Ghosted: A Review – Apple TV+ Action Rom-Com Scrapes the Bottom of the Barrel

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

My Rating: ½ out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Don’t even contemplate watching this stupid movie.

Ghosted, which premiered on Apple TV+ this past Friday, is an action rom-com starring Marilyn Monroe and Captain America…oops…I mean Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.

I feel conflicted in labeling the film an action romantic comedy because the action is decidedly derivative and dull, the romance flaccid and the comedy non-existent, but the film identifies itself as an action rom-com so I’m respecting its pronouns, so to speak.

The film does have a plot, although I’m not going to insult your intelligence by trying too hard to recount it as it’s so idiotic as to be insulting. The basics of it are that after a meet cute that isn’t cute, world-traveling woman-of-action Sadie (Ana de Armas) and needy, home body Cole (Chris Evans) have a whirlwind 24-hour romance, which is followed by a globe-hopping, fish-out-of-water, spy/action-adventure. It’s basically a Hallmark Movie with disturbing amounts of killing and some very bad action set pieces.

The film has a run time of 116 minutes that feel like 116 hours because the writing is an abomination, the acting atrocious and the action choreography and execution ridiculous. But besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln…oh…it was so bad that Mr. Lincoln would’ve shot himself in the head if John Wilkes Booth didn’t do him the favor first.

A major issue with Ghosted is that the core of the film is the relationship between Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, and they have absolutely zero chemistry. Although to be fair, this script is such crap that you could’ve put Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in this sack of shit and still would’ve stunk to high heaven.

De Armas at least has a light in her eyes and is obviously working hard to make the best of a bad situation, but Evans has such dead eyes and does such lifeless line readings the movie feels like a Weekend at Bernie’s reboot with de Armas dragging Evans’ corpse all over the world.

Evans, who made a name for himself playing Captain America in the Marvel movies, is such a buff buffoon one wonders how he got his famed physique while eating so many of his own boogers.

Hollywood has been trying forever to make Evans a movie star but the only thing that worked was the Captain America stuff because Captain America is just as bland as Evans.

Evans’s last two films are the instantaneously forgettable streaming duds Ghosted and The Gray Man, which might be the worst double-feature in the recent history of cinema. One can only hope that in short order some new meat-headed moron would take Evans’ place in Hollywood rolodex of dumb-ass hunks but you never know.

I actually felt bad for Ana de Armas watching this movie. Unlike Evans, she’s not a terrible actress…she’s not a good one either…but she deserves better than this.

It felt like the makers of this movie saw de Armas in the last James Bond movie, where she had a small but scintillating role as a sexy and silly CIA agent, and thought they’d try and replicate that energy. The problem though is that character was pretty paper thin and barely got us through ten minutes of screen time in Bond, so trying to put her on-screen for two hours in Ghosted is beyond a stretch.

Some movie stars and famous Marvel men, like Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie, show up in Ghosted in order to inject some life and laughs into the festivities, but not surprisingly that all falls as flat as Chris Evans’ sculpted abs.

The director of Ghosted is Dexter Fletcher, whose previous work includes the Elton John bio-pic Rocketman, which made me think that this movie should’ve starred Elton John and Debbie Harry for some random reason. At least then it would’ve been funny even if unintentionally so.

The writers of the film are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote the Deadpool movies, and Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who wrote a bunch of Marvel stuff. Reese and Wernick’s distinctive style is easy to spot in the movie, but with Evans and de Armas spouting it and not Ryan Reynolds, it all feels forced and fails.

Apple TV+ is desperate to be a player in the streaming world, which is sort of amusing since it’s a gigantic tech company but still can’t even develop a barely usable streaming site. Despite some occasional hits like Ted Lasso and Severance, Apple has done little to distinguish itself in the crowded streaming world.

Apple seems to not understand that we aren’t in Old Hollywood or even Hollywood of the 1970s, as their approach seems to be to get stars and put them in shitty movies and people will tune in regardless of quality. As an aside, Netlfix has the same approach except they don’t even use movie stars, they just throw any piece of shit up on their service because they need content.

If Apple wants to become a Hollywood player, and to be honest I don’t really understand why they would want to be, they’re going to have to use their tech bazillions to bully buy somebody else…like Netflix or Disney or God help us HBO Max/Discovery. Because the truth is churning out third-rate garbage like Ghosted with second-rate stars like Ana de Armas and Chris Evans, isn’t gonna move the needle for a fourth-rate streaming site like Apple TV+.

The bottom line is that Ghosted is garbage and wholly deserves to not only be ghosted, but blocked before first contact. Do yourself a favor and don’t even give this pile of shit a single second of your attention.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023

Air: A Review - Who Knew That Shameless Corporate Ass-Kissing Could Be So Entertaining?

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A rare treat of a well-made movie for grown-ups. Not life changing but undeniably entertaining.

Air, the new movie about Nike’s push to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal in 1984, is, to quote Kris Kristofferson, “partly truth, partly fiction, a walking contradiction”.

The film, which is directed by Ben Affleck and stars Affleck as well as his old buddy Matt Damon, is the rarest of rare things in our current culture in that it’s a movie featuring movie stars, made for grown-ups in which everyone involved is exceedingly competent at what they do.

Ben Affleck’s direction, the cast’s performances, first-time screenwriter Alex Convery’s script and Robert Richardson’s cinematography are all, at a bare minimum, competent and often much more than that. For this reason alone, the film is undeniably entertaining.

It’s a testament to Damon and Affleck’s star power, and the professionalism and skill of everyone involved, that even though viewers know how the story ends, Air is still a compelling and captivating story that at times is remarkably exhilarating and even moving.

Matt Damon is terrific as Sonny Vaccaro, the guy leading the charge to get Michael Jordan to sign up with the then basement-dwelling, third ranked basketball sneaker company, Nike.

Damon has always been a top-notch movie star actor, and he brings all his skill to the fore as the lovable loser Vaccaro. Damon is a pleasant and oddly charming screen presence who effortlessly carries this story from start to finish.

Viola Davis, who plays Michael Jordan’s mom Deloris, is outstanding in her supporting role. With minimal screen time Davis imbues Deloris with a silent authority that dominates the drama. Every time she is on-screen, she is subtly the center of the universe. It would be difficult to imagine a scenario where Davis doesn’t get nominated for an Oscar for this performance.

Ben Affleck is very good too as Phil Knight, the very strange founder of Nike. Affleck is fantastic at being unintentionally funny and if Phil Knight is anything it is unintentionally funny.

Affleck’s direction is solid as well. His decision to not make Michael Jordan a major character in the film, and to not show Jordan’s face, were pretty brilliant as the movie could have easily spun out of control and turned into a rather cheap, made-for-tv type of project with a Jordan imitator joining the festivities.

All that said, there are some things about Air that leave a decidedly bad taste in my mouth.

The first of which is that this movie is undeniably a piece of corporate propaganda and hagiography. This isn’t just a film about American capitalism and corporatocracy, it is a celebration of American capitalism and corporatocracy.

The movie bends the truth to some extraordinary degrees in order to pretend it isn’t celebrating the rather deplorable parts of American capitalism and corporatism symbolized by Nike, and to act like it’s actually a tale about the working man fighting against corporate power.

Jordan is made out to be a pioneer who broke the mold regarding shoe contracts by demanding profit sharing and his mother Deloris makes the case that “young black boys will pay a lot for this sneaker and that money should go to my son!” She also says that workers like Vaccaro, and black athletes endorsing sneakers, are exploited by companies like Nike, and Converse and Adidas and they deserve more of the profits.

This is all well and good and is a nice bit of drama for the film, but the fact that Nike pays slave wages to third world workers in order to make their sneakers goes unsaid and unacknowledged. Also unsaid and unacknowledged is the fact that Nike sell their status symbol shoes at exorbitant prices that are so high that in the 80’s and 90’s they often caused crime and violence by young black men against other young black men in order to get them.

In addition, it is also a bit unnerving that Sonny Vaccaro, who is widely considered by many in the know to be one of the sleaziest people from the amateur basketball scene back in the 70’s and 80’s, is made out to be the good-hearted, kind, lovable hero of the movie.

Vaccaro was a shark who was deeply involved in all sorts of shady shit back in the day, and to see him in the film and in the film’s prologue, portrayed as the champion of the good, the noble and the right is a bit much.

There’s an interesting monologue in the film about the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the USA”, which was enormously popular in 1984. The song, which was co-opted by Reagan as a flag-waving theme song, is actually a lament about the brutal decline of America, but because its morose lyrics are accompanied by the energized music of an uber-patriotic anthem, the song’s meaning gets lost and its artistic power usurped.

It could be that Affleck uses the “Born in the USA” monologue to let astute viewers know that he is trying to hide his critique of the insidious nature of American capitalism and corporatocracy in plain sight in this hagiography. I’d like to think so…but Air feels too weak in its criticisms and too vociferous in its praise of Nike (and all that it represents) to pass that test, and thus feels like just the anthem part of “Born in the USA” without the existential lament at its core.  

The reality is that Air is really a movie about marketing that is itself a piece of marketing. The film, with its fantastic soundtrack of 80’s music, looks and feels like a two-hour commercial for Nike. In this way it is almost an extension of The Last Dance, the ten-hour Michael Jordan docu-series that was so gloriously received by everyone but me back in 2020. That docu-series was shameless legend cultivation and brand buttressing of Michael Jordan and was produced by…you guessed it…Michael Jordan. But our culture is so enamored and addicted to narcissistic self-promotion and propaganda, that no one cared they were being fed a piece of self-serving bullshit.

Speaking of shameless marketing and self-promotion, it is strange that Damon and Affleck are out pounding the pavement selling this movie and pretending this is their first reunion film since their smash hit Good Will Hunting back in 1997, for which they won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.

Damon and Affleck’s last actual on-screen and writing credit reunion was Ridley Scott’s underrated 2021 film The Last Duel. The Last Duel was overlooked by audiences and snickered at by critics, but I thought it was very good, so to see Damon and Affleck pretend like it doesn’t exist is somewhat bizarre…but makes sense in terms of marketing as the Damon-Affleck reunion card is being played again. As they say, everything old is new again…apparently even on-screen reunions that already happened two-years ago.  

Also a bit odd is the fact that this movie is the first from Damon and Affleck’s production company Artists Equity, which is all about paying workers above and below the line fairly and with equity in the film.

That the narrative of Air somewhat reflects the business model of Artists Equity is clever, as is Affleck talking up how he looked out for first time screenwriter Convery and promised him he’d get full credit despite some rewrites.

But that “looking out for the working man” narrative feels like window dressing when the movie it is placed in is an embarrassing ass-kissing of sweatshop masters Nike made by the deplorable demons at Amazon. I mean…yikes…you’d be hard pressed to find two companies as destructive to working people and our culture as Nike and Amazon. This insidious approach is somewhat reminiscent of the Best Picture winner Nomadland, which told a tale of the working poor on the fringes of society yet disgustingly managed to portray Amazon - which is well-known for its abuse of workers and labor practices, as a friend to the working man and wonderful worker’s paradise.

And yet, despite the rather repulsive pro-corporation politics and economics on display in the movie, Air is an irresistibly entertaining and unrelentingly enjoyable movie, which is a testament to Affleck and Damon’s talent and star power.

In conclusion, Air is in rarified air in that it’s a movie for grown-ups that features movie stars confidently filling up the big screen. I highly recommend it and can guarantee that while it won’t change your life, it will definitely leave you satisfied.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 97 - The Woman King

On this episode, Barry and I don our women warrior garb and do battle over The Woman King, the sword and sandal action movie starring Viola Davis now streaming on Netflix. Topics discussed include the blueprint of successful female-led action movies, the burden and benefits of claiming to be "based on a true story", and the curse of over-hyping sub-mediocrity. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 97 - The Woman King

Thanks for listening!

©2023

TV Round Up - Thoughts on Succession, The Mandalorian, White Lotus, JK Rowling and more!

I was going through my notes and thought I’d share some thoughts on various tv shows that have come and gone that I failed to properly review. If you are looking for something to watch maybe these mini-reviews will be useful.

I also had some not-so-brief thoughts on some current shows…The Mandalorian and Succession, as well as some observations regarding JK Rowling and a potential HBO Max Harry Potter series. Enjoy!!

White Lotus –

HBO Max

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. Over-rated garbage.

Season Two of White Lotus was all the rage this past fall. It became that show that critics and fans fawn over and that generates all sorts of cultural buzz. I watched season two when it originally aired but didn’t write a review of it for a variety of reasons…one of which is that I greatly disliked it and the thought of writing about it depressed me.

The first season of White Lotus – set in Hawaii, grew on me as it went along but the second season got worse as it went along. I watched season two – set in Sicily, beginning to end in hopes of it improving…but it never did and ended up being nothing but a grating chore.

The things that irritated about this show are too numerous to list in full but here’s a select few of them.  

Jennifer Coolidge, aka Stifler’s mom, seems like a nice person and I suppose it is all well and good that she’s having a career renaissance, but her clueless Tanya character which returns for season two is no longer quirky and amusing but aggressively annoying. Coolidge’s act, which may not be much of an act, wears incredibly thin the more time you spend with her. We all would’ve been better off if she was left behind in Hawaii.

Also annoying is that apparently every hotel manager in the entire world is gay…and in the case of Valentina in Sicily, gay and incredibly boring.

The elaborate plot of season two is so beyond ridiculous as to be absurd. None of the characters are relatable or even remotely likable. I spent the entire series loathing everyone and praying for everyone, especially Audrey Plaza’s Harper, Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia, Michael Imperioli’s Dominic (Imperioli is exposed as an awful actor in this show to a shocking degree) and Adam DiMarco’s repulsive Albie, to all die heinous deaths.

On the bright side…Meghann Fahy delivers the best moment of the entire series in her scene on the beach with her husband’s supposed best friend. Fahy was the lone bright spot in this massively over-hyped and over-rated show.

I’ll never understand why this show became a thing.

Slow Horses –

Apple TV+

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. Series has some charm but never figures out what it wants to be.

Season one of Slow Horses wasn’t much to write home about…Gary Oldman’s hysterical flatulence aside. It was too slow and too fast all at the same time.

Season two starts off with more promise than season one, but it ends up being just as underwhelming.

The show should be a rather small-scale story of bureaucratic intrigue, but it constantly goes for these over-expansive, James Bond-ian scale storylines that just seem rushed, cheap and totally unbelievable.

Oldman is, as usual, great, and the rest of the cast give solid performances, but the writing never lives up to their stellar work.

This is just one of those shows that just can’t figure out what it wants and needs to be…and thus ends up being nothing.

Black Bird –

Apple TV+

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT. A mess of a mini-series. Incredibly poorly written. Paul Walter Hauser is great as the bad guy and deserved better.

This mini-series, developed by Dennis Lehane based on an alleged true story, is so amateurish as to be astonishing. The writing and casting of this series is so bad it made my stomach hurt.  

Taran Egerton plays a bad guy who agrees to go into prison to get a serial killer to confess. There’s not a single moment where Egerton is believable. Not one.

Sepidah Moafi plays an FBI agent and she is so miscast, and so terrible in the role, I’m surprised my tv didn’t spontaneously explode while watching it.

My old friend Greg Kinnear, one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, is saddled with an abysmal role as a small-town cop that is never fleshed out or given any logical narrative.

The best thing about the show is Paul Walter Hauser, who is truly great as the twisted serial killer. Hauser is unquestionably one of the very best actors working on the planet right now. I hope he is given opportunities in much better projects going forward.

Bottom line is that this script is atrocious and this show is beyond ridiculous, as it’s a pyramid of inanities upon inanities.

The Mandalorian –

Disney Plus

No rating yet

Thoughts on the first 5…no wait…6 episodes of the 8-episode third season.

Season one and two of The Mandalorian grew on me as they went along and as the series became the flagship of Disney +. But season three has been a very, very bumpy ride over the first five episodes of the eight-episode season.

The drop off from season two to season three has been considerable. Mando now seems to have gone from searching to wandering…and that has sucked much of the drama out of the show. The season three story feels very scattered and unfocused and the execution of that story feels alarmingly cheap and decidedly second-rate. The writing is, unfortunately, just egregiously bad.

Maybe the series can get its mojo back in the three final episodes of this season…but that seems highly unlikely…and The Mandalorian mojo may very well be lost forever.

****Ok…so I wrote the previous paragraphs BEFORE I watched episode six of The Mandalorian. And now I’ve watched episode 6 and…holy fuck…things have changed…and not for the better.

Season 3 episode 6 of The Mandalorian is arguably the very worst Star Wars related event to have occurred in the history of the franchise…which is saying quite a bit. This is the Jar Jar Binks of episodes. This episode is so bad it makes the absolute shit shows that were Obi Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett seem like passable Star Wars entertainment.

Episode 3 is the most amateurish and cheap piece of garbage imaginable. The script, written by Jon Favreau, is abysmal and embarrassing. The directing, by famed actress Bryce Dallas Howard, is shameful and humiliating. The ignominious cameos in the episode by the rotund non-actress Lizzo, Jack Black and a decrepit Christopher Lloyd, are undeniably mortifying and resolutely cringe.

You’d be hard pressed to find anything anywhere as awful as the diarrhea of cutesy-ness that was Baby Yoda doing a front flip to be by Lizzo’s side…or watching him use the force to help her cheat and win at some stupid space game. Watching Lizzo knight Baby Yoda may have been the lowest point in American pop culture history.

Equally idiotic and incoherent was the story about Christopher Lloyd’s character who is maybe a bad guy or maybe a good guy. The conclusion of that narrative is so trite and throwaway as to be absurd. It’s like a kid playing with Star Wars figurines got called to dinner so they just gave their play session a generic ending and walked away.

The Mandalorian is apparently not about Din Djarin (Mando) and Grogu (Baby Yoda) anymore and instead has turned its flaccid dramatic focus to Bo-Katan Kryze, played by a gaunt and ghastly Katee Sackhoff. Sackhoff, who once upon a time was so good in Battlestar Galactica, is a dullard on The Mandalorian, and the nonsensical narrative turn of her not wearing her Mandalorian helmet has only made things worse as we are forced to see her lifeless eyes.

The bottom line is that Episode 6 was so bad it wasn’t a jumping of the shark, it was a Kessel Run over a trillion space sharks. This show is done. It simply cannot recover from such an egregious episode.

It’s a shame…at one point it seemed like The Mandalorian was going to save Star Wars. Now it seems that The Mandalorian is the final nail in its coffin.

Succession –

HBO Max

No rating yet

Thoughts on the first 2 episodes of the 10-episode fourth and final season

The final season of Succession is here and as enjoyable as it is to marinate in this capitalism porn, the truth is that the producers were very wise to make this the last season. The show, which is two episodes into its ten-episode finale, is well shot, well written and well-acted, but season four does feel like the series narratively repeating itself.

As glorious as it is to watch a dramatization of the palace intrigue amongst the villainous Murdoch/Redstone/Cox clans who run America’s media empires, the show thus far in season four seems to be rehashing the same battles from previous seasons just with characters taking on different roles in the melo-drama.

That said, watching Succession is a pure joy because the writing is so crisp and the performances so committed that it feels like a modern-day version of Shakespeare.  

Brian Cox, Kieran Culkin, Matthew MacFayden, Allen Ruck, Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong and Nicholas Braun are fantastic as the Roy extended family, and the supporting actors are equally outstanding.

As sad as it will be to see Succession go, season four is showing signs that the story has run its course, so best to enjoy it while it’s here and be glad it’s not going to sully its reputation by dragging on uselessly for another three seasons.

FUTURE HARRY POTTER SERIES

HBO MAX

So, I saw in the news that HBO is maybe going to make a tv series remake of the Harry Potter books, with each of the seven original books getting its own season.

I don’t really care one way or the other about the Harry Potter franchise, be it the books, movies or anything else. But what struck me as I read the stories about this potential series is something that has struck for many years but which I never took the time to write about (that I remember)….namely that every article about the potential new series mentioned that “transphobic” creator JK Rowling would be involved in the show.

What bothers me about this is that JK Rowling being “transphobic” is an opinion, not a fact, and yet it showed up in every news article I read about this series…and in every article I’ve read about JK Rowling in recent years.

Coincidentally, I was helping my young son with his school work the other day and one of the assignments was to place a series of statements into one of two categories, ”fact” or “opinion”.

The statements were things like “there are 8 planets”, which would be considered a fact, and “apples are better than oranges”, which is an opinion. My son being the precocious lad that he is even pushed back against the 8 planets thing saying “that’s only if you don’t count dwarf planets”. Which is true…but in the spirit of the assignment we labelled it a fact since it said “there are 8 planets” not “there are ONLY 8 planets”.

The most intriguing statement in the assignment was “you shouldn’t eat too much candy”. My son’s instinct was to say it was a fact, because it is true that you shouldn’t eat too much candy. But…as we kicked the idea around, we got very philosophical…pondering how much is “too much” and who is the one to decide what is “too much”? “Too much” for me might be “not enough” for you.

We even got Clintonian as we parsed what is “candy”? We can all agree a chocolate bar is candy…but is a caramel apple candy? Are chocolate covered almonds candy? Is bubblegum candy?

The conclusion we came to was that “you shouldn’t eat too much candy” was not a fact but rather an opinion because it lacked specificity and detail and relied upon the subjective and not the objective.

Which brings us to JK Rowling’s alleged transphobia. What bothers me about these articles stating as fact that JK Rowling is transphobic is that opinions greatly differ in regards to Ms. Rowling’s transphobe status.

A journalist writing about Rowling may believe she is transphobic, but that doesn’t make it a fact. There are many people, myself included, who don’t think Rowling is transphobic at all. And just because trans activists label Rowling a transphobe doesn’t make her one.

Any journalist worth a damn should write of Rowling that “some claim she is transphobic” or “trans activists claim Rowling is transphobic” or that “Rowling has made statements some deem transphobic”. This really isn’t that hard.

Hell, when I was working for RT I wrote the term “dementia-addled” while joking about Joe Biden in an opinion piece and the editors very quickly informed me that I wasn’t a doctor and hadn’t examined Biden so I couldn’t diagnose him as having dementia. It was a valid point, so I took the phrase out of the piece despite my believing Joe Biden has dementia and, worst of all, that removing that statement ruined a good joke.

Anyway…I don’t care about the Harry Potter tv series, but I do care that our culture has completely gone off the rails and that journalists at the most prestigious of media outlets lack the critical thinking skills and basic journalistic integrity of a 7-year-old. I have no doubt that the Ivy League educated know-it-all, know-nothings at The New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe would not hesitate for a moment to declare that “you shouldn’t eat too much candy” is a fact because “the science is settled”. Sigh.

It should also be obvious that the news media plays the same word games with other topics as well…and treats opinions as fact on a daily basis turning journalism into nothing more than insidious, subtle and not-so-subtle activism which only misinforms its audience and diminishes journalism’s credibility.

Alright, thus concludes both my rant about shitty journalism and JK Rowling as well as my not-so-brief TV Round Up.

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Woman King: A Review - Amateurish Action Junk for Women

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Mindless, middlebrow movie devoid of meaningful drama, decent action or historical accuracy.

Sometimes a movie comes along and critics and audiences fawn all over it and then I watch it and wonder what the hell is wrong with these people?

The Woman King, an action movie about the Agojie, a real-life group of female soldiers in 1820’s Dahomey, Africa, is one of those movies.

The film, which stars Viola Davis and is directed Gina Prince-Blythewood, premiered back in September and it was greeted with an impressive 94% critical score and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It is now streaming on Netflix and I finally watched it and am utterly baffled by the love it’s received.

The Woman King got some more attention when the Oscar nominations came out because the usual suspects were bitching and moaning that the movie’s star, Viola Davis, was “snubbed”, and that the film’s director Gina Prince-Blythewood was too, both on account of their being black, and in Prince-Blythewood’s case also because she’s a female director. Sigh.

The arguments for The Woman King’s star and director being snubbed by the Oscars are so ridiculous as to be absurd.

For example, many pundits claimed the movie was awards-worthy because it was a “blockbuster” and that should have elevated its Oscar profile. Let’s be as clear as we can about this, The Woman King was not a “blockbuster” by any stretch of the imagination. The film made $94 million on a $50 million budget…which in the Hollywood accounting world means it probably didn’t even break even once you factor in marketing costs.

And let’s be even more real about The Woman King…it isn’t even remotely a good movie. It’s a painfully ordinary, rather silly sword and sandals, middlebrow movie that is burdened with a laughable script, piss poor direction and even worse fight choreography.

This movie is a painfully pedestrian action film, but simply because it’s about, stars and is directed by black women, it has magically been elevated into the “prestige” category. For example, one critic actually admitted in his positive review, “Every single beat of the plot is creaky and familiar, and if it had been a story about white people, it would have been a snore.” Yikes.

Gina Prince-Blythewood, whose last film was the clown show The Old Guard, simply is not a good director. On The Woman King her visuals are relentlessly flat and stale, and the performances from her cast obscenely forced and phony.

The film is really just an action movie so its action sequences should be its calling card, but just like with The Old Guard, the action sequences here are haphazard. Every battle is muddled and murky, poorly shot, poorly choreographed and poorly edited. The amateurish action cheese on-screen in this film makes a home video of a sandbox slap fight between toddlers look like Saving Private Ryan.

It also doesn’t help that these female super soldiers that can allegedly kick everybody’s ass look as weak as a geriatric sewing circle. If good old boy Buford Pusser from Walking Tall (the 1970’s original not the newer one starring The Rock) squared off all by himself against these crazy broads he’d beat them silly with his baseball bat in five minutes flat.

Viola Davis is supposed to be the baddest of badasses as Agojie General Nanisca but she looks like what she is…a nice, middle-aged lady with no muscle tone and probably some bone density loss.

Thuso Mbedu plays new girl Nawi who joins the Agojie, and she is a profoundly shoddy actress and an even worse action hero, as she looks like she’s allergic to exercise and has the upper body strength and muscle tone of a quadriplegic on a hunger strike.

Supporting actress Lashana Lynch plays warrior Izogie and looks like Don Cheadle in drag…which in this context could be construed as a compliment.

None of the acting in this movie rings anything but hollow. There’s lots of posing and preening and pretending on screen, but not any real acting. It’s like watching a girl’s junior high school drama club play act at being macho men.

The only performance that had any life to it was a rather hysterical portrayal of Dahomey King Ghezo by John Boyega. Boyega is so free and funny as the King he steals the whole damn movie.

The reason that other critics won’t tell you these hard truths about The Woman King is the same reason the movie was made in the first place…namely that it’s a black girl power story which makes it a glorious triumph among the weak-kneed woke buffoons in the establishment critical class regardless of its merit…or lack thereof. In other words, it’s a wonderful vehicle for critics to use to signal their virtue.

What makes the movie’s modern-day racial and political posturing so amusing is that The Woman King violently contorts and distorts actual history to such a degree its astonishing the movie didn’t collapse in on itself from its own gargantuan hypocrisy.

The film portrays the Agojie as female super soldiers, vastly superior to any men in combat and morally superior to them in the rest of life by being virulently and violently opposed to slavery. The reality is something very, very, very different. You see, in real life the Agojie and the Dahomey were unrepentant, shameless slave traders. Their economy depended on them kidnapping and capturing other Africans and selling them to Europeans and Americans who would then bring them to the new world.

As uncomfortable as this is to acknowledge, the truth is that black Africans were always vital partners to Europeans and Americans in the slave trade. In fact, it could be argued that without tribes like the Dahomey, which sold Africans to white slave traders, the infamous and calamitous slave trade to America would have been so difficult to make profitable as to be rendered essentially defunct.

Of course, that history is inconvenient to the modern Manichean victimhood narrative around slavery where white men are bad and black people saintly. It should be noted that actress Lupita Nyong’o, a native daughter of Kenya, nobly turned down a role in this film due to the “complicated” history regarding the Dahomey and slavery. Wise woman.

In this context, one can’t help but ponder…would there be more or less generational shame around slavery for black Americans if the actual truth about African complicity in the heinous crime of trans-Atlantic slavery were brought to the fore?

At least in that scenario blacks are not just hapless victims without agency who are too weak or disorganized or technologically inferior to overcome white devils and the monumental machinery of slavery. No, in this historically accurate scenario Africans are crucial cogs in the machinery of slavery itself and therefore are no longer stripped of agency but saddled with some, but obviously not anywhere close to all, responsibility. Would that be a better scenario to cleanse the perceived shame of their ancestors having been enslaved from African-American’s collective consciousness? Maybe, maybe not. My argument would be that the truth about slavery and African’s complicated complicity in it would be a better narrative to embrace in order to heal that grievous wound for the sole reason that it is the truth…and as we know the truth shall set you free.

To be clear, it doesn’t much matter what I think, but to be fair as an Irishman and a Catholic I know a wee bit about generational shame and the cultural and collective insecurities that fester over historical crimes. Take that for what it’s worth.

As if the slave history stuff in The Woman King weren’t enough, the notion of the Agojie as super soldiers is equally, if not more, ridiculous. Not surprisingly, in 1892 when, in one of the few times these female super soldiers fought an actual army, the French slaughtered them in an afternoon using only bayonets, killing 417 Agojie while only losing 6 of their own.  

The question then becomes, with the ugly history of Dahomey slave trading and Agojie military incompetence, why not just make up a fictional story about an imaginary tribe in Africa with great female warriors? I suppose that’s already been done with Marvel’s Black Panther movies…but The Woman King wants to be a real inspiration to black women and delusional feminist fools everywhere, so they manufactured a false story and just labelled it history in order to give it weight, meaning and purpose and garner prestige.

What is most egregious about this approach though is that the movie goes out of its way to whitewash the historical crimes of the Dahomey and place them instead in the hands of reliable movie villains…white men. In the film, Viola Davis’ Nanisca even says, “the white man has brought immorality here!” Ummm…if history is any guide the Dahomey seemed quite advanced when it came to immorality well before the white man ever showed up.

Of course, changing history to make a better story is not exactly breaking new ground in Hollywood, so the crimes of The Woman King in that regard can be shrugged off in the name of empty-headed entertainment…but what can’t be so easily forgiven is the numerous crimes against artistry and drama that the film commits.

The bottom line is that The Woman King is an instantaneously forgettable film that is deserving of neither critical acclaim nor award recognition. That gullible audiences are so dopey as to enjoy this third-rate, cheesy girl power garbage only speaks to the calamitous lowering of taste and standards across the entirety of our culture. I do admit that I wish the Agojie were real though, just so they could mount an offensive and wipe out the philistines who enjoy this sort of mindless junk.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCO

©2023

The Last of Us: TV Review - Zombie Video Game as Prestige TV Zombie

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An uneven show that feels like prestige tv fool’s gold.

HBO’s latest prestige tv series, The Last of Us, is a strange one.

The series, which premiered in mid-January and recently ended its first season, follows the trials and tribulations of Joel (Pedro Pascal) and his teenage ward Ellie (Bella Ramsey) as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic, fascist America under siege by fungus-fueled zombies. Considering that description it should come as no surprise that the series is based on a 2013 video game of the same-name.

It seems a bit of an odd choice to make a prestige tv series based on a video game, but thanks to the hard work of HBOs savvy marketing department, the show was well-received by critics and generated a modicum of cultural chatter, no small feat in our scattered entertainment era.

Full disclosure, I’ve never played the video game The Last of Us and in fact had never even heard of it until the tv show came along. This lack of knowledge left me unencumbered by the source material and able to judge the series solely on its value as a tv show not as an extension of the video game.

My thoughts on the series are that…it is…despite some great moments, overall sort of underwhelming. The show is very uneven, as it’s at-times extremely compelling, but also often dull and aggravating. It’s also one of those rather annoyingly trite shows that poses as elevated but is really rather philosophically vacuous and politically vapid.

The first season runs nine episodes and the first episode is easily the best of the bunch. The drama of a civilization instantly crumbling due to a quickly expanding pandemic – a fungus spreading across the globe which turns its victims into zombie extensions of itself, is fantastic and eerily reminiscent of the real-world’s recent tumult. The flashbacks in episode two of how the pandemic started are equally captivating and may have been my favorite part of the series.

Another solid sequence is in episode four and five when Joel and Ellie meet up with a pair of brothers in Kansas City. The four of them must avoid not just zombies but blood thirsty locals. The conclusion of this particular adventure is phenomenal.

The problem though is that the show often feels like…well…a video game. The set ups for most of the adventures feel painfully contrived and uncomfortably like a sequence from a rather simple video game.

The series also has trouble with pacing and with generating and keeping dramatic momentum. For every episode like one, two, four and five where you’re fully invested, the show also has episodes, like three and seven where everything slows down to a crawl and we get stuck in the muck and mire of inconsequential characters and their flaccid non-drama.

It really is purely coincidental that the focus of the drama in episodes three and seven revolves around characters being gay. Even if these characters were as straight as arrows their stories simply wouldn’t be that interesting. Although it must be said that HBO injecting a heavy dose of cultural politics into a story that doesn’t need it is not the least bit surprising in our current hyper-political age. In addition, considering the paucity of people we get to know and spend time with in the series, that close to half of them are gay is sort of hysterical in an absurd way. To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”

The later episodes encapsulate the overall issues with the show as they seem both dramatically lethargic and narratively unfocused. In these last few episodes, a survivalist, charismatic Christian cult comes to the fore and considering the other cultural politics of the show it will not surprise you to learn that they are the most-evil people imaginable.

Despite the first season being much too slow at times, it also somehow manages to feel uncomfortably rushed at its conclusion. It also doesn’t help that the series and its violence become less based in reality in terms of its action as the season progresses, culminating in a rather bizarre 1980s action-movie climax.

The acting in The Last of Us is like the rest of the show, not particularly great. I genuinely like Pedro Pascal and find him to be a pleasing screen presence, and he does solid work as the tortured tough guy Joel, but he’s never really asked to do too much heavy lifting.

Bella Ramsey as Ellie is like nails on a chalkboard. Ramsey is a very unappealing screen presence and she feels completely phony as the struggling teen. Ramsey’s cadence and speech are so odd as to be grating and her entire performance rings very hollow to me.

Melanie Lynskey, an actress I very much like, is terribly miscast in a supporting role as a revolutionary leader fueled by bloodlust and revenge. Unfortunately, Lynskey is so unbelievable in the role as to be ridiculous and it scuttles what is one of the more intriguing storylines.

As for the special effects, the zombies do look pretty cool, and the actors portraying them do a terrific job of being creepy as hell.

On the whole though watching the first season of The Last of Us, despite its occasional high points, felt like a bit of a chore. Maybe I would feel differently if I was familiar with the video-game. Who knows?

In terms of just being a tv series, The Last of Us seems like one of those prestige shows that, like HBO’s Westworld, run out of creativity, lose the plot, lose their audience, and then are quickly tossed down the cultural memory hole never to be thought of again.

Considering The Last of Us seems to have already lost its creative steam (around episode six), I’d guess season two will see a precipitous decline in both audience engagement and critical adoration. It seems to me this prestige drama is a mindless zombie ultimately not long for this world.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Mel Brooks' History of the World Part II: A Review - Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen...and Can't Get Up

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. If you prefer you’re comedy to be funny, then this isn’t the series for you.

Let me start by saying that I love Mel Brooks. He was, for good or for ill, a major influence on the development of my sense of humor growing up.

His movies Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (which is one of my all-time favorite movies) and History of the World Part I, were on heavy rotation during my formative years and the world has been paying the price for it ever since.

Truth be told though that as much as I love the 96-year-old Mel Brooks, he also has the unique distinction of being the only director in cinema history to have me walk out of one of his films because it sucked so bad. Back in 1993 I got free tickets to a screening of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and after 45 gruelingly unfunny minutes I made the painful decision to get up and walk out…something I’ve never done before or since.

Which brings us to Mel Brooks’ newest creation, The History of the World Part II, which is a mini-series currently streaming on Hulu.

The most unfortunate thing about Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II is that I couldn’t walk out of it because then I’d be left standing outside my house in the rain like some shmuck.

History of the World Part I was iconic and hysterical. History of the World Part II is its antithesis, as there’s nothing insightful, original or amusing about it. This series is so actively anti-comedy and anti-funny that I consider it to be the Adolf Hitler of comedy series since it commits a hellacious holocaust against humor.  

It should come as no surprise this series is so bad since it stars the congenitally, malignantly unfunny Wanda Sykes, who I think of as the herpes of comedy – always unwanted yet mystifyingly recurring.

The other star of the series is the turd with feet known as Nick Kroll. If Wanda Sykes is the herpes of comedy, Nick Kroll is AIDS. Kroll is not only egregiously not funny, he is aggressively anti-funny. Kroll is a black hole of comedy who sucks all humor and all possibility of humor out of every scene he inhabits. Kroll is so unfunny he seems to have been given anti-comedy enemas for years at a time to remove any semblance of funny from his system. Kroll is so allergic to being funny he should be sealed in an oil drum at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes, ears and mouth taped shut for his and our safety.

Kroll plays a cavalcade of grating characters, like Shmuck Mudman, Judas, Galileo and Henry Kissinger. Sykes’ characters include Harriet Tubman and, in the unquestionably least funny recurring part of the entire series, Shirley Chisholm.

The third “star” listed on the series is Ike Barenholtz. Ike, who plays Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Graham Bell, is a thousand times funnier than Sykes and Kroll combined and yet he wouldn’t know funny if it gang raped him in a prison shower. A comedy truism to always remember is that if the funniest person in your comedy series is Ike Barenholtz, you’ve got some major fucking problems.

History of the World Part II, which runs for 8 interminable, thirty-minute episodes, covers such topics as the Civil War, Jesus and his Apostles, The Russian Revolution, Shirley Chisholm, Kublai Khan, Typhoid Mary and Stalin among many others.

Literally the only time I laughed during the entire excruciating four hours of this series was when, in a scene set in 1865, Abraham Lincoln, played by Timothy Simons, kept complaining about being tall and how he bumps his head all the time. Lincoln then exits a room and painfully bumps his head on the door frame. After gathering himself he declares “well, that’s definitely the worst thing that’ll happen to my head this year!” That’s funny. The rest of the show is not.

What stood out like a sore thumb in this series is that Mel Brooks, the guy who wrote “Springtime for Hitler”, has been completely neutered. Throughout the series Brooks genuflects to wokeness at every turn. The most obvious of which is a series of flaccid jokes directed at whites by Sykes as her Tubman and Chisholm characters. Yawn.

That Brooks has been reduced to conforming to the vapid, politically correct guidelines du jour is one of the more disheartening developments in recent years. You would think that a genius like Brooks, who usually finds the heights of comedy by pushing back against such ridiculous constraints, would be even less inclined to conform to them now that he’s 96, but apparently not.

Brooks, who is now almost the same age as his 2,000-Year-Old Man character, is a living piece of 20th Century comedy history. His career, which spans writing with a hall-of-fame collection of comedians for Sid Caesar’s The Show of Shows to the heights of Hollywood filmdom and Broadway dominance, is a testament to his prodigious talent.

Unfortunately, Brooks long ago lost his comedy fastball, and it would be best for his glorious legacy if History of the World Part II is memory-holed and quickly forgotten.

If you want to enjoy Mel Brooks, go watch Young Frankenstein again, or Blazing Saddles or History of the World Part I. Whatever you do don’t be a putz and a shmuck and watch the absolute worst double feature in Mel Brooks’ cinema history, History of the World Part II and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.  

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Triangle of Sadness: A Review - Savage and Insightful Social Satire

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic, original and scathing takedown of modern society.

Triangle of Sadness, written and directed by Ruben Ostlund, is one of the best films of last year and one of the more misunderstood films in recent history.

The movie, which is a black comedy/social satire, was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards, but was tepidly received by critics and audiences alike as evidenced by its 71% critical score and 68% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

The film premiered in the U.S. in October and generated almost no buzz. In my circles in Hollywood, I heard no one talk about it at all, be it positively or negatively. It seemed the movie, which is in the English language but is produced by a cavalcade of foreign production companies from England, France, Germany, Sweden and Denmark among many others, would just come and go and be forgotten.

But then the film was nominated for a bunch of Oscars, which is why I figured I should watch it in order to be up to date prior to the Academy Awards. Thankfully the film is now streaming on Hulu which makes it more accessible.

I watched the film knowing nothing about it prior and came away from my screening believing it to be unquestionably one of the very best of the year, and certainly the most original.

The film is broken into three parts. The first is titled “Carl and Yaya” and it introduces us to models/social media influencers Carl and Yaya, two beautiful people navigating the business of marketing their bodies as well as their intimate relationship.

This opening section is absolutely mesmerizing and could be a stand-alone movie all its own. Carl, played by Harris Dickinson, and Yaya, played by Charlbi Dean, are so compelling and captivating that you are instantaneously drawn into their very topical, painfully politically correct, gender-sensitive, Gen Z drama.

Swedish writer/director Ostlund masterfully shoots this opening section with a stunning level of both subtlety and craftsmanship. There’s one shot of a conversation in a car that is as good as anything seen in a movie in years.

The second section of the film, titled “The Yacht”, chronicles Carl and Yaya and a bunch of other incredibly wealthy people as they vacation on a giant yacht. This section sets up the power dynamics between the unconscionably rich and the working people in the service industry at their beck and call.

This part of the movie is, to put it mildly, batshit crazy, as it devolves into one of the more absurd and extreme bits of physical comedy you’ll ever witness. That said, it is also incredibly insightful in terms of presenting and then propelling the film’s philosophical narrative.

The third section, titled “The Island”, turns the film on its head (again I’m being vague to avoid spoilers) as it lays bare the insidious hunger for power that lies at the heart of humanity.

After watching the film, I did something I rarely, if ever, do…I went and read some reviews of it. The reviews, which were all mostly dismissive, all said the same thing…that the film was nothing more than a rather trite criticism of American capitalism. The fact that politically-correct, limousine liberals writing for various high falutin, establishment, corporate media entities like the New York Times and such, would disapprove of a scathing Euro takedown of American capitalism should come as no surprise. But what did surprise me was that I didn’t see the film as a trite criticism of capitalism.

Yes, the film does criticize capitalism, but it also, and with maybe even more ferocity and fervor, criticizes the criticisms of capitalism. For example, at one point in the film there is a drunken debate between a wealthy capitalist and the socialist captain of the yacht. The two of them regurgitate famous quotes at one another to make their argument because neither is able to think for themselves or have an original thought. The wealthy capitalist is a repugnant pig and former citizen of the Soviet Union, and the socialist sea captain is a lazy drunkard who literally has been unable to leave his cabin to perform his duties due to his inebriation.

That the capitalist admits he sells “shit” and the socialist sea captain makes money being too drunk to pilot a giant yacht for the rich, sums up perfectly the scathing social satire of Triangle of Sadness. That critics are so venal, vapid and vacuous that they are unable to see past the obvious façade of “anti-capitalism” in this film in order to see the much deeper and more important point of it all is both damning and alarming. Or maybe critics actually did see the film’s deeper meaning and were angry that their woke worldview was so easily and entertainingly disemboweled. Who knows?

Regardless of misguided critic’s opinions, Triangle of Sadness is one of those glorious films that rattles around your brain for days after seeing it. The compromises the characters make in order to survive and/or thrive and to above all else deceive themselves, is an extraordinary thing to watch.

Ruben Ostlund’s direction is simply stunning. The opening section features numerous scenarios that are so exquisitely conjured and executed as to be amazing. For example, the modeling audition that Carl attends is both hysterically funny and unconscionably depressing for its accuracy and incisiveness.

In the second section, Ostlund does something so subtle and so clever that I’ve been ruminating on it for weeks now. During a chaotic sequence, which I won’t reveal to avoid spoilers, Ostlund introduces, almost out of nowhere, the sound of a baby crying. This baby and its parents are not featured characters and are little more than extras in the movie at best, but the sound of the baby crying elicits in the viewer a deep psychological and emotional reaction that is totally instinctual. This crying baby amidst the comedy chaos is like a vicious kick in the gut, and it leaves you shaken even if you aren’t sure why.

The third section is the laying bare of human nature and power dynamics and an escalation of the film’s critique of capitalism and criticisms of capitalism. That stereotypes regarding gender politics and economics are eviscerated in this section only makes it all the more delicious.

The cast of Triangle of Sadness all do exemplary work. Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean as Carl and Yaya are utterly fantastic. Dickinson in particular is able to walk a perilous tightrope to perfection. Dean, who in the most tragic of circumstances actually died last August before the film was released, is a magnetic screen presence and an absolute natural.

Other actors, like Zlatko Buric as the wealthy businessman, and Woody Harrelson as the drunken sea captain, and Dolly De Leon as the mysterious Abigail, all do solid work in their roles.

The bottom-line regarding Triangle of Sadness is that it takes no prisoners in its attack on the political, social and economic spectrum. Whether socialist or capitalist, man or woman, liberal or conservative, you’ll find yourselves in the crosshairs of this movie, and you’ll have no viable counter-argument as the film is aggressively astute and allergic to sentimentality.

If you can “stomach” it, I highly recommend Triangle of Sadness, as it is extremely well-made and extraordinarily insightful. This is the kind of movie that cinema desperately needs right now, and it was a joy to discover it.

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 96 - Triangle of Sadness

On this uncharacteristically joyous episode, Barry and I go on a ritzy cruise to debate one of the best movies of the year, the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nominated Triangle of Sadness. Topics discussed include the glory of original storytelling, the art of deft directing and the joy of well-crafted cinema. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 96 - Triangle of Sadness

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 95 - Oscar Wrap Up and Wakanda Forever

On this episode, Barry and I do a quick recap of the Oscars and then catch a flight to Wakanda to discuss all things Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Topics discussed include the sorry state of movie stardom, the sorry state of cinema and the even sorrier state of Marvel.

Looking California and Felling Minnesota: Episode 95 - Oscar Wrap Up and Wakanda Forever

Thanks for listening!

©2023

9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2022 Edition

THE 2022 SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Amsterdam – An astonishingly awful film that is so incoherent and incomprehensible I can only posit that the Illuminati running Hollywood (and the world) demanded it be intentionally so poorly crafted in order to scuttle any discussion of Smedley Butler and the Business Plot.

She Said – Imagine making such a shitty a movie that audiences end up rooting for a deplorable fucking pig like Harvey Weinstein by the end. Quite an accomplishment!

Don’t Worry Darling – No, actually DO worry, darling. This turd was an absolute shit show of epic proportions and may very well have mercifully ended Olivia Wilde’s directing career…for that we can be grateful.

My Policeman – To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”…including Harry Styles apparently. A gay plot about gayness that is totally gay, but still makes no sense, that is infused with instantly forgettable performances turned this derivative drama into Return to Blokeback Mountain.

Pinocchio – Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks should return their Oscars after churning out this mindless, heartless, craft-less sack of shit. Just utterly abysmal from start to finish.

The Fabelmans – An alarmingly amateurish, poorly written, directed and acted piece of vapid, narcissistic garbage that is filled to the brim with cringe. Besides that it’s just fine.

AND THE LOSER IS…AMSTERDAM! – It’s actually quite an accomplishment to make a movie this bad and to stand out from this collection of shit sandwiches.

WORST VIRTUE SIGNALING FILM OF THE YEAR

She Said – A movie that featured the stunningly brave, earth-shattering thesis that Harvey Weinstein is bad and women are good! Too bad this empty movie had nothing original or interesting to say. Total piece of junk meant to signal its virtue to the usual suspects in order to garner awards…but was so dreadfully made even its target audience stopped pretending it was good.  

Women Talking – A stagey, whiney, bitchy movie about Mennonite women debating each other like they’re know-it-all know-nothings at a late-night bitch session at Wellesley College. As pretentious, pompous, poorly made and transparently virtue-signaling and awards-thirsty as any movie as we’ve seen in years.

AND THE LOSER IS…WOMEN TALKING – The most blatant bit of vacuous and vapid virtue signaling imaginable. The fact that it is a truly horrendous movie but still won an Oscar tells you all you need to know about its pure pandering business model.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

Tom Hanks – Tom Hanks has won two Best Actor Oscars, yet this year with his truly abysmal work in Elvis and Pinocchio, he has proven himself to be the worst best actor of all time. Hanks’ inability to play a character, or speak with an accent, were on full display this year, as was his hackneyed, hokey, shticky acting approach, and we’re all worse off for it. Please go away forever Tom Hanks.

Harry Styles – Harry Styles was poised to have a break out year and become a big movie star…and then we saw him in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling and his rocket ship to superstardom exploded on the launching pad. Holy shit this kid can’t act…not even a little. As uncomfortable and unnatural a screen presence as we’ve seen since Cindy Crawford in Fair Game.

Seth Rogan – Seth Rogan is an unwiped anus. His work in The Fablemans was a healthy reminder that he is an odious screen presence. I, for one, yearn for his vanishing from the public eye and/or the planet.

AND THE LOSER IS…TOM HANKS! Hanks should be embarrassed and humiliated by his work over the last twenty years, but he’s incapable of feeling anything but smug and superior. This hack should fuck off forever.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR

She Said – Bar Scene – An astonishing piece of cinema that is so atrocious as to be amazing. This scene has everything! From the poor dialogue (“these are the menus”), to the egregious virtue signaling, to the one-dimensional strawman, to the heinous acting. Just an all-around miraculous piece of cinematic shit that would be laughed out of a freshman year student film festival.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR

The Fabelmans – The Fabelmans isn’t just a bad movie, it’s an embarrassing movie. That it was Oscar nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress, is a testament to how corrupt Hollywood truly is. If this film were made by anyone other than Steven Spielberg, it would’ve been vociferously labeled cringey, amateurish horseshit…but since St. Steven made it we are supposed to fawn over how “personal” it is. Get the fuck outta here with this garbage. This movie is shitty to the extreme and absolutely sucks donkey balls. If you liked it you’re an incorrigible idiot and an unrepentant asshole.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE

David O. Russell – Russell has never been a good director, but for some reason he has been considered among the elite moviemakers in Hollywood for the past twenty years or so. I think with the trainwreck that is Amsterdam, Russell has convincingly disabused Hollywood of the notion that he is even remotely able to make movies. To see even the most-simple of things, like setting actor’s eye lines, be fucked up in this deplorable shitshow, was jaw-dropping to witness. Russell put all of his copious amounts of shittyness into the Amsterdam stew and a few of us poor souls had to take a stinky bite. Yikes. Hopefully this asshat never gets another shot to make a movie.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Meghan and Harry – Only these two self-absorbed, narcissistic pieces of shit could make a pervy prodigious pedophile like pecker-face Prince Andrew seem like a half normal person.

These two half-wit shitbags hate publicity and the public eye so much they moved to Hollywood and got into the entertainment business. And now you can’t avoid them because they won’t shut the fuck up and stay off camera for a single, solitary moment.

Prince Harry is a sad-sack eunuch and a ball-less buffoon and Meghan is a diabolical and devious shrew who has successfully neutered her needle-dicked husband and isolated him from his in-bred family.

My wish is that the new King Charles invites these two insufferable cunts to his coronation, they show up and then right after the ceremony King Charles has them beheaded, old school style, on live television. This would please Harry and Meghan because they’d get a lot of attention and get to be victims, and it would also ensure that Charles would be the most popular King in the history of England.

P.O.S ALL-STARS

Sean Penn – I’ve always liked Sean Penn as both an actor and a guy. He and I have very similar personalities…which isn’t exactly a brag on my part.

This year Penn has brought some of his famous screen characters to life in the real world, as he’s publicly morphed into the mentally challenged young man from I Am Sam combined with the gay activist politician Harvey Milk from Milk. Penn has made this transformation in order to bang the drums of war in Ukraine as loudly as possible.

Yes, Sean Penn who was so vociferous in his righteous anti-war sentiments regarding Iraq in 2003, is now out there demanding the U.S. and the military industrial complex get further involved in the war in Ukraine, including direct combat.

What a fucking genius.

Maybe someone should remind Sean that he has a son who’s the perfect age to go fight in Ukraine…and if that country’s “freedom” is so fucking important to him maybe he and his son can gear up and move out and go kick some Russian ass halfway across the world.

If that isn’t something he’s interested in, then maybe I Am Sam should shut the fuck up and stop talking and acting like a fucking useless retard. Maybe Mayor Man Milk should stop shouting that “I’m here to recruit you…to die in the war in Ukraine for the U.S. elites who absolutely hate you and only want to use you for cannon fodder!” Penn’s I am Sam/Harvey Milk character sounds like another famous gay buffoon, George W. Bush, as he marched us into war in Iraq…and as we all remember that went spectacularly well. Mission accomplished motherfucker!

So, Sean Penn, do us all a favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP. If you want to fight, I’d be happy to meet you and your movie star biceps anywhere, anytime, and slap the stupid out of your thick fucking skull. And by the way maybe try and do another exercise bedsides curls when you’re at the gym, you might find your bulging biceps to be less than useful in combat, be it in Ukraine or in a scrap with me. You’re welcome you fucking empty-headed shit heel.

And thus ends the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards and the cinema calendar for 2022…thank God!!

Hopefully the losers this year will be the winners next year…you never know. One thing I can guarantee though is that there will be movies and performances worthy of the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Award next year…and I’ll be ready!!

Thanks for reading!

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The 9th Annual Mickey™® Awards: 2022 Edition

THE MICKEYS – 2022

The god-awful Oscars have finally come and gone and now it’s time for the final and most prestigious awards in cinema to commence.

The Mickey™® Awards aren’t just the most prestigious award in cinema, but are undeniably the most prestigious award on the planet, easily topping those wannabe poseurs at the overrated Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately, in recent years the art of cinema has not been worthy of such an esteemed and distinguished honor. You see, since the halcyon days of 2019 when great movies like Parasite, Joker, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and The Irishman, and significant arthouse films like Ad Astra, A Hidden Life, The Last Black Man in San Francisco and High Life, as well as quality middle-brow entertainment like the finely-crafted 1917 and Ford v Ferrari, graced our big screens, we’ve been in a dramatic and dire cinema drought. Not only has greatness not come to the big screen (or small screen) in the last three years, goodness has been an absolute rarity as well.

On the bright side, it must be said that 2022 was definitely better than 2021, but that isn’t saying much as 2021 was easily the worst year for movies in my entire life. To give an indication of how bad things were in 2021, last year The Mickeys™® were almost cancelled because the nominating committee couldn’t make a list of top five films due to the fact that there weren’t five good films that came out all year.

As far as the future is concerned, one can only cling to the hope that the ever-so-slight upward trend in cinema quality from 2021 to 2022 continues and that the three years ahead of us end up being better than the three unbelievably shitty years we’ve just slogged through.

Am I optimistic? God no! But at least as I wallow in my depression I’m setting myself up for the wondrous experience of being pleasantly surprised. As my cavalcade of girlfriends can attest, I am extremely fond of saying, “the key to happiness is low expectations.”

Before we get started…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, streamer or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive one acting coaching session with me FOR FREE!!! Yes…you read that right…FOR FREE!! Non-acting category winners receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, you aren't actors so I know you can eat carbs, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). Actors who win and don't want an acting coaching session but would prefer the lunch…can still go straight to hell…but I am legally obligated to inform you that, yes, there WILL BE SUBSTITUTIONS allowed with The Mickey™® Awards prizes. If you want to go to lunch, I will gladly pay for your meal…and the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge.

Enough with the formalities…let's start the festivities!!

Popcorn Movie of the Year

The Batman – Matt Reeves wrote and directed the most recent sojourn into the world of the Batman and his film is a unique and original venture in a genre worn thin by its relentless and ridiculous repetition.

The Northman – Robert Eggers attempt at a Norse action movie is as weird as you’d expect it to be. While uneven, the film is a gloriously ambitious and smart action film that audiences were too stupid to understand.

Prey – I assumed Prey was going to be just another empty-headed franchise movie. It wasn’t. It was an original take on the well-worn Predator movies that revitalized the franchise.

And The Mickey™® goes to…THE BATMAN

Best Cinematography

All Quiet on the Western Front – James Friend – Friend’s work on All Quiet is simply astounding as he captured the scope and scale of war while also conveying the deeply intimate impact of it. Just beautifully photographed.

The Batman – Grieg Fraser – Fraser’s work on The Batman is at times absolutely stunning. His use of light in darkness paints some of the most extraordinary visuals in any film this year.

The Banshees of Inisherin – Ben Davis – Davis makes the most of his Irish setting through the use of fundamentally sound cinematography.

Tar – Florian Hoffmeister – Hoffmeister’s framing is simply exquisite as he turns the mundane into delicious pieces of cinema.

And The Mickey™® goes to…ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Best Supporting Actor

Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin: Gleeson is one of the best actors around and he brings the full force of his skill to his role of Colm, the dissatisfied musician tired of the ordinary life. Gleeson elevates every scene he inhabits.

Barry Keoghan – The Banshees of Inisherin: Keoghan’s work as Dominic, the fragile and combustible young man trapped in his life on the small isle of Inisherin, is at times stunning. The scene where he asks a girl to be with him is one of the very best captured on film this year.

And The Mickey™® goes to…BRENDAN GLEESON

Best Supporting Actress

Kerry Condon – The Banshees of Inisherin: Condon perfectly captures the frustration and futility of life as an Irish woman surrounded by the hell that is Irish men.

And The Mickey™® goes to…KERRY CONDON

Best Screenplay

The Banshees of Inisherin – Martin McDonagh: McDonagh’s screenplay is ridiculous and absurd at times, but it never fails to perfectly capture the civil war raging in the hearts and minds of every Irishman.

Triangle of Sadness – Ruben Ostlund: On its surface, Triangle of Sadness is a rather banal and somewhat predictable criticism of American capitalism (a criticism I agree with by the way), but just beneath this surface is as smart, savvy and savage a social satire as seen on big screens in ages.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: Del Toro turns the well-worn story of the puppet come to life into a fascinating tale of love, loss and fascism. As relevant a story as we saw all year.

And The Mickey goes to…TRIANGLE OF SADNESS

Best Scene of the Year

The Banshees of Inisherin – When Barry Keoghan’s Dominic professes his love for Kerry Condon’s Siobhan, it is absolutely heartbreaking and gut-wrenching. Both Keoghan and Condon absolutely crush this scene.

Tar – When Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tar tries to teach a simple-minded social justice woke warrior about the complexity of life and music in this ten-minute uncut scene, it is simply mesmerizing. The actor playing opposite Blanchett, Zethphan Smith-Gneist, is so uncomfortable (either intentionally or unintentionally) in the role as to be glorious. Just one of those unbelievably magical scenes that make cinema so wondrous.

All Quiet on the Western Front – The scene where Paul is stuck in a bomb crater with a French soldier is absolutely hellacious as it shows war as a humanity crushing machine. It is a perfect encapsulation of this film and its anti-war message.

And The Mickey goes to…TAR

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett – Tar : There is no other option in this category. Blanchett is the best actress of her generation and maybe every other generation too. Blanchett’s skill and mastery of craft are sublime, and her raw talent is undeniable. Just a master class of master classes in terms of great acting.

And The Mickey goes to…CATE BLANCHETT – TAR

Best Actor

Felix Kammerer – All Quiet on the Western Front: A deft portrayal of the horrors of war that hollows out the human soul. Kammerer never loses his edge or his innate sense of humanity in this role.

Colin Farrell – The Banshees of Inisherin: Farrell’s work as the dim-witted, sad-sack Padraic is astonishing considering he was little more than a rather dim-witted, Hollywood pretty boy not that long ago. Farrell has grown into a terrific actor of quality and worth over the last decade or so and he puts it all together in this most subtle and deft portrayal.

And The Mickey™® goes to…COLIN FARRELL – THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Actor/Actress of the Year

COLIN FARRELL – In 2022 Farrell not only excelled as the lead in The Banshees of Inisherin, but he was also terrific in The Batman as the Penguin, and even elevated a rather mundane Ron Howard movie with a simple yet subtle turn as one of the divers who saves kids trapped in a cave in Thirteen Lives. Farrell has come a long way, and he now has not one but two Mickey™® awards to prove his greatness.

Best Director

Ruben Ostlund – Triangle of Sadness: Ostlund the director had to somehow bring to the screen the wild, unwieldly, sprawling story written by Ostlund the screenwriter…and he does it with a panache and deft touch that is breathtaking to behold.

Martin McDonagh – The Banshees of Inisherin: McDonagh is a better writer than he is a director, but on Banshees he lets simplicity be his guide and the result is an extremely well-made movie that never gets in its own way.

Guillermo del Toro – Pinocchio: Del Toro infuses such life and energy into this old story, and does it with the most beautiful stop-motion animation imaginable, that one can only bow to his enormous talent and extraordinary artistic vision.

Edward Berger – All Quiet on the Western Front: Berger perfectly captures the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual hell that is war. An unrelenting film that is as relevant today as the stellar original was back in 1930.

And The Mickey™® goes to…Edward Berger – All Quiet on the Western Front

Best Picture

8. Barbarian – The first two acts of this film are spectacularly well-made, but the third act falters. Still, was a pleasant surprise to see such a well-crafted horror film.

7. The Menu – A crisp and entertaining bit of class warfare moviemaking that featured some solid performances. Not a perfect movie but compelling.

6. The Batman – Matt Reeves proves himself to be a solid captain for the good ship Caped Crusader. His unorthodox approach and storytelling are a bit of fresh air in the oversaturated superhero genre.

5. Tar – 2/3rd of a great movie. The final act falls short but Blanchett’s brilliance is undeniable.

4. Triangle of Sadness – So much more than it appears to be. A funny, but insightful and incisive social satire that pulls no punches towards anyone.

3. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – A deeply moving, mournful meditation on life and loss.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin – Fantastically acted story that speaks to our current time and to the burden of Irishness.

1. All Quiet on the Western Front – Astonishingly well-made film. It isn’t perfect, but it overcomes its shortcomings by brutally conveying the fact that war is hell and only demons want it.

Most Important Film of the Year

All Quiet on the Western Front – In case you haven’t heard, there’s a war going on In Ukraine. Most Americans have been so thoroughly propagandized and indoctrinated that they are chomping at the bit to get the U.S. even more entangled in this bloody war.

All Quiet on the Western Front is a powerful reminder that that idea is a very bad one. War is hell, and only demons want it…and the U.S. has nothing but demonic elites running the show.

Watching liberals, with whom I proudly marched against the Iraq War in 2003, now be so blinded by relentless propaganda, misinformation, disinformation…is both astonishing and infuriating.

These dupes, dopes and dumb asses have been thoroughly manipulated into a myopic, vicious anti-Russian mania that is breathtaking to behold.

The reality is that all these dipshits who proudly display the Ukrainian flag in their bios don’t have half a fucking clue when it comes to Russia, Ukraine and this awful war.

Most of these morons, and most of Americans, have absolutely no idea what started this war – the U.S. backed coup in 2014.

Americans think their Ukrainian flag waving is in support of “democracy”, but they’re ignorant to the fact that a democratically elected Ukrainian government was overthrown in the coup that the U.S. instigated and fueled in 2014. They also have no knowledge of the 46 ethnic Russians burned alive in the Odessa Union House – and no clue that the burning alive of Russians is particularly triggering since the Nazis did the same thing in occupied Soviet territories back in the day.

These same Americans are ignorant to the fact that the newly installed, U.S. backed, post-coup Ukrainian government proceeded to shell ethnic Russians in the Donbas, killing 14,000 men, women and children. They are also blissfully unaware that this U.S. backed Ukrainian government signed a peace accord, the Minsk Agreements, with Russia in 2014 and then intentionally violated these agreements breaking the peace. These same fools are also unaware that Ukraine, the alleged bastion of democracy, outlawed the Russian language, Russian language media, and opposition parties after the 2014 coup that toppled a democratically elected government.

Americans don’t know any of this, or they reflexively call it “Russian propaganda”, because they’ve been sold a narrative and are too stupid or too cowardly to push back against it.

How many lies about the war in Ukraine have these idiots swallowed whole? There’s the Ghost of Kiev bullshit, the Snake Island nonsense, the continuous claims of Russian massacres and war crimes – like Bucha – which are obvious pieces of unsubstantiated propaganda.

Then there’s the endless stories of massive Russian defeats and retreats, with hundreds of thousands of dead Russian soldiers…except the actual numbers are the exact opposite of what the U.S. media claims. The truth is that for every one Russian soldier killed there are ten Ukrainian soldiers killed.

Then there’s the breathless stories the U.S. media keeps telling Americans about Putin on death’s door, suffering from cancer or Parkinsons or both.

The U.S. media report Russian retreats as catastrophic failures and turn around and call Ukrainian retreats “strategic withdrawals”.

Then there’s the media deification of a two-bit twat like Zelensky, who is the new Fauci…in other words a con artist and bullshitter used to front a phony narrative.

The coverage of this war has been the most blatantly dishonest propaganda spewed by the American misinformation machine I’ve ever witnessed…which is quite an accomplishment.

Which brings us to All Quiet on the Western Front. This movie lays bare the atrocity that is war and how it is a money-making machine that devours any humanity within its reach. The problem now is that Americans are so stupid and so ill-informed and so indoctrinated, that they are yearning for the U.S. to get more involved…which will only lead to copious amounts of misery for everyone involved.

We never learn. We didn’t learn from Vietnam. We didn’t learn from Afghanistan. We didn’t learn from Iraq. And now we are sleepwalking into a ground war with a nuclear power over what it deems to be a pivotal piece of property directly on its border.

The same is true of China and Taiwan by the way, which is next up on our propaganda list. There are already establishment geniuses and flag-waving fools banging the drums of war against China. I mean, why start one major ground war when you can lose on two fronts while your empire crumbles?

The reality is that the U.S. is not the good guy in the world…and most certainly not in the war in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean the Russians are the good guys…or the bad guys…they are just the guys fighting for their existential survival in a vital part of their neighborhood. What this all means for Americans is that this is a very complex, very dangerous situation which we are much too obtuse and too narcissistic to ever fully comprehend.

The truth is that Russia is winning in Ukraine…and has been winning all along. The truth is also that the U.S. empire is flailing and falling, and the BRICS are ascendant and will be the counter balance in a multi-polar, post-U.S. empire world. We need to understand this thoroughly in order to navigate it and not end up living in a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max world.

I’m not optimistic. And after watching All Quiet on the Western Front and seeing the astonishing gullibility and brutal barbarity of mankind, you shouldn’t be either.

And thus ends my rant and the 2022 Mickey Awards, the most prestigious of all cinema awards shows.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you at the after-party!!

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

95th Academy Awards: 2023 Oscar Predictions Post

It’s that time of year again!! The Oscars are here and I think I speak for everyone on the planet when I say…nobody gives a fuck!

It is a testament to how far the film industry and art of cinema has fallen in recent years that I find myself neither excited nor angered over this year’s Oscar nominations. No, my overwhelming sentiment regarding movies in general and the Oscars in particular is numbing indifference. I just don’t care anymore.

You see, my cinephile spirit has simply been broken under the weight of our cultures repeated cinematic failures. I’m one of those foolish people who demands excellence from cinema and refuses to soften my standards in order to indulge a commitment to mediocrity. This has resulted in my being a rather brutal cinematic curmudgeon for the past three years, which have been the worst three years of my movie-watching lifetime.  

Other critics have been all too eager to conform to the current times and adjust (lower) their standards. This is how we get fawning reviews of inconceivably atrocious shit like The Fabelmans and Top Gun: Maverick. Those movies are true embarrassments and it speaks to our decadent age – which is indicative of an empire in steep decay and decline, that they are held up as wondrous cinematic achievements.

To be clear, this past year was better than the previous year, but that’s sort of like being proud that you’re the tallest midget in the freak show.

What is so unnerving about the recent decline in cinema is that it was just four short years ago, in 2019, when cinema seemed to be in tremendous shape. That year we had a truly phenomenal film, Parasite, win Best Picture, beating out an array of interesting and well-made movies for the honor. Among them The Irishman, Joker, Ford v Ferrari, 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Any one of those film would be the run-away Best Picture winner this year.

But since the heights of 2019 we’ve been inundated with garbage. The low point being when Coda, an absolutely ridiculous, Hall Mark Channel level movie, won Best Picture last year.

The problem is not that bad movies win Oscars, that’s been going on time immemorial. No, the problem is that there’s no movies to get angry over for not having been recognized or honored. When Coda won last year, I just shrugged because I had no dog in the fight.

P.T. Anderson had a film, Licorice Pizza, competing against Coda, and he is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers so it would’ve been nice if he won but truthfully, Licorice Pizza wasn’t any good and I wasn’t going to pretend it was…so I didn’t care.

The same is true this year. There’s no movie that I think stands out that it would be a crime if it was overlooked.

Yes, I liked All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin, but I just liked them, not loved them. They are flawed but “enjoyable” movies, so I’m not going into Oscar night yearning for their recognition.

The ugly truth is that I am so indifferent to the Oscars this year, and have become so disenchanted with cinema, that I’m not even going to watch the ceremony, which will be a first for me in my adulthood. The reality is that I have much better things to do, sleep definitely among them, than watch a delusional industry give shitty movies awards for excellence.

That said, I will still fill out my Oscar picks and compete in my Oscar pool, which I have won for a record 34 years in a row. Will I continue my astonishing streak? Probably, but not because I have any clue who will win the awards but more because my competitors care even less than me so they have no clue.

Ok…so there’s my sad tale of disillusionment and disenchantment. Now let’s get on to my Oscar picks and put this terrible year in movies behind once and for all.

BEST PICTURE

Tar – A very flawed but fascinating character study that features the best scene of the year but also the worst third act.

The Fabelmans – An utter embarrassment of a movie. Is the cinematic equivalent of Spielberg soiling himself in public.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – A mildly interesting, pretty trite popcorn movie that has no business being nominated, nevermind the odds-on favorite.

All Quiet on the Western Front – A visually stirring anti-war epic when we need an anti-war epic most. Is the best made movie of the bunch.

Women Talking – This is a bad movie.

Triangle of Sadness – An ambitious and audacious social satire that is actually smarter than it appears at first glance.

Avatar the Way of Water – a big, blue billion-dollar behemoth that is almost instantly forgettable.

Top Gun Maverick – People’s love for this pile of poop astonishes me. It’s like people know it’s awful yet love it for its awfulness.

Elvis – An absurd piece of junk.

Banshees of Inisherin – A flawed but fascinating study of Irish masculinity.

This seems pretty set in stone…but I guess there’s a miniscule chance of an upset, which if it occurs would be All Quiet winning or maybe, maybe Tar.

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front/Banshees of Inisherin

Will Win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

BEST ACTOR

Austin Butler – Elvis – The kid is good as Elvis, really good. But it feels more like a lived-in imitation than a piece of acting.

Brendan Fraser – The Whale – The dirty little secret is that Fraser isn’t acting particularly well under that fat suit.

Colin Farrell – Banshees of Inisherin – Farrell has matured into a terrific actor and his work here is intricate and detailed.

Paul Mescal – Aftersun – I don’t get the hype over this kid.

Bill Nighy – Living – Nighy is great in general but I’ve not seen this movie.

This is one of the more up in the air awards of the night. A lot of people have Fraser winning but I just think there’s a ground swell for Austin Butler.

Should Win: Colin Farrell

Will Win: Austin Butler

BEST ACTRESS

Cate Blanchett – Tar – Blanchett is the best actress of her generation and absolutely crushes it in this movie.

Michelle Yeoh – EEAAO – She’s…fine.

Ana de Armas – Blonde – Starring in torture porn is tough work, but the reality is that Ana de Armas shouldn’t have been playing Marylin.

Andrea Riseborough – To Leslie – I like Andrea Riseborough but like the rest of the human race I’ve not seen this movie.

Michelle Williams – The Fabelmans – Williams is an at times pleasant actress but she is truly atrocious in The Fabelmans. This is bad. Really bad.

It seems the tide has turned against Blanchett and in favor of Yeoh. What can you do?

Should Win: Cate Blanchett

Will Win: Michelle Yeoh

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Brendan Gleeson – Banshees of Inisherin – Gleeson is an outstanding actor and he is terrific in this.

Barry Keoghan – Banshees – Keoghan is a little uneven in this role but he does bring it all together in the second best scene in the year in cinema.

Brian Tyree Henry – Causeway – This is a joke. This movie stunk and Henry wasn’t very good in it.

Judd Hirsch – The Fabelmans – A bloated cameo of dubious quality.

Ke Huy Quan – EEAAO – I never thought Quan could be as good as he is in this movie. A really remarkable performance.

Should Win: Gleeson, Keoghan, Quan

Will Win: Quan

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Angela Bassett – Wakanda Forever – I don’t get it. This movie stinks and she is not good in it.

Hong Chau – The Whale – Another head-shaker…Chau was much better in The Menu than in this.

Kerry Condon – Banshees of Inisherin – A terrific and layered performance that perfectly captures the hell of Irish womanhood.

Jamie Lee Curtis – EEAAO – I actually really liked Curtis in this role.

Stephanie Hsu – EEAAO – I thought Hsu was ok.

It seemed like Angela Bassett was going to run away with it but the tide has turned in Jamie Lee’s favor.

Should Win: Kerry Condon

Will Win: Jamie Lee Curtis

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Banshees of Insherin – Terrific screenplay.

EEAAO – The film’s underlying philosophy is trite but it’s a sprawling story that eventually works.

The Fabelmans – This is junk. A dreadful script makes a dreadful movie.

Tar – A great forst two acts are scuttled by a rushed and unearned third act.

Triangle of Sadness – This script is fantastic.

This is sort of interesting as The Fabelmans may win because the Academy wants to reward Spielberg for his truly shitty autobiography. That said, I still think that EEAAO wins.

Should Win: Banshees of Inisherin

Will Win: Everything Everywhere All At Once

 ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

All Quiet on the Western Front – Not perfect but overall well executed.

Glass Onion – identical twins? Oh please. This script is dogshit.

Living – Haven’t seen it.

Top Gun Maverick – This is a joke.

Women Talking – Brutal.

The academy want to reward a woman and Sarah Polley fits the bill with her egregiously awful Woman Talking script.

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: Women Talking

BEST DIRECTOR

Martin McDonagh – Banshees of Inisherin – Nice to see McDonagh bounce back from the shit that was Three Billboards.

The Daniels – EEAAO – Not great but they somewhat pulled off an ambitious idea.

Steven Spielberg – The Fabelmans – This movie stinks so bad it shocked me that Spielberg released it.

Todd Field – Tar – Well directed but loses its grip in the third act.

Ruben Ostland – Triangle of Sadness – Shockingly well directed movie that in lesser hands would’ve been an absolute mess.

Should Win: Martin McDonagh

Will Win: The Daniels

BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM

All Quiet on the Western Front

Argentina, 1985

Close

EO

The Quiet Girl

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Puss in Boots

The Sea Beast

Seeing Red

Should Win: Pinocchio

Will Win: Pinocchio – This is a terrific movie, one of the best of the year.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

All That Breathes

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Fire of Love

A House Made of Splinters

Navalny

Will Win: Navalny – Just feels like the academy will want to signal its virtue by thumbing their nose at the supposed Hitler du jour Vladimir Putin. How brave.

DOCUMENTARY SHORT

The Elephant Whisperers

Haulout

How Do You Measure a Year

The Martha Mitchell Effect

Stranger at the Gate

Will Win: Elephant Whisperers

LIVE ACTION SHORT

An irish Goodbye

Ivalu

Le pupille

Night Ride

The Red Suitcase

WILL WIN: Le pupille

ANIMATED SHORT

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

The Flying Sailor

Ice Merchants

My Year of Dicks

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It

Will Win: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

ORIGINAL SCORE

All Quiet on the Western Front

Babylon

The Banshees of Inisherin

EEAAO

The Fabelmans

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front – The score of this film is crucial in setting the ominous and unsettling mood.

ORIGINAL SONG

Applause – Tell it Like a Woman

Hold My Hand - Top Gun Maverick

Lift Me Up - Wakanda Forever

Naatu Naatu - RRR

This is Life - EEAAO

Will Win: Naatu Naatu

PRODUCTION DESIGN

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar The Way of Water

Babylon

Elvis

The Fabelmans

Should Win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Will Win: Elvis – This is the type of movie that the Oscars reward.

BEST SOUND

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar the Way of Water

The Batman

Elvis

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: Top Gun Maverick – This feels like the Academy throwing this fan favorite a bone.

 CINEMATOGRAPHY

All Quiet on the Western Front

Bardo

Elvis

Empire of Light

Tar

Will Win: All Quiet on the Western Front – Easily the best cinematography of the year.

COSTUME DESIGN

Babylon

Wakanda Forever

Elvis

EEAAO

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

Will Win: Elvis – There’s a chance that Wakanda Forever or Babylon win, but it seems like Elvis will do well in these types of categories.

MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLE

All Quiet on the Western Front

The Batman

Wakanda Forever

Elvis

The Whale

Will Win: Elvis – Wakanda Forever is a real possibility but again, Elvis is adored for stuff like this.

FILM EDITING

Banshees of Inisherin

Elvis

EEAAO

Tar

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: EEAAO – I actually thought the editing (or lack thereof) was one of the worst parts of EEAAO, but what the hell do I know?

VISUAL EFFECTS

All Quiet on the Western Front

Avatar The Way of Water

The Batman

Wakanda Forever

Top Gun Maverick

Will Win: Avatar the Way of Water – This is a bone thrown to big Jim Cameron for his money printing machine.

And thus concludes my Oscar picks. God willing every Oscar winner gets slapped on stage this year. If that happens then I promise I’ll actually watch the show next year. A man can dream.

©2023

Chris Rock: Selective Outrage - Comedy Review: Alas, Poor Yorick

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Find the part where Rock mocks Will Smith online and just watch that…the rest of it is pretty weak.

It was just about one year ago that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock on-stage at the Oscars after Rock made a rather tepid, timid and terrible joke about Smith’s wife Jada looking like G.I. Jane.

Since that time Smith, who won a Best Actor Oscar just moments after the “Slap Seen Round the World”, has been busy issuing contrived, P.R. produced, half-assed public apologies, getting banned from the Oscars for ten years, and having an Apple TV movie about slavery come and go with no one giving a shit about it…good for him.

Rock on the other hand, has mostly kept silent and bided his time waiting for the perfect moment to metaphorically strike back at Smith. Rock’s new Netflix special, Selective Outrage, which aired live on the streaming service on Saturday, is unquestionably his counterpunch. Unfortunately, it falls decidedly flat.

To put my review of Selective Outrage into context, understand that I am 100% Team Rock.

I loathe the talentless, phony, dreadful actor and embarrassment of a “rapper”, that is King Cuck Will Smith, as well as his grating, useless fame-whore of a wife and their two relentlessly deplorable, silver-spoon kids. I have long believed that the world would be a better place if the four of these shitbags were loaded onto a rocket filled with raw sewage and launched headlong straight into the sun.

Chris Rock on the other hand is a comedian I have long admired. Rock’s brutal honesty, insightfulness and fearlessness have been his signature comedic style. To be clear though, Rock isn’t just some sharp-elbowed edge-lord, he’s also a pretty exquisite and deft comedic craftsman.

There was a time when Chris Rock was the best comedian on the planet. Unfortunately, that time was more than a quarter century ago. It was 1996 when Rock’s critically-acclaimed, immensely-popular HBO comedy special Bring the Pain hit the scene and Rock captured the ‘Greatest Comedian on the Planet’ championship belt. Since that time that championship belt has passed to a few different hands, like Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle, but it’s never gone back to Rock.

Rock’s post-Bring the Pain HBO comedy specials, Bigger and Blacker (1999), Never Scared (2004) and Kill the Messenger (2008), were all very good and sometimes great, but they weren’t nearly as great as the iconic Bring the Pain.

It took ten years after Kill the Messenger for Rock to release another comedy special, Tamborine (2018), his first for Netflix on a deal that allegedly pays him $40 million a special.

Tamborine was a major disappointment. In the ten years since his previous special, Rock had seemed to lose mojo, and with it his rhythm, his sharpness and his precision, and the result was a scattered, dull and flaccid affair.  

Which brings us to Selective Outrage.

The show runs an hour long, and like its predecessor, features a second and third-rate Rock doing a poor imitation of Chris Rock when he was great.

Rock once again seems unfocused and out of rhythm. His material is derivative and repetitive and his delivery is forced and clumsy.

Rock seems to be trying to get ‘into the zone’ by mimicking the things that he did back in the good old days when he actually was in the zone, like pacing and prowling the stage, and repeating a few words again after saying a joke. But here the prowling seems more like wandering, and the repeating seems more like a comedian trying to remember his set. Not good.

There are some sequences in Selective Outrage that are utterly incomprehensible. For example, at one point Rock rambles on about how back when his mother was growing up in racist, Jim Crow South Carolina, black kids had to go to the veterinarian to get their teeth pulled. This is a pretty striking point, but Rock garbles the delivery so much that it makes it sound like he doesn’t know that kid’s teeth fall out all by themselves.

Another mess is his rant about his oldest daughter and how Rock surreptitiously gets her kicked out of school for her own good. Rock tells us that his ex-wife and his daughter don’t know he was behind her expulsion and they’ll only hear it for the first time while watching the special. Rock seems to think this is the height of edginess…oh how the mighty have fallen.

When the material isn’t incoherent, it’s derivative. For example, at one point Rock does a bit about abortion and how pro-choice he is…but that abortion is still killing a baby. This bit was funnier when I saw Bill Burr do it, and do it considerably better, last July in his special Live at Red Rocks.

The most anticipated part of the show is the Will Smith section. Rock is obviously still very pissed about the slap, and that anger explodes when he addresses the topic in the last ten minutes or so of the special.

Rock derisively calls both Will Smith and his wife Jada “bitches” at one time or another in the bit, and even talks about Jada sucking her son’s friend’s dick. None of it is comedic gold but all of it is very, very satisfying. Put it this way, if Chris Rock did these jokes at the Oscars then I would totally understand Will Smith getting up and slapping him.

My biggest issue with the Will Smith bit was that Rock used it to end the show instead of open it. Obviously, it’s what everyone was waiting to hear and what Rock was waiting to say…why not open with it? It seemed like the audience, and Rock, were distracted all night while waiting for what they wanted.

Maybe if Rock opened with the Will Smith bit he would’ve lost the jitters and gained the confidence that he so desperately needed. By holding off until the end to get into the nitty gritty of the Will Smith stuff, Rock didn’t build anticipation, he built frustration and boredom.

At the end of his anti-Will Smith rant Rock literally drops the mic and stands defiantly at the edge of the stage as the audience applauds. What was strange about this, and frankly kind of embarrassing, is that Rock didn’t seem like some bad ass comedian who just settled a score with his superior wit, he actually looked a lot like he did on Oscar night post-slap…like an insecure little kid trying not to cry.

Ultimately, with the lights shining brightly in anticipation of his response to Will Smith, Selective Outrage could’ve reestablished Chris Rock as one of the premier comedians on the planet. Instead, Rock’s underwhelming material and unfocused delivery made it clear that he isn’t Richard Pryor or George Carlin. He isn’t Dave Chappelle or Louis C.K. Hell, he isn’t even Bill Burr. This is why, despite how fun it was to ever so briefly hear Chris Rock talk shit about Will and Jada Smith, Selective Outrage is a painful missed opportunity.

©2023

Empire of Light: A Review - Empire Strikes Out

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite a cavalcade of top-notch talent working on this film the end result is little more than a muddled mess of a movie.

Empire of Light, written and directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes, attempts to tell the story of Hillary, a middle-aged woman struggling with mental illness who works at a seaside British cinema in 1980.

Empire of Light is the fourth, and thankfully final, film in what I call the Masturbatorial Manifesto Movie Quadrilogy of 2022. The other members of this awful foursome who made autobiographical, virtue signaling, ego/nostalgia driven films are Alejandro Inarritu with Bardo, James Gray with Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg with The Fabelmans. All of these films are navel-gazing, self-serving stories about their directors past lives, social justice issues and the magic of cinema.

Of these four films, Empire of Light, which is currently streaming on HBO Max, is the most astounding, but not because it’s good…it certainly isn’t, in fact it’s downright dreadful. No, Empire of Light is astounding because it brought together a remarkable collection of talented individuals and all they could collectively produce was this really, really lousy movie.

For example, the film boasts not only Oscar winner Sam Mendes as writer/director, but also Oscar winning cinematographer Roger Deakins, as well as Oscar winning musicians Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, not to mention Oscar winning actors Olivia Colman and Colin Firth. This very impressive group combined to make a most unimpressive movie.

The problems with Empire of Light are numerous but the most egregious of them is the script by Mendes, which is all over the map. Mendes obviously wanted to make a movie about his real-life mother’s struggle with mental illness, which he did, but, like his predecessors Inarritu, Gray and Spielberg, he also wanted to cram in as much politically-correct social commentary as he could about a variety of topics, the most obvious of which in this case are sexism and racism.

Sexism and racism are perfectly fine and often remarkably compelling topics to feature in a film but in Empire of Light they feel artificially added-on and inorganic and this distracts from what could have been a very interesting character study with the sublime Olivia Colman at its center.

Instead, we get a scattered, paper-thin story about a mentally-ill white woman who is sexually exploited by her boss and who learns that racism exists in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1980. How revelatory.

The racial angle in the film is so vapid and panders so aggressively as to be offensive. This racism narrative was so heavy-handed, so after-school special level unsophisticated, and so lacking in any nuance that it made me roll my eyes on numerous occasions to the point of near seizure.

Equally forced and lifeless is the love story between Hillary and her young black co-worker Stephen (Michael Ward). Ms. Colman is a marvelous actress and quite lovely but Michael Ward is a considerably younger and very handsome man and the pairing is never remotely believable nor well-explained. The two also lack chemistry and their relationship devoid of dynamism and this heightens the sense of their tryst being unbelievable, if not inconceivable.

Mendes, whose famous films include American Beauty, Road to Perdition and 1917, is a filmmaker I’ve never particularly enjoyed as I find him to be a middlebrow moviemaker masquerading as an arthouse auteur. Mendes comes from the theatre world and his movies often reflect that limitation as his scripts are too verbose and his stories too obvious, flat and literal.

On Empire of Light, Mendes gets lost in the throes of a victimhood narrative and social justice fantasy and ends up losing the vitality of what should be, but isn’t, the main thrust of the story, Hillary’s struggles.

Speaking of Hillary, Olivia Colman, who may be the best actress working right now, does excellent work in the role but is time and again undercut by the asinine script. Colman’s finest hour comes when Hillary loses grip on her mental health and dissolves into a raging madness that is visceral and combustible. But beyond that, Colman is too often stuck in an anemic narrative maze of Mendes’ making.

I’m a newcomer to Michael Ward, who plays Stephen, and found him to be a compelling and very pleasant screen presence, but he too is hamstrung by the clunky script and incessantly vapid cultural politics. Too often Stephen feels like little more than a black prop in a white woman’s journey to enlightenment on racial issues.

Colin Firth has a smaller role as the cinema’s manager Donald, and he does all the Colin Firth things you’d expect him to do, but he, like every other character in the film, never feels like a real person.

It must be said that the film is beautifully photographed, not surprising considering Roger Deakins is the cinematographer, but for all of Deakins’s coloring and camera wizardry, the film cannot be elevated.

As for Reznor and Ross’s soundtrack, it’s very reminiscent of their other stellar work but here it surprisingly underwhelms and feels a bit too derivative.

As a whole the film feels stridently antiseptic, allergic to drama, and relentlessly generic. For instance, the movie is set in the 1980’s and yet it never exploits that setting and fails to much look or feel like the 1980’s. It’s also set in a cinema and it fails to exploit that potentially dramatic setting as well as movies are never featured prominently or used effectively as a dramatic device. Truth be told the whole exercise is so devoid of any genuine place, people or purpose that it just feels very weird, dramatically disconnected and like a terrible waste of an opportunity.

Which brings us back again to Mendes’ script, which is also disconnected and disjointed to the point that it seems like nothing but a collection of random scenes and not a fully formed story.

The truth is that making a good movie, never mind a great one, is unconscionably difficult, and the fact that Oscar winning talents like Sam Mendes, Roger Deakins, Trent Reznor, Olivia Colman and Colin Firth all got together and made a piece of junk like Empire of Light, is proof of that. That Alejandro Inarritu, James Gray and Steven Spielberg all tried to make similar movies this past year and all fell flat on their faces too only further reinforces that fact.

Having seen all four of this year’s autobiographical ego/nostalgia movies, the most difficult thing to do is decide which one is the worst as they’re all truly terrible in their own special ways. Deciding which of these insipid movies is best is simply a physical and metaphysical impossibility.

In conclusion, Empire of Light is a messy, middling, misfire of a movie that you should skip entirely, just like Bardo, Armageddon Time and The Fabelmans.

Hopefully these navel-gazing, nostalgia-addicted auteurs have gotten their mindless Masturbatorial Manifesto Movies out of their systems so that we never have to see this type of shamelessly awful garbage again. These filmmakers are simply too good to waste their talents making such dull, derivative, sanctimonious, self-serving detritus as this.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin

On this spoiler-filled episode, Barry and I get our Irish up and declare our blood feud as we discuss Martin McDonagh's Academy Award Best Picture nominee The Banshees of Inisherin. Topics discussed include the joy of confidently made quality films, the glorious cast and the impressive recent rise of Colin Farrell, and the undeniable darkside of Irishness. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 94 - The Banshees of Inisherin

Thanks for listening!

©2023

The Whale: A Review - The Whale Beaches Itself on its Hyper-Theatricality

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. You’d be better off stuffing your pie-hole with guliver-expanding, artery-clogging garbage for two hours than watching this hyper-theatrical dud.

The Whale, written by Samuel D. Hunter (based upon his play of the same name) and directed by Darren Aronofsky, tells the story of Charlie, a morbidly obese online English professor suffering from congestive heart failure. The film stars Brendan Fraser, who was nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards for his work as Charlie, with supporting turns from Hong Chau, Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton.

The Whale is a comeback movie of sorts for both Brendan Fraser, whose career careened into oblivion as he aged out of being the handsome guy some years back, and Darren Aronofsky, who was once one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation but who has stumbled in his last two cinematic outings with the abysmal duds Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017).

The result of the comeback bid is a mixed bag as The Whale is a major disappointment of a film, and the blame for that lies squarely with Aronofsky and with Samuel Hunter’s script, but on the bright side, Brendan Fraser may just have rejuvenated his career with his sad sack, fat suit wearing performance in the movie.

I must say, I didn’t find anything cinematically redeeming in The Whale, not even Fraser’s performance, but I think Fraser has presented himself as a likeable person on the marketing and awards circuit and that may lead to future substantial work for him. Whether he’s up to the task in that work is certainly open for debate.

The Whale is a movie that yearns to be prestige but which is so theatrically written and executed that it feels like a very sub-par stage play from an overly confident, first-time playwrite you’d regret paying to see in some off-off-off Broadway hole in the wall.

The setting for the film is almost exclusively the dim confines of Charlie’s apartment. The action consists of his visitors, from his nurse Liz (Hing Chau), to a missionary named Thomas (Ty Simpkins) to his long-lost daughter Ellie (Sadie Sink) and ex-wife Mary (Samantha Morton), coming and going.

Due to Hunter’s cringe dialogue and Aronofsky’s stagey and/or laissez-faire direction, all of these actors give mannered and contrived performances. None of the characters they portray feel like real people, but rather like caricatures used solely as plot devices.

Sadie Sink is an actress I think has a very promising future, but her work as Ellie is so heightened and performative as to be distracting and laughable.

Hong Chau fares better than Sink but she too misses the mark with her incomprehensible Liz.

And Ty Simpkins’ character Thomas makes no sense and is a dramatic disaster, which is mostly due to the bad script but also aided by Simpkins’ tepid performance.

But the main failure on The Whale is Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky’s direction is so awkward, clumsy and inept as to be disheartening. If I saw one more scene where a character walked to the door, then stopped and turned around and made some declaration…or walked to the door, opened it, stepped out, then stopped, turned around and made some declaration…or if I saw one more scene where a character crossed “the stage” and the camera counter-crossed…I was going to binge eat carbs until I spontaneously combusted.

In addition to that artless, theatrical staging, Aronofsky’s choice to confine most, but not all, of the action in Charlie’s apartment, but not limit the film’s perspective to just Charlie, is a grating and self-defeating one.

For this type of black box, arthouse movie to succeed, in needed to be a laser focused character study examining Charlie and his experiences alone. Instead, Aronofsky gives us side stories and scenes between undeveloped characters that feel like filler and dramatic distractions. These side-scenes drain any dramatic momentum the sorry story ever generated.

Aronofsky is a filmmaker I’ve long rooted for and admired. After seeing his first two films, Pi (1998) and Requiem for a Dream (2000), I thought he really had a chance to be a special artist.

Even his third film, The Fountain (2006), which was a more ambitious project but which ultimately failed, contained much promise and kept my hope alive.

His fourth and fifth films, The Wrestler (2008) and Black Swan (2010), seemed to indicate he had found his artistic groove and creative style with small budget, gritty character studies starring big name actors.

But then he went with a big budget project, Noah (2014), with Russell Crowe starring in the biblical epic. The result was a mammoth misfire both creatively and financially.

His follow up film was Mother! (2017), an ambitious and audacious meditation on humanity/horror story that was simultaneously too tightly and too loosely woven. Mother!, which was one of the more disorienting and aggravating movies in recent memory, was rightfully panned and flopped at the box office despite starring Jennifer Lawrence, who was maybe the biggest movie star in the world at the time.

And now we have The Whale. What is so disheartening about The Whale is not that it’s a misfire, but that it’s so poorly made as to be shocking. Aronofsky’s promising career has become as bloated and artistically unhealthy as the morbidly obese, compulsive eater Charlie. It’s difficult to imagine Aronofsky righting the ship after three cinematic disasters in a row, but who knows? I certainly hope he does, but I’m not optimistic.

As for Brendan Fraser as Charlie, he is…fine. Fraser has the requisite sad eyes to engender pity beneath his enormous fat suit, but beyond that he doesn’t really bring much to the table.

The thing that is lost amongst the recent Fraser renaissance, is that he was never a good actor to begin with. His claim to fame is playing empty-headed lugs and second-rate action-hero roles. He isn’t exactly Olivier, and this fact makes me think his sympathy-fueled comeback will be short-lived.

That said, he has a legit chance to win a Best Actor Oscar, and that should at least help him to make a living in the next couple of years. Does he deserve the award? Frankly…no. But most people who win Oscars don’t deserve them either…what can you do?

In conclusion, The Whale is another in an expanding list of recent sub-par Darren Aronofsky films as well as another in a gargantuan line of awful movies from 2022. I watched this movie so you don’t have to…and trust me, you really don’t have to.

©2023

Women Talking: A Review - Women Talking Has Nothing Interesting To Say

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly written script and ham-handed direction are the lowlights in this movie more interested in promoting its agenda than cultivating its drama.

The past year, a most dismal one in terms of cinema (and most everything else), gifted us two films with the least tantalizing titles since Freddie Got Fingered and Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo, with She Said and Women Talking.

Those titles conjure in the mind visions of nagging, navel-gazing shrews waxing rhapsodic about their sacred victimhood and pugilistically and pedantically pontificating about the inherent toxicity of masculinity. Not surprisingly, both films fervently live up to that expectation.

But that’s not all She Said and Women Talking have in common. Both were written, directed and star women. Both movies feature top-notch actresses. Both tell stories from a rigidly female perspective about abuse at the hands of men. Both movies are unabashed “agenda” films which emphasize ideology above artistry. And both films are Oscar-bait geared toward a very limited audience consisting of devout members of the #MeToo/neo-feminist cult who unquestioningly adore the film’s trite cultural/political ideology.

Unfortunately, what the two films also have in common is that regardless of their cultural/political messaging, they are truly abysmal cinematic works. To be fair, Women Talking is the better of the two movies, but that isn’t saying much as She Said is a cataclysmically awful movie.

Women Talking, which is written and directed by Sarah Polley and is based on the 2018 novel of the same name by Miriam Toews, tells the story of the women in an isolated Mennonite community secretly meeting to discuss the sexual abuse they’ve all endured over the years at the hands of the community’s men, and what to do about it.

The women believe their three options are to do nothing, stay and fight or leave the community en masse. They argue the pros and cons of each position and then vote. The vote ends up in a tie…so we are subjected to even more debate.

The film, which is nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards and is not yet available on a streaming service, stars Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jesse Buckley and Frances McDormand among many others, and each of them play characters that are supposed to embody various feminine archetypes in this struggle.

Rooney Mara’s Ona, is a wise waif, gentle and spiritual. Claire Foy’s Salome is a mama bear. Jessie Buckley’s Mariche is the battered realist fueled by frustration and ferocity. Frances McDormand’s Janz is the withered veteran too old and bitter to envision a better future.

All of these women are terrific actresses, and yet, none of them give even remotely decent performances or are in the least believable in this film due to the extremely sub-par script, the result of which is that you don’t care about any of these characters.

The dialogue is painfully contrived, and feels like it’s nothing but a collection of ‘look-at-me-acting’ audition speeches totally devoid of genuine intent or believable context.

Another issue is that these characters, all of whom are illiterate, are somehow able to talk with the philosophical fluency of second-year Women’s Studies majors at Bryn Mawr, which makes suspension of disbelief a monumental hurdle to overcome.

None of the characters are dramatically consistent either as they fluctuate between their beliefs like Kardashians shopping for shoes. There’s also no actual confrontation or conflagration during this important debate, just staged, rather showy but decidedly flaccid speeches followed by petulant walking away or a clamoring of voices silenced by one sole voice rising above the din. I guess this is supposed to show that women aren’t aggressive and therefore are superior to men, but all it really shows is that drama is dead with no genuine conflict.

It's also rather odd considering the film is about a group of women in a religious community, that the notions of God and religion are conspicuously absent most of the time and on the rare occasion they are mentioned are quickly brushed aside. The religious aspect of this debate among the women should be the most powerful and imposing element, but writer/director Sarah Polley, who is an atheist, imposes her notion of religion as entirely irrelevant onto the proceedings.  

Director Polley is a critical darling for a variety of reasons, but her work on Women Talking exposes her as quite the cinematic charlatan. Critics fawned over her films Away from Her (2006)and Take This Waltz (2011) despite both films being second and third-rate, self-indulgent exercises. Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell (2012) is a much more interesting piece of work but it too is also saddled with a relentless self-indulgence that reduces its power.

The main criticism voiced by the few critics who dare speak against Women Talking is that it’s visually not vibrant. It’s true that Luc Montpellier’s cinematography uses a desaturated and very muted visual style some find ugly, but I thought it was beautiful in its own stark way. And I actually found this visual approach to be the most interesting thing about the film because it was a coherent choice to reflect the setting and sub-text of the drama.

That said, this movie pushes the boundaries of reality with a plot point that includes one of the longest “golden hours” (which means the time after the sun sets but the sky is still bright enough to shoot a movie) in living memory.

As for Polley’s script and her direction, it is egregiously theatrical in style and is so lacking in subtlety and so heavy-handed that it ultimately feels like nothing more than a cheap agenda movie that only cares about its politics and not its drama.

A major example of this is that there is a trans character inserted into the film that is completely superfluous and does nothing but distract from the drama and narrative. This character, a female to male trans person, is so traumatized by the sexual abuse she suffers that she becomes not only a man named Melvin, but mute to boot. Although that sounds like a joke, I’m not kidding. What makes it even funnier than a trans man who is mute by choice is that Melvin is only mute with adults, but speaks freely with kids…and then with adults when necessary. Look, if you’re gonna have a mute trans man in a movie, for drama’s sake you got to commit to the muteness full-time, not have them be half-mute or mute by convenience. The preceding is a sentence I never in my wildest dreams imagined I’d ever write…welcome to post-modern America.  

Another example of the film’s skewed storytelling and perspective is that there is one single, solitary man in the whole movie, and his name is August and he is played by Ben Whishaw. August is such a weepy, whiny, weak-kneed eunuch as to be astounding if not embarrassing. August isn’t just anti-toxic-masculinity, he is allergic to all masculinity to the point of absurdist comedy. That August’s presence is just another piece of political theatre meant to satiate the man-hating in the audience by showing them that even anti-toxic men are repulsive, is obvious.

The irony of this man-hating is that Melvin, the trans-man, is not considered to be a “real-man” and is lumped in with the women by all the women, which no doubt will infuriate some of the more strident of the politically-correct, JK Rowling-hating, realism-averse viewers…such is the peril of incessant box-checking when making a movie.

What is so grating is that the endless, mindless, feminist pablum spewed in this movie isn’t insightful, it isn’t revelatory and it isn’t dramatically compelling. It is contrived, manufactured, phony cultural posing that might have been topical and/or interesting in 1992…maybe.

This type of sub-par, propagandistic liberal/feminist agenda movie is no different than those atrocious bullshit conservative agenda movies like the ridiculous Kirk Cameron “Jesus is Real!” pieces of garbage, or 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, or the shitty Chris Kyle hagiography American Sniper.

These are all bad movies and just because you like their politics doesn’t make them good. Of course, critics and the Academy Awards agree with the politics of Women Talking so they turn a blind eye to the poor writing, directing and acting and mute their criticism in order to signal their virtue and tribal affiliation. I am under no such obligation. I made my bones savaging shitty movies from across the political spectrum, and Women Talking is a shitty movie that thinks it’s brave and courageous for placing a well-worn flag on top of a secured hill in friendly territory in the forever culture war.

The bottom line is that Women Talking, or as I prefer to call it The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Mennonite Sisterhood or The Mennonite Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, is a dramatically dull, dreadfully amateurish movie that feels like every suburban high school stage play defiantly put on by the school’s drama-nerd girl group. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a shallow, adolescent, emotionalist, feminist rant from a fragile fool who thinks they’re a courageous hero because they wear an “I’m with Her” oversized t-shirt with Lululemon leggings.

The truth is that Women Talking should’ve taken trans Melvin’s approach and just stopped talking because it had absolutely nothing interesting or original to say.

Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 93: The Fabelmans

On this episode, Barry and I put on see-through nightgowns and dance poorly in the glow of a campfire and car headlights as we break down Steven Spielberg's Oscar nominated, autobiographical movie The Fabelmans. Topics discussed include the perils of autobiography, the Oscars and the abysmal year in movies, and Spielberg's shocking cinematic decline.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 93: The Fabelmans

Thanks for listening!

©2023