his series embodies “the collected feelings of folks of color in America…This is how America has treated us. This is how we feel.” is just another example of his ego-driven, racially-addled myopia.

Of course, Jenkins’ claim of his documentary capturing all of black thought is both self-serving and absurd, as black opinions are expansive, one need only look at the bevy of black intellectuals throughout history, like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington to realize that, and today’s black thought is no less vibrant, just consider the gloriously diverse brilliance of both Cornell West and John McWhorter.

To further give an indication of how delusional Jenkins is, in the extra discussion episode he has seven or so guests, all minorities, gathered together and he proudly boasts, “This is what America really looks like!” The only problem is that none of the guests were white, and I hate to break it to Jenkins but roughly 60% of Americans are non-Hispanic whites, so sewing circle is not what America looks like, not even close.

‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’ is one of those documentaries that isn’t interested in revealing a hidden truth or, God-forbid, persuading people with its arguments. For example, the notion of reparations for slavery is brought up multiple times throughout the series, but the only actual argument made for them is literally, “it’s not a debate, it just needs to happen!” How convincing.

The other topics discussed in ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’ are done so with equal petulance and vacuousness.

Incredible insights like the Capitol riot of January 6th was because “white folks throw a hissy fit whenever they’re feeling fragile”, which, considering the “mostly peaceful” riots across the country in 2020, sounds like the pot calling the kettle black, no pun intended, and historical inanities like “white people never got over losing the civil war” (white people won the civil war…for the Union) are bandied about with reckless abandon.

Words and phrases like “black and brown bodies”, “centering whiteness”, “Karens”, “white fragility” and “white privilege” are peppered throughout as though they actually convey anything but the pretentiousness of the speaker and the tortured state of their simple mind.

To further give an indication of how detached from reality this docu-series is, utterly bizarre questions like “why are white people so obsessed with blackface?” And declarative statements like “black face is a rite of passage for white folks”, are uttered and taken actually taken seriously.

What is so disheartening about this docu-series is that it’s so obviously self-defeating as it makes enemies out of potential allies.

Fighting racism with more racism is a catastrophic idea, and judging a person solely on the basis of their race or ethnicity is just as bad.

Contrary to what ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’ tells us, not all white people are “Karens” or Capitol-storming, Confederate-flag-waving racists. Just like not all black people loathe whites and think they’re “ignorant” and violent.

People are not their race, ethnicity or their religion. Everyone is an individual with inherent value and worth, and the potential for redemption, who should be judged solely by the content of their character.

It’s a testament to the sorry state of our culture that that obvious truth is now ridiculed and deemed racist, and that an insidious and insipid docu-series like ‘Everything’s Gonna Be All White’ is a part of the discourse.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

The Fallout: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. The flawed film wisely eschews politics for the personal as it paints an at times compelling portrait of a teen emotionally and mentally disoriented by post-traumatic stress.

The specter of school shootings has become such a pervasive fear here in America that there’s not a school I know of that doesn’t have “active shooter drills” to prepare students, some as young as preschool and kindergarten, for such a horrifying potential disaster.

‘The Fallout’, the new dramatic movie streaming on HBO Max, isn’t a guide on how to avoid or survive a school shooting, but it’s definitely a useful study on how teens deal with the after effects of such a devastating event.

The movie, written and directed by first time feature film maker Megan Park, opens with 16-year-old protagonist Vada going through the motions of the most mundane of California mornings. She brushes her teeth, takes a shower, rolls her eyes at her younger sister, stops at Starbucks with her gay friend Nick and eventually gets to class.

Then at school all hell breaks loose. Gunfire rings out in the hallway as Vada and a stranger named Mia, hide and huddle together in a bathroom stall praying they won’t be discovered by the unknown gunman.

What makes ‘The Fallout’ an intriguing film is that, unlike virtually every other movie on the topic, it steadfastly refuses to engage in any meaningful way with the contentious politics that surround school shootings.

There’s no anti-gun or pro-gun message delivered, or passionate cries for more money to treat the mentally-ill who would be deranged enough to shoot people at a school, or musings on how demented a culture must be to produce school shooters in the first place.

No, ‘The Fallout’ entirely eschews the political for the personal. The movie avoids those cliched and more conventional political narratives in favor of simply focusing on the drama of how a 16-year-old girl deals with the overwhelming trauma of surviving such a violent and heinous event.

To its credit, the film also never exploits its subject matter for titillation. For instance, the shooting is never shown and neither are the physical after effects of it. We never see kids being killed or bodies piled up. And the fictional shooter is an afterthought, as his name is only mentioned once, and his motive never addressed.

The best part of the film is Jenna Ortega (who was most recently seen in the new ‘Scream’ movie), who plays Vada and gives a vibrant and compelling performance. Ortega convincingly captures the awkward nature of a 16-year-old, as well as the disorienting effects of such a heavy, existential burden being thrust upon an innocent child.  

Vada, like many victims of trauma, feels everything and nothing all at once. This manifests at first as numbness and lethargy. For instance, when her best friend Nick becomes one of those passionate activists you see on tv after a school shooting demanding change, this alienates Vada who struggles just to watch tv, nevermind appear on it.

Vada then finds companionship with Mia, the pretty-girl, Instagram star she hid with in the bathroom during the shooting. Mia and Vada become attached at the hip as they try and navigate the tumultuous waters of their fear and emotions in an ocean of post-traumatic stress.

Not surprisingly, two 16-year-old girls left to their own devices as they try and come to grips with a tsunami of mental and emotional turmoil, make some pretty bad choices, but in context they are completely understandable and believable.

Like Ortega as Vada, Maddie Ziegler is very good as Mia, giving the rather shallow, one-dimensional character that was written, a great deal more depth on-screen.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast are less than spectacular. In fact, some of them are distractingly bad.

For instance, Julie Bowen, of hit sitcom ‘Modern Family’ fame, is so miscast and out of step with the film that it’s painful to watch. Bowen can’t seem to shake her sitcom performance style to better fit a movie attempting to tackle a topic of such gravitas.

Another issue is writer/director Megan Park. ‘The Fallout’ is definitely a confident and solid first-time feature film, but it also highlights Park’s inexperience as a director. For example, the film at times struggles to find its tone and maintain it, often devolving into an insipid silliness, usually while Julie Bowen is on-screen.

But to Park’s credit, ‘The Fallout’ is no polemic, as she doesn’t preach and she doesn’t pander with her movie. She also does a good job of discreetly contrasting American teen internet culture’s insidious vacuousness and vapidity against the intense existential angst born by peering into the deep void of death.

In addition, Park makes a solid but subtle case that American teen internet culture, with its narcissistic nihilism, is a type of soul-sucking trauma in and of itself.

And best of all, Park finishes ‘The Fallout’ with a flourish, as the ending is both simple and profound enough to elevate the movie and diminish its myriad of minor flaws.

As a dramatic study of a teen dealing with post-traumatic stress from a school shooting, ‘The Fallout’, despite its flaws, is a compelling and at times insightful movie, and the fact that it stays away from poisonous politics only makes it all the more worth watching.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

Peacemaker: Review of First Three Episodes

***THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

James Gunn’s HBO superhero series ‘Peacemaker’ isn’t great, but it’s good enough.

DC Comic’s show is a mixed bag, but it’s elevated by the relentless effort of star John Cena.

Peacemaker is the new DC Comics superhero series for HBO Max which premiered its first three episodes on January 13, with new episodes being released every Thursday until February 17.  

The show, which stars John Cena and is written and directed by the controversial James Gunn, is a spin-off from Gunn’s The Suicide Squad movie from last summer.  

Peacemaker is DC’s first foray into prestige tv, and it’s in direct contrast to Marvel’s bevy of family-friendly Disney Plus tv shows in that it is decidedly raunchy, racy, irreverent and R-rated.

You see, Peacemaker the superhero isn’t the pretty poster boy for perfect patriotism like Marvel’s Captain America, no, he’s more like Captain America’s unbridled shadow. At best, Peacemaker is a morally ambiguous, sociopathic, white trash, trailer park superhero who demands the Dove of Peace be branded on all his weapons and who “loves peace so much he doesn’t care how many men, women, and children he has to kill to get it”…which sounds like something that should be chiseled in stone above the entrance to the Pentagon.

Of course, that’s what makes Peacemaker an interesting character is that while he is a lovable lunkhead, he’s also a walking, talking monument to America’s unadulterated adolescence and unabashed addiction to militarism, colonialism and fascism.

When the series opens, Peacemaker is given a clean bill of health after recovering from the grievous wounds that he received in The Suicide Squad. Upon his release from the hospital, he’s supposed to go back to prison to serve his life sentence, but instead gets co-opted by a “black ops” squad to assassinate some bad people under the moniker of “Project Butterfly”.

The very best thing about Peacemaker is unquestionably John Cena. I remember the first time I saw John Cena act it was in the 2015 Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck. Cena had a small role in the film but stole every scene in which he appeared. The movie was awful but he was the best thing in it. He did the same thing in last summer’s The Suicide Squad, nearly stealing the whole movie.

What makes Cena so compelling is that he obviously isn’t a natural comedian, but he is absolutely fearless if not shameless, and works relentlessly hard to get a laugh, which is why he wins over audiences.

Admittedly, at times Cena’s act can wear a bit thin, but overall, it does work well on Peacemaker. Cena, with his cartoonish, comic book, pro wrestler’s body, comes across as a charismatic, magnetic and endearingly goofy on-screen presence.

The other driving force on Peacemaker is writer/director James Gunn. Gunn has grown a cult following for his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and the signature bawdy banter he writes for his projects.

A few years ago, Gunn got into hot water when old tweets surfaced where he made some offensive rape and pedophilia jokes on Twitter. Not surprisingly considering our hyper-sensitive era which only grows more sensitive with every passing day, Disney fired him from future Guardians of the Galaxy movies because of his bad jokes. Incredibly, after actors and media outlets pushed back against Disney’s Gunn cancellation, the studio relented and brought him back into the Guardians of the Galaxy fold.

But while he was in Disney/Marvel purgatory he signed on with DC and Warner Bros. to make The Suicide Squad and now the spin-off Peacemaker.

Gunn’s work is an acquired taste and to be frank, I’m not exactly sure I’ve acquired it just yet. I liked his The Suicide Squad (2021) considerably more than the dreadful original Suicide Squad (2016), but that isn’t saying much.

I think what sort of grates me in regard to Gunn is that while he may pose as a rebellious edge lord, at his core he’s a kiss-ass sycophant who lacks the testicular fortitude to speak truth in the House of the Woke.

For instance, in typical flaccid fashion, on Peacemaker every white, male character is either an imbecile, a cuckold or an outright Nazi. How original.

According to Gunn, the second lead on the show is the character Leota (a poorly cast Danielle Brooks), who is, of course, a black lesbian, for no apparent reason other than blatant woke tokenism. How edgy.

To be fair, Gunn does at least occasionally get a bit clever with the woke stuff, like when he has hard-nosed beauty Emilia Harcourt (an excellent Jennifer Holland) give a passionate monologue to Peacemaker about how sick and tired she is of the oppressive and aggressive sexism of men in the world, and then cuts to a naked woman as Peacemaker has aggressive sex with her. But even that bit of self-awareness only results in highlighting Gunn’s overall weak-kneed woke acquiescence on the show.

Other issues are much more obvious, such as the action sequences being less than stellar and the production value being painfully thin.

But with that said, and even though the show is more amusing than laugh out loud funny, thanks to John Cena I still found Peacemaker compelling and entertaining enough that I will watch the rest of the series over the next month as the final five episodes become available.

Thus far the show isn’t anywhere near as good as say, The Boys, the more profound and less pubescently profane, brilliant superhero series on Amazon, but it is good enough.

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for some rather mindless, mildly amusing, bawdy and base, family unfriendly superhero fun featuring John Cena, then Peacemaker is definitely for you.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Matrix: Resurrections - A Review

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

My Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dreadful, awful movie that does nothing but undermine the brilliance of the original.

At the very end of Matrix: Resurrections, the movie perfectly sums up its sole reason for existing as well as what is so dreadfully wrong with it.

Back in 1999, when The Matrix came to its conclusion after its astonishing action sequences and mind-expanding/blowing storyline, the song “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine blasted out of studio speakers as an aggressive rallying cry and call to arms. It was a stunning moment that perfectly captured the volcanic frustration born out of the ennui and malaise of post-cold war and pre-9/11 America.

In contrast, after two and a half hours of impotent fight sequences and flaccid philosophical musings in Matrix: Resurrections, the fourth movie in the Matrix franchise - which is now in theatres and streaming on HBO Max, the same song, “Wake Up” by Rage Against the Machine, plays once again, but this time the ferocious and rebellious growl of Rage Against the Machine is replaced, and the song is played by a flaccid cover band, Brass Against, and the singer is a woman.

To give an even deeper context to that music cue, Brass Against is a watered-down, truly shitty cover band, and they’ve only ever made the news once, for an incident where their female lead singer literally urinated on a male fan on stage during a show.

Chef’s kiss.

It would seem, with all of the ridiculous, gender-based changes made to the Matrix in Matrix: Resurrections, the girl power revolution will most definitely be televised, but it will also be an abysmal, derivative and boring fucking show that’s only redeeming value is that it is almost instantaneously forgettable.

What grates about Matrix: Resurrections, is that it apparently only exists in order to undermine the story, meaning and power of the original film. In Matrix parlance, it’s like the filmmakers want their audience to vomit up the red pill and gobble up the blue pill.

This of course would seem to be an asinine course of action for the filmmakers, who have never made anything even remotely worthwhile since The Matrix. But when seen in context, it all makes perfect sense on a meta level, as the creators of the Matrix have literally castrated themselves and now have succeeded in castrating their greatest work, The Matrix, as well.

You see, the Wachowski brothers , who wrote and directed the ground-breaking The Matrix in 1999 and both of its dismal sequels in 2003, are now in 2021, the Wachowski sisters. Lana Wachowski, who was Larry Wachowski back in the day, directed this new Matrix movie solo as her former brother and current sister Lilly (formerly Andy), wasn’t involved in the production.

Obviously, a lot can change in the Matrix over twenty years. Besides brothers becoming sisters, action sequences that were once so revolutionary back in ‘99, are now just derivative and dull and the original mind-bending Matrix story is now reduced to a masturbatorial homage driven by limp cultural politics and painfully inert and cliched narratives.

Back for Resurrections are veterans of the original trilogy, Keanu Reeves and Carrie Ann-Moss, but gone for no discernible reason are fellow trilogy vets Laurence Fishburn and Hugo Weaving. But at least Matrix: Resurrections casts heavyweight Doogie Howser…oops…I mean, Neil Patrick Harris, in a critical role. Yikes. Was Urkel/Jaleel White not available?

Keanu, always an understated actor, seems to sleep walk through the film and Moss looks oddly detached from the foolish festivities into which she wanders. I understood their weariness, as I too fought to stave off slumber.

I’d recount the specifics of the plot of Matrix: Resurrections, but its just so supercilious and self-defeating as to be inane if not insane. The brilliance of The Matrix was that it was narratively complex without being complicated. This was why it was so effortless to fall under the spell of the film and go along for the ride. Matrix: Resurrections on the other hand, is needlessly labyrinthine but also remarkably stupid. It repels audience interest by building barriers of banality cloaked in contradictions and incoherence.

I remember when I first saw The Matrix in ‘99. I was going to London the next day and took my lady and a friend to the movie after we had dinner in Manhattan. I had extremely low expectations as I considered Keanu to be a bit of a joke at the time. I left the theatre a few hours later gobsmacked. The movie blew me away. And what made it all the more fascinating was that as the days, weeks, months and even years went by I thought more and more about the movie. Quite an accomplishment for what I assumed was just an action movie.

Unfortunately, the sequels to The Matrix, Matrix: Reloaded and Matrix: Revolutions, were abysmal disappointments, with Revolutions in particular being nearly unwatchable.

Besides the original Matrix movie, the Wachowski’s filmography reveals them to be quite dreadful filmmakers. Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending is a murderer’s row of cinematic dogshit, and Matrix: Resurrections is an equally odious addition to that line-up.

I’ve read that Lana Wachowski wanted to use Resurrections to take back The Matrix’s “red pill” symbology that had been pirated by right-wing radicals, most notably during the Trump years. This strikes me as a sort of “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” type of situation.

The Matrix: Resurrections seems like an attempt to retroactively ruin a classic film, The Matrix, in order to piss off the original’s fans who found meaning within it, because the meaning they found wasn’t what the filmmakers intended.

I’ve heard this Matrix right-wing conundrum equated to when Ronald Reagan usurped Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” back in the 80’s. Springsteen wrote the song as a protest about the injustices against the working class in America. Reagan used it as a patriotic rallying cry.

The problem with “Born in the U.S.A.” is that while the lyrics astutely lament America’s treatment of the working class, the music accompanying them is written like an anthem. The music is a celebration, while the lyrics are a lamentation. (To see how the musical context changes the song, listen to Springsteen’s sterling acoustic version on the 1999 album 18 Tracks)

Music, like movies, makes people feel first, and think second. Audiences of both Born in the U.S.A. and The Matrix responded to the pride and anger respectively of those two works.

Trying to reverse the effects of that is near impossible, and no matter how much Springsteen corrects the record regarding his song, or the Wachowski’s try and go back and change the meaning of The Matrix, the cat is already out of the bag, the horse is out of the barn, and the genie is out of the bottle. Audience response is solidified and deeply held and there’s nothing that can change that.

Ultimately, Matrix: Resurrections is wrestling with a ghost, and while that may be interesting for the ghost and for the wrestler, to outside observers it just looks like an idiot having spasms during a psychosis-fueled conniption.

My advice is to skip Matrix: Resurrections. It is truly awful. Don’t see it. Don’t even acknowledge it exists. Stay stuck in the delusion that only The Matrix exists and all the other Wachowski films are just bad dreams to be brushed off and forever forgotten.

©2021

Don't Look Up: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An ultimately instantly forgettable cinematic venture that tries to satirize our already-absurd reality in vain. The allegorical climate change comedy wastes its star-studded lineup’s brilliant performance in a flaccid and unfocused attempt at comedy.

The new Netflix movie, Don’t Look Up, an apocalyptic black comedy that uses the narrative of a huge meteor heading towards earth as an allegory for climate change, seemingly has a lot going for it.

For instance, the movie, which premiered on the streaming service on December 24th, boasts an impressive cast, as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence star with Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance and Timothee Chalamet in supporting roles.

In addition, the movie is written and directed by Adam McKay, who has shown himself, most notably with his stellar film The Big Short, to be a clever and ambitious filmmaker.

Despite bursting at the seams with comedic potential and its bevy of formidable assets, the laughs of Don’t Look Up unfortunately never blossom, but instead die on the vine. Unfortunately, the comedy and the film just don’t work.

The film opens with Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a PhD candidate at Michigan State, discovering a mammoth comet as she does research at an observatory.

Her professor, Dr. Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), does the calculations and realizes that the comet is heading toward earth and will arrive and destroy all life on the planet, in roughly six months.

From there, Dr. Mindy and Dibiasky try and warn humanity but constantly run up against the worst of mankind, from the vapid, vacuous and venal President Orlean (Meryl Streep) to the sociopathic tech guru Peter Ishwell (Mark Rylance) and everyone in between, trying to thwart them and subvert the truth.

Part of the problem with Don’t Look Up is that it intends to be an ambitious satirical social commentary about media, big tech, social media, celebrity culture and our politics, but how do you successfully satirize things that are already so absurd as to be parodies of themselves?

For example, The New York Times, which the film briefly pokes fun at, wrote an article titled “A Comedy Nails the Media Apocalypse” about Don’t Look Up and the media’s alleged inability to focus on climate change because it keeps getting distracted by superfluous side stories.

In the article, as the writer, Ben Smith, opines about two empty-headed tv hosts in the film who can’t stay on topic even when that topic is the potential end of humanity, he himself gets distracted by a superfluous side story and ends up writing an aside where he chastises director McKay for having the film’s female tv host (a Mika Brzezinski type played by Cate Blanchett) sleep with DiCaprio’s Dr. Mindy character.

Smith writes, “I did ask Mr. McKay if we could have a moratorium on fictional female journalists sleeping with their subjects, even if they’re Mr. DiCaprio in the guise of a nerdy scientist.”

Mr. Smith is oblivious to his inane ridiculousness and only succeeds in raising the question in regard to this movie and the media, namely, how can you satirize something that is so absurd and obscene as to be beyond satire?

There are some bright spots in the film. The first of which is that both Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence give solid performances. DiCaprio, who plays a somewhat Dr. Fauci-esque scientist the media and public falls madly in love with, is particularly good in moments.

Lawrence is terrific as well, as movie star charisma, as well as her dry delivery and impeccable timing, show themselves at times to great effect.

The supporting cast, most notably Mark Rylance as the creepy tech guru and Jonah Hill as the chief of staff and son to the president, give delicious performances. As do Cate Blanchett as the aforementioned horny tv host and Meryl Streep as the shameless, Trumpian president.

But despite such a bevy of top-notch performances, the comedy of Don’t Look Up just never coalesces enough to make it a compelling cinematic venture.

The main culprit in the failure of the film is writer/director McKay.

McKay is trying to make Don’t Look Up be to climate change what Stanley Kurbick’s Dr. Strangelove was to the cold war.

The problem, of course, is that for as interesting as McKay can be as a filmmaker, he is no Stanley Kubrick. Not even close.

Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove works because he never preaches or panders or allows his film to become a pure partisan political polemic. In contrast, McKay is unable to restrain his more-base impulses and simply cannot resist needlessly preaching and pandering. The result is an often-times partisan political polemic that comes across more as self-righteous, pretentious and smug than comedically insightful or enlightening. 

The ironic thing is that McKay’s film is commenting on the short-attention span and scatterbrained nature of our current culture, but it fails as a film because it is scatterbrained and lacks the unflinching focus of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Ultimately, Don’t Look Up tries to say too much about too many things and ends up saying nothing of any substance about anything.

Like so many films this year, Don’t Look Up isn’t a great movie, or a funny movie or even an interesting movie, it is just a movie you sit through and when it’s over you move on and never once think about it again. Which is a shame, because it could have been, and should have been, so much better.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 54 - Dopesick

On this combustible episode, Barry and I talk about the Barry Levinson produced Hulu mini-series Dopesick, which examines the opioid epidemic sparked by Purdue Pharma's alleged wonder drug Oxycontin. Topics discussed include Michael Keaton's brilliance, Purdue Pharma's villainy, the scourge of government and corporate corruption and the hell that is addiction. Love me or loathe me, if you’ve ever wanted the briefest of glimpses into the heart of darkness beating within me...listen to this episode, particularly the last ten minutes.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 54 - Dopesick

Thanks for listening!

©2021

The Forever Prisoner: A Documentary Review

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Documentarian Alex Gibney once again expertly exposes the origins of the U.S. torture program, although he doesn’t adequately shame the ruling elites responsible for the moral and ethical atrocity of torture.

 Watching the new HBO documentary, The Forever Prisoner, by Academy Award winning filmmaker Alex Gibney now available on HBO Max, is an at times infuriating experience.

 The film isn’t infuriating because it’s a flawed but damning reminder of America’s hypocrisy and brutality as it examines the birth of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program and the death of the delusion of American ideals. No, it’s infuriating because you know no one of any consequence will be held accountable for the gruesome crime being exposed in heinous detail before you.

‘The Forever Prisoner’ of the title is Abu Zubaydah, the alleged terrorist mastermind captured in Pakistan in 2002 who was savagely tortured by the CIA for months and now resides in an endless legal limbo in Guantanamo Bay.

 Zubaydah’s torture, which included isolation, sleep deprivation, freezing, beatings, stress positions, and 83 water boarding sessions, is shown to have been the blueprint for CIA and U.S. military torture programs from Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay in the War on Terror.

Zubaydah was no innocent, but he also wasn’t the al Qaeda heavy hitter that the CIA claimed him to be. That said, he was a useful asset, as FBI agent Ali Soufan was able to extract vital information from him during the early, pre-torture days of his interrogation.

As Soufan explains, it was non-torture interrogation techniques that got Zubaydah to identify Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as an al Qaeda leader and mastermind of 9/11.

But when word got back to CIA director George Tenet that it was FBI agents getting info from Zubaydah and not the CIA, the ever-territorial Tenet went ballistic.

So, FBI agent Soufan was out and after a 47-day isolation period where Zubaydah saw and spoke to no one – a clear indication that the ticking time bomb scenario so often used to justify torture was invalid, the insidious clown show that was the CIA took over and the torture program kicked off.

The CIA man who developed the torture regime used on Zubaydah which became the playbook for America’s torture program, James Mitchell, is featured in The Forever Prisoner and vociferously but poorly defends himself and his work.

As the film shows, the CIA were so desperate to create an “enhanced interrogation” system they chose the eager Mitchell with virtually no vetting and despite the fact that he had no experience in actual interrogation.

Mitchell and his partner Dr. Bruce Jensen’s only remotely relevant experience was in working with the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Extraction) program which teaches U.S. military personnel how to avoid being captured and how to resist torture techniques.

The CIA reverse engineering SERE to create an interrogation program creates obvious legal and operational contradictions as the SERE program clearly states that torture techniques only extract false confessions and empty propaganda victories.

Not surprisingly, Mitchell and Jensen’s immoral and unethical torture program was also ineffective, as it failed miserably to garner any useful intelligence, but despite their abysmal failure they were paid by the CIA an astonishing $81 million as torture teachers.

The man who led the CIA torture program and signed those checks was Director of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez, and he knew the evil and illegality he was perpetrating, as evidenced by his telling his subordinates, “Do not put your legal concerns in writing. Not helpful.”

Rodriguez and his Chief of Staff, Gina Haspel, were also the ones who illegally destroyed the videotapes of the Zubaydah torture sessions, against the advice of legal counsel.

Haspel and Rodriguez never faced any legal recourse for their part in the torture program or for destroying evidence. In fact, Haspel later became Director of the CIA and then Director of National Intelligence, while Rodriguez became wealthy as a consultant with an impressive car collection.

Deep State darlings like General Michael Hayden and John Brennan avoided consequences as well, as they’re now warmly welcomed on CNN and MSNBC and even get fellated by Bill Maher for being “heroes”.

Of course, George W. Bush was never held to account for his torture program, and liberals now adore him because he once gave a candy to Michelle Obama.

President Obama too gets a pass for his complicity after the fact regarding the torture program, as he refused to investigate or prosecute any of these war criminals, instead only admitting that “we tortured some folks”, but then calling the torturers “real patriots”. I suppose that just as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, one man’s war criminal is another man’s “real patriot”.

Zubaydah has never been charged for a crime but he still may very well deserve his lifetime imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay. But also deserving of that dismal fate are the Washington ghouls like Bush, Cheney, Brennan, Hayden, Haspel, and Obama who were either directly responsible, complicit or aided and abetted some of the worst war crimes of the War on Terror era.

While The Forever Prisoner viscerally recounts the crimes committed upon Abu Zubaydah, often using his own drawings as a visual guide, like the establishment media, it unfortunately doesn’t do enough to shame the murderer’s row of Washington war criminals listed above.

Like Gibney’s Oscar winning film, Taxi to the Dark Side, The Forever Prisoner dutifully and skillfully exposes the depravity unleashed by the U.S. in the wake of 9/11, but it’s ultimately a frustrating film because it fails to adequately target the brutal and barbaric elites that conjured the evil of torture and yet managed to maintain their reputations despite the blood on their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey - JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass

On the newest episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey, I talk about Oliver Stone’s new JFK Assassination documentary, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

J.K. Rowling Cast Out of Harry Potter Reunion

The Harry Potter movies are having a reunion, but a spell has been cast to keep J.K. Rowling and her alleged transphobia away from the festivities.

HBO Max will air the 20th anniversary reunion special but the creator of Harry Potter is persona non grata because she dared to speak the truth about the trans movement.

Twenty years-ago the magic of Harry Potter jumped from the page to the screen as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first movie of the Harry Potter franchise, premiered in cineplexes across the globe.

Now, after 8 total films based on books that sold more than 500 million copies, which raked in more than 7 billion galleons at the box office, Warner Brothers is celebrating the Harry Potter film franchise with a tv reunion set to air on HBO Max on January 1st, 2022.

All the surviving stars of the films and their directors will be there, including Daniel Radcliff (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) as well as Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Ralph Fiennes (Voldemort), Gary Oldman (Sirius Black) and even Draco Malfoy himself, Tom Felton.

But, like a god cast out of an Eden of her own making, J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and literary hero to a whole generation of readers, will not be there to bask in the glow of her creative genius.

Neither Warner Brothers nor Rowling have explicitly stated so, but it appears that the author of the Harry Potter books who was intimately involved in the making of the movies, wasn’t invited to this Harry Potter party.  

Rowling’s egregious sin for which she has been banished from wizarding world and forced to wear a scarlet “T” for transphobe, is that she is a dutiful progressive on nearly every issue imaginable, but she just can’t bring herself to ignore objective biological reality and therefore refuses to fall under the insidious spell of the subjective lunacy of transgenderism.

The Rowling row heated up last year when, in response to an article that used the term “people who menstruate” instead of the word “women”, Ms. Rowling had the temerity to tweet, “People who menstruate, I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben?  Wimpund? Woomud?”

She followed that up with a tweet saying, “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

I whole-heartedly agree, but Rowling’s naivete is charming, as anyone with a first year Hogwarts education knows that in our damned world of lies, daring to speak the truth is now considered an expression of violent hate, if not an outright crime.

The author of Harry Potter becoming a scapegoat and being crucified on the “T” cross by trans radicals who live in their own imaginary and fantastical world with a bizarre vocabulary all its own, is such a deliriously delicious turn of events, I can’t help but think that Ms. Rowling appreciates both the irony and literary profundity of it all.

Rowling is now the muggle, a person without magical powers, who lives in ignorance of the wondrous wizarding world of the transgender. In her muggledom she is incapable of understanding the transfiguration, the art of turning one thing into another, of the trans, and is so far lost she can’t see the trans for the glorious centaurs that they are.

The real magic in this story is the black arts performed by the woke who have cast a spell that has transformed a resilient woman who left an abusive marriage and rose from abject poverty to build a multi-billion dollar empire, despite being labelled a purveyor of the occult by fundamentalist Christians, by using nothing but the power of her imagination to charm and enchant children and families across the globe, into a pilloried pariah because she “refuses to ‘bow down’ to  a movement seeking ‘to erode women as a political and biological class.”

The insipid ‘pronouned’ woke, who proudly declare their pronouns of choice, and those who are trans or who reflexively support the trans movement, are at war with not just J.K. Rowling, but with the English language and biological and objective reality.

I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but as I’ve watched her be relentlessly chastised in this culture war battle by these malicious and nefarious nit-wits, I’ve become a fan of JK Rowling.  

Unlike the spineless fools at Warner Brothers who have lined their pockets on her creation, and the ungrateful simps like Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, who wouldn’t have careers if it weren’t for Rowling, and who now chastise and shun her, J.K. Rowling actually has a moral, ethical and intellectual compass. Unlike them she won’t play the rigged game of transgender quidditch and bend the knee to appease a loud but absurdly inane movement trying to force everyone to accept a distorted subjective experience as unquestioned objective reality.

Good for her.

Now instead of wasting her time at the HBO Max Harry Potter reunion hob-knobbing with artistic midgets who all lack her genius, resilience and courage, and who degrade themselves by worshipping at the golden calf of transgender wokeness, Rowling can sit in her castle made of money and bask in her own brilliance knowing that she alone in the extended Harry Potter world has the most elusive yet magical power of all…integrity.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Mayor Pete: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A contrived, and unintentionally hysterical, hour and half long campaign commercial for Pete Buttigieg, the relentlessly vapid and vacuous narcissistic sociopath White House wannabe.

This year has been a banner one for sycophantic documentaries of political figures.

First there was the eye-rolling, ass-kissing HBO documentary mini-series Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Then National Geographic gave us the insidiously fawning Fauci.

Now Amazon has rolled out what may be the most unintentionally funny bit of homosexual hagiography in documentary history, Mayor Pete, which chronicles Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The film starts one year before the Iowa Caucuses with South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg gearing up for his historic run as the first openly gay candidate for the presidency.

The opening sequence begins with a voice off-camera, I think it is Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten Buttigieg, lovingly telling the candidate, “don’t bullshit us, Peter!”

Mayor Pete and its diminutive subject then spend the next hour and half relentlessly bullshitting us, as this movie is less a documentary than it is an hour and a half long campaign commercial.

What’s so funny about Mayor Pete is that the couple at its center, Pete and his husband Chasten, who both appear to have been the recipients of charisma bypass surgery, have all the chemistry of two strangers sitting across from each other in the waiting room of a contagious disease clinic. When the two of them kiss it’s like watching lip-transplant patients trying to kiss for the first time. I suppose it’s a sign of progress that an openly gay man can now run for president and be in just as loveless a marriage as all of the straight candidates he’s competing against.

Another amusing thing about the documentary was that as it wore on, I realized of whom Pete Buttigieg reminded me…it’s the sociopathic serial killer Dexter who, coincidentally, recently returned to television after an eight-year absence. Did Dexter flee Miami after his last killing spree and hide out in South Bend, become mayor, and is now running for president? Find out on Dexter: New Blood.

Like Dexter, the wooden Pete works extremely hard to try to convince people he’s a normal person, yet his dead eyes give away the game. The guy exerts so much energy pretending to be human, he comes across as entirely inhuman.

Like the film that documents him, Pete Buttigieg is so contrived and manufactured I didn’t believe anything about him. I spent half the time wondering if Pete’s face was a skin-mask from one of his alter-ego Dexter’s unfortunate victims, or if he was just pretending to be gay in order to increase his electoral chances.   

Pete so aggressively pushes his homosexuality as his main selling point the ridiculous notion of his sexuality being just a function of branding and not biology started to seem considerably less absurd. Would any Democrat pay any attention at all to Pete if he were straight? No, of course not.

This is why Pete puts his homosexuality front and center, it gives him the precious political commodity of victimhood which translates to credibility in the eyes of identity-obsessed Democrats. This victimhood is enhanced in the movie with two scenes of homophobic protests against Pete, which are so buffoonish they feel staged.

Buttigieg’s husband Chasten too makes being gay the be all and end all of his identity. There’s a sequence in the film where Chasten goes to a gay camp for kids and leads them in the pledge of allegiance to the gay camp flag, and then dresses potatoes up as drag queens, which felt like the funniest skit Saturday Night Live has never aired.

There’s another sequence where Chasten is complaining that all the Democratic candidates have their wives on stage with them on election night in Iowa, except for Pete. Even Pete grows tired of Chasten’s whining at this point and resorts to ignoring him when placating fails.

Another immensely amusing thing about Mayor Pete is watching Buttigieg navigate the victimhood pyramid of the Democratic party.

Pete is constantly seen contemplating, rehearsing and then spouting platitudes regarding race. Most notably at a town hall in South Bend after a white cop kills a black man in the city.

In another scene, Pete is seen strategizing over race and he says of his efforts, “make sure it doesn’t read as very white.” Then the documentary cuts to Pete and Al Sharpton having lunch together in Harlem. Chef’s kiss.

As funny as that is, it pales in comparison to the ass-kissing of Joe Biden that the film and its subject engage in.

For example, after an impromptu conversation between Biden and Buttigieg in Iowa, the film cuts to Pete enthusiastically telling an aide that Biden is “such a good guy!”

Later after Buttigieg drops his presidential bid, he gets a call from Biden, and we eavesdrop on the conversation between the two. Mayor Pete the movie, and Mayor Pete the man, are both so affected and manipulative I couldn’t help but wonder if all of these scenes about Biden were staged well after the events of the 2020 primary.

Biden ultimately made Buttigieg the youngest and first openly gay Secretary of Transportation in U.S. history. In that role his greatest accomplishments thus far are taking paternity leave and saying that some roads are racist.

Fans of Buttigieg shouldn’t fret though, because as Mayor Pete reveals, Pete is addicted to style and allergic to substance, and is also malignantly vapid, vacuous, ambitious, narcissistic and sociopathic, which means he meets all the requirements to be the President of the United States of America. His ascension feels inevitable. God help us all.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass - Documentary Review and Commetary

My Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful documentary well worth a watch. It isn’t perfect, but it is important.

Oliver Stone’s JFK hit theaters in 1991 and sent shockwaves through Washington and the corporate media because it was a compelling cinematic counter-myth to the equally fantastical Warren Report.

The Praetorian guards of the establishment in the halls of power and press met the film with ferocity as they set out to debunk and defang it, as it directly challenged their narrative and thus their authority. They failed. JFK was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and brought in over $200 million at the box office. More importantly though, it broke the spell of public indifference and somewhat loosened establishment obstruction in regards to the JFK assassination.

In the film’s wake the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed and the Assassination Records Review Board set up and funded.

Now, thirty years later Oliver Stone is back, this time with a documentary streaming on Showtime, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which sticks its thumb in the eye of those who mindlessly espouse the “official” story of JFK’s assassination as the truth.

As someone interested in the JFK assassination, and who has read a multitude of books on the subject across the spectrum, from Gerald Posner’s ‘Case Closed’ and Vincent Bugliosi’s ‘Reclaiming History’ to Jim Marrs’ ‘Crossfire’ and James W. Douglass’ ‘JFK and the Unspeakable’, finding a decent documentary worthy of a watch on the topic is a challenge.

Thankfully, Stone has stepped up to the plate with JFK Revisited, a serious work and worthy documentary that offers a coherent, if limited, counter theory to the official JFK assassination story.

The film runs a brisk two-hours, features a bevy of talking heads, including John M. Newman (whose two books ‘JFK and Vietnam’ and ‘Oswald and the CIA’ are terrific), David Talbot (who wrote ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’ – another fantastic book), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., James K. Galbraith, Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Henry Lee, and is a well-paced primer that would be a useful launching pad for anyone interested in diving even deeper into the assassination.

There is a four-hour cut of the film which will allegedly be made available to the public in the new year, and I’m looking forward to seeing that version as I assume it gets more into the specifics of who did the actual shooting, a subject the at-times rushed two-hour version foregoes in favor of more foundational topics.

The film does examine a plethora of fascinating JFK assassination topics though, including Oswald’s numerous and obvious connections to the intelligence community. The Warren Commission’s, the intel community’s and the media’s knowing distortions and deceptions regarding the assassination. The fantasy of the magic bullet theory. The contradictory medical evidence from Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. The other remarkably similar plots to kill Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa leading up to Dallas, which included other Oswald-esque patsies Thomas Arthur Vallee and Gilberto Lopez. As well as the story of Abraham Bolden, the first black secret service agent, who tried to inform authorities of the Chicago plot but instead of being hailed a hero was railroaded and sent to prison.

JFK Revisited also spotlights the struggle between Kennedy and the political establishment. Kennedy’s famed American University speech of June 1963, where he laid out his vision for a newfound, peaceful American foreign policy, opens the film. This vision is foundational to ‘the why’ of Stone’s theory regarding the assassination as it provides motive for the intelligence agencies and military to act to remove a president they deemed soft on communism and weak in general.

Kennedy wanted to promote anti-colonialism, normalize relations with Cuba, not make the same mistake as the French in Vietnam, and have détente with the Soviets, even including combining efforts in the space race.

The Intelligence community and Pentagon had a very different and much more nefarious agenda. They were busy eliminating Lumumba in the Congo, fomenting a military coup in France, conjuring both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods – which would use false flag terror attacks on U.S. targets to force a war in Cuba, and pushing for American escalation in Vietnam.

This is why Kennedy moved to reduce the CIA budget by 20%, fired CIA warhorse Allen Dulles (who curiously enough would become a powerful member of the Warren Commission), and famously declared he would shatter the CIA into a million pieces. According to Stone, the CIA beat Kennedy to the punch as it shattered his skull into a million pieces in Dealey Plaza, on November 22nd, 1963.

The gaping, gangrenous wound at the heart of America that rots our national soul, was born on that fateful day, and it still festers and it still matters.

Unlike both malignant political parties and the shameless corporate media, Oliver Stone, whose status as pariah is the fuel that powers all his documentaries, understands this, and he’s trying to heal that wound by seeking out the truth regarding JFK’s killing.

While the establishment may ignore JFK Revisited, the general public shouldn’t. It’s a useful and insightful film for anyone who wants to understand their government and what it’s willing to do in order to maintain its grip on power and the lucrative status quo.

Seek JFK Revisited out and watch it, it isn’t perfect, but it is vitally important.

For other JFK assassination related articles - check these out.

JFK and the Conspiracy Coundrum

JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins

JFK and the Big Lie

Oliver Stone, JFK Revisited and the Establishment Media

The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don’t

Oliver Stone: Top Five Films

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Succession is Glorious Fun, but the Oligarchical Media Empire it Dramatizes is a Harsh Reality

HBO’s ‘Succession’ is a glorious guilty pleasure but the oligarchical family run media empire it dramatizes is actually a horrifying and harsh reality.

Four families control the majority of American media, and the Roy family of ‘Succession’ is an entertaining and clever amalgam of the dysfunction of them all.

Succession, HBO’s deliriously addictive and seductive soap opera that follows the travails of the Roy family dynasty and their media and business empire, is back in full swing for its highly anticipated third season.

The show is obviously a work of fiction, but the blueprint of the story is frighteningly familiar to anyone paying attention to our ever-consolidating media landscape lorded over by an oligarchy of just four families.

If you’ve not seen it, Succession is a sort of Shakespearean stew of palace intrigue set in the uber-wealthy and powerful world of monopolized media’s master class. It’s kind of what you’d get if you tossed King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth and Hamlet into a witch’s brew with the Murdoch, Redstone, Cox and Roberts families that control most of America’s media market.

The Roy family of Succession, with patriarch Logan and sons Kendall, Roman and Connor and daughter Siobhan, is most often likened to the media mogul Murdoch family.

The 80-year-old Logan, played with scowling ferocity by the inimitable Bryan Cox, is reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch’s combative and domineering leadership of NewsCorp. Logan’s sprawling media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo and its conservative cable news channels certainly bear a resemblance to the star-spangled simp-fest of Fox News.

Logan’s dueling sons Kendall, exquisitely portrayed by Jeremy Strong, and Roman, a fantastic Kieran Culkin, also bear some similarities to Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, as does their internecine warfare to find favor with, or advantage over, their powerful father.

The scandal that befalls Waystar RoyCo, with accusations of sexual misconduct and the like, is also eerily familiar to the tawdry accusations that knee-capped Fox News and its leader Roger Ailes and star Bill O’Reilly.

But the Murdochs aren’t the only family dynasty running a media empire for Succession to emulate. Another is the Redstone family, long led by Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020.

Sumner’s media empire of Viacom/CBS/Paramount certainly resembled Waystar, and his personal life is akin to Logan Roy’s too, as it’s littered with adultery, charges of cruelty and failed relationships with women.

The most striking resemblance though between Logan Roy and Sumner Redstone is that they both have/had ambitious daughters. Logan’s daughter, Siobhan, gloriously portrayed by the beguiling Sarah Snook, is making a calculated bid for the family throne, similar to Sumner’s daughter Shari, who battled with her father over control of the family business and ultimately took over his vast empire after his death.

Sumner’s son, Brent, who in Roy-esque fashion sued his father and sister Shari, and was eventually bought out after he was removed from the board of Viacom’s parent company National Amusements.

Besides the Murdochs and the Redstones, the Cox and Roberts families are also Succession-like dynasties whose family business is media empire.

Cox Enterprises, with its major subsidiaries Cox Communications and Cox Media Group, is run by James Cox Kennedy, grandson of the company’s founder, James M. Cox, a two-time Governor of Ohio.

Kennedy’s earthy mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his cosmopolitan aunt, Anna Cox Chambers, long had controlling intertest of the family empire in spite of their love/hate, very distant relationship, which seems eerily similar to Logan Roy’s relationship with his estranged brother Ewan Roy.

Kennedy eventually took over the massive company from his aunt at the age of 41, and while the aristocratic Cox family isn’t as prone to paparazzi or media prying as the Redstones and Murdochs, they’re just as powerful.

The same is true of the Roberts family, which founded and runs mammoth telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. Billionaire Brian L. Roberts took over Comcast at the tender young age of 31 from his father Ralph and now runs the media monster that includes NBC/Universal.

Brian’s ascent to corporate power was swift, but despite siblings having no interest in the family business, he still solidified his powerful position as CEO and Chairman by pulling up the drawbridge and literally having his leadership written into Comcast’s articles of incorporation. There will be no sibling coup d’etat at Comcast.

The same is certainly not true on Succession which is why it’s such a fun show to watch. But despite being an eminently compelling and entertaining piece of capitalism porn, the reality it dramatizes is both horrifying and dispiriting.

Having just four families be the movers, shakers and opinion makers controlling so much of America’s media, controlling discourse, manufacturing consent and silencing dissent, is detrimental to democracy if not terminal to the republic.

These aristocrats and oligarchs, despite their pretentious and vacuous displays of philanthropy, are populated by spoiled and sadistic monsters who only care about preserving the status quo in order to secure and ensure their egregious wealth and power.

These monopolist corporate tyrants use their wealth and propaganda power to influence politicians tasked with regulating them to get further expansion of their family businesses, so that they can then use their expanded wealth and propaganda power to further pressure politicians to allow further expansion of their wealth and propaganda power. This endless cycle of corruption is corroding the core foundations of American democracy as it allows these family run media misinformation manufacturers to keep the public perpetually disinformed and deceived.

Ultimately, we can turn off Succession and walk away from its spectacle of egregious privilege and dramatic display of family intrigue, but unfortunately reality is just a less entertaining but more depressing version of the same insidious disease.

I love Succession, I just wish it was total fantasy and not a terrifyingly real glimpse of the four oligarchical families manipulating our minds through their mendacious media machines.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Colin in Black and White: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Colin Kaepernick’s new Netflix autobiography ‘Colin in Black and White’ is the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism that reveals hims to be an entitled, self-absorbed jerk.  

Colin in Black and White is the new mini-series on Netflix that dramatizes Colin Kaepernick’s teenage years where he struggles against racism and to be taken seriously as a quarterback.

Kaepernick, if you’ll remember, once led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and made a name for himself by kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games to protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression.

I utterly loathe flag fetishism as a mindless display of vacuousness, so I never had a problem with Kaepernick’s protests. I disagree with him on some of the specifics of his stance, but I always respected his kneeling. The way I see it, if the NFL wants to turn their games into de facto celebrations of militarism, then players kneeling shouldn’t be beyond the pale.

I also think it’s obvious that Kaepernick was unjustly black-balled by the league for his protests. While I admit that Kaepernick is a very specific and unique QB talent and that his skill set isn’t a fit on every team, it’s ludicrous to think he couldn’t at least have been a back-up somewhere. Of course, that brings up the question of whether he would accept that secondary role and at a price below what he thinks he deserves.

The reason I mention my moderate stance on the controversial Kaepernick is because I want to make it clear I went into watching Colin in Black and White without an axe to grind against the man, quite the opposite actually.

Having said that, let me tell you that Colin in Black and White isn’t just an amateurish tv show so awful it would be laughable as an after school special, it also exposes Kaepernick as being quite a despicable and deplorable human being.

This show is like the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism and Kaepernick is Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Tom Brady wrapped into one.

The series opens by literally transforming the NFL combine into a slave auction. Besides the fact that the NFL combine is something so elitist most football players of any race can only ever dream about attending, and that players at the combine have worked their whole lives to get there and are competing to become draft picks and multi-millionaires with generational wealth who’ll be worshiped like gods in our culture…yeah…the combine is EXACTLY like a slave auction.

Colin Kaepernick’s ignorance about the horrors of actual slavery is to be expected though since his social justice warrior pose and victimhood addiction apparently makes him blind, deaf and dumb regarding Nike, the company he has a big endorsement deal with that uses slave labor to make its profits. Of course, Nike is immune from Kaepernick’s social justice posing because they give him a fair share of their blood money.

It’s equally absurd witnessing real-life Colin watch and comment as his teenage screen version pouts and preens like a cheap tart at a red-light street over his anger and disappointment that the best colleges in the country want to give him a baseball scholarship, and Major League Baseball wants to draft him and give him a million-dollar signing bonus, and the prettiest white girls in school throw themselves at him, while all little Colin wants is to get a scholarship to play QB and have a black girlfriend. Boo fucking hoo.

What really turned my stomach though about Colin in Black and White is that Kaepernick’s adoptive, working-class white parents, insipidly portrayed by Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are depicted as vapid racist caricatures.

The fact that Kaepernick, who co-created this series with Ava Duvernay, would belittle, demean and slander the couple (who are still alive) that raised, loved and nurtured him from infancy, and shelled out big bucks by paying for travel baseball and high-end specialized QB coaches to help him achieve his dream, is repugnant and repulsive.

In one episode where Kaepernick’s adoption is briefly explored, the show frames his soon-to-be parents as deciding to adopt Colin only after another adoption falls through. Kaepernick then chimes in with his woe-is-me wail that “since the day I was born, I’ve never been anyone’s first choice.”

Again, boo fucking hoo Kaepernick, you sad sack clown. Your parents actually chose you. They got up in the middle of the night to feed you and change you, they held you and loved you, they gave everything to you and they moved heaven and earth to make your dreams come true, and because they’re a different skin color than you, you reward them, not with gratitude, or respect, or love, but with a tv show that bends over backwards to publicly ridicule them. That says more about you, Kaepernick, than it does about your parents.

Of course, Kaepernick turns everything into racism because he’s a nitwit incapable of understanding anything else. So, when he and his parents disagree over the usual things teenagers and parents disagree over…hair styles, facial hair, wardrobe, choice in girlfriends, Colin sees this as proof of the racist conspiracy against him.

Due to Kaepernick’s desperate need for victimhood, everyone is racist in his eyes…coaches, referees, umpires, opposing fans, opponents, hotel employees, his parents. The fact that schools weren’t tripping over Kaepernick too is because of racism.

The word that kept popping into my head as I watched this self-pitying shitshow was pathetic.  There is absolutely nothing quite as egregiously pathetic as a grown man wallowing in long past perceived slights from adolescence. Nothing.

Adding to the idiocy is that Kaepernick, dressed all in black with a massive afro, looking like Morpheus from The Matrix wearing a wig as a joke, interjects various tidbits of racial knowledge throughout the show. Kaepernick is so hysterically ridiculous in these segments he seems like a character from Dave Chappelle on The Chappelle Show or Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live.

On the bright-side, Jaden Michael plays teenage Kaepernick on the show, and as bad as the show is, he’s terrific. Despite not having a lick of athleticism in his body, he’s a compelling screen presence and an actor who conveys an intriguing inner life. He’s a talent to watch.

A talent not to watch is Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL career is most certainly over, and considering his dead-eyed appearance on the self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, celebration of delusional victimhood, Colin in Black and White, which reveals his truly loathsome nature and intellectual midgetry, one can only hope he disappears from the public eye as well. The sooner the better.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021