An Autopsy of Bombs: The Fall Guy and Furiosa Edition

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

This year we’ve had a few notable box office bombs, the most intriguing of which are The Fall Guy and Furiosa.

Like the vast majority of people, I did not see those movies in the theatre, hence their under-performance at the box office. But now both films are available to stream and I recently checked them out to see what, if anything, I missed, and if they deserved to be ignored in the theatre.

Let’s start with The Fall Guy, which is currently available to stream on Peacock.

The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, was set up to be the big office blockbuster to open the summer movie season when it hit theatres on May 3rd. The film, which stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, had a huge marketing push pre-release, which included a witty bit of banter at the Oscars between the two stars. The film sold itself in a plethora of television ads as an old-fashioned, 1980’s style Hollywood action movie with likeable movie stars (Gosling and Blunt).

But upon release the film fell flat as nobody came out to see it. It was number one at the box office on its opening week, but with a severely subdued haul of $35 million. Not great. It went downhill from there.

It dropped to number two in its second week of release and then fell off a cliff. It ended up making a paltry $180 million in total off of its $120 million budget. In Hollywood accounting, that means it lost a ton of money. (Hollywood accounting means you roughly double the budget to account for marketing and for the theatre’s haul – and the rest goes to the studio – so The Fall Guy is about $240 million underwater)

So why did The Fall Guy fail?

The Fall Guy does have two very charming and beautiful movie stars as its leads, Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, who are, you guessed it, very charming and very beautiful. But on the downside, The Fall Guy is a movie no one wanted…and so no one went to see it. Myself included.

The movie is sort of attached to the rather forgettable B-tv series from the 80’s, The Fall Guy, which is second rate Lee Majors material, as Majors is remembered for the Six Million Dollar Man, not The Fall Guy. But The Fall Guy brand doesn’t have a built-in fan base as Gen Xers may remember the show from their childhood but don’t really give a shit about it because it wasn’t beloved, and younger audiences will have absolutely never heard of it.

Another major issue is that The Fall Guy is, frankly, a really bad movie. It features an abysmally incoherent and relentlessly stupid script, as well as stunts that are rather tepid and cinematically mundane.

As charming as Gosling and Blunt are…and they are incredibly charming…they’re not charming enough to tolerate the excruciatingly boring and stupid nonsense going on around them for the duration of this idiotic movie.

In some ways The Fall Guy is meant to be a love letter to stunt men, which I suppose is a nice thought. Stunt men are a different breed (and deserve an Oscar category)…but if you’ve ever met one you know that while their work is often interesting, they often are not.

On the bright side stunt men will always be happy to have you break a chair over their head, which is very cathartic. Truth is I’d rather break a real chair over my head than watch The Fall Guy again.

The Fall Guy’s failure is a stark reminder that wishful thinking from the C Suite of Hollywood studios doesn’t translate into audience interest. The Fall Guy had seemingly everything going for it except for the two things it actually needed, audience interest and good storytelling. Oops.

In conclusion, The Fall Guy most definitely deserved to fail, and it certainly did just that.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga on the other hand…

Furiosa is the fifth film in the Mad Max franchise and is a prequel to 2015’s fantastic Fury Road, which received ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won six Oscars.

Fury Road didn’t break box office records but it did break more than even making $380 million on a $160 million budget.

In all honesty I am not a Mad Max fanatic. The first movies came out when I was a kid and I didn’t see them in the theatre. I did see them all as a teen on VHS though, and liked most of them (I wasn’t a real fan of Beyond Thunderdome), some a great deal…but it’s not a franchise with which I ever strongly identified despite my respect for it.

When Fury Road came out in 2015 after a thirty-year absence of Mad Max material, I didn’t see in the theatre but caught it on cable…and was absolutely blown away. Fury Road is an astonishing movie and is a monument to director George Miller’s brilliance.

Despite having missed the boat on Fury Road in the theatre, when Furiosa came along I, being the moron that I am, once again didn’t venture out to theatres to see it. In my defense, my time is much more limited now than it was back in 2015 (having kids will do that), so I sort of have an excuse – but not a very good one.

Unfortunately, I was not alone in not seeing Furiosa when it hit theatres on May 24th, as the movie made a measly $172 million during its run against a $168 million budget. The film performed so poorly that it seems likely that the Mad Max franchise may have breathed its last breath. Considering that the franchise’s director, George Miller, is 79, one can assume at the very least that Miller is done making Mad Max movies…which is a shame because he is extraordinarily good at it.

But now Furiosa is streaming on Max and I’ve seen it.

I can report that missing Furiosa in the theatre was a grievous mistake.

Furiosa isn’t perfect by any means. For instance, it isn’t nearly as good as Fury Road. But…it does feature some truly imaginative and original stunt sequences that are breathtakingly spectacular.

The film also features a stoic but solid performance from Anya Taylor-Joy, who lives up to the name of Furiosa with a fire in her eyes that is undeniable.

All of the magic that make George Miller such a dynamic moviemaker are evident in Furiosa, as he shoots his action sequences with a verve and aplomb that are unequalled in our CGI addicted world. (to be fair there is some CGI in Furiosa, but nothing compared to most movies).

As for why a film as good as Furiosa failed, it is difficult to say.

The marketing for Furiosa wasn’t particularly strong, I mean it didn’t move me to go see it, so that could be a reason.

I do recall the marketing being “female driven”, and some have speculated that having a female lead, Anya Taylor-Joy, could have turned off male audiences, so that could be it. People are certainly tired of culture war bullshit in their movies – myself included, and the impression could’ve been given by Furiosa’s marketing that this was a girl power movie…which is kryptonite nowadays for male audiences. But counter to that, that certainly wasn’t the case with Fury Road, which starred Charlize Theron, so it seems to be a thin argument. Although counter to that counter, Tom hardy had a starring role in Fury Road as well, so who knows.

Another reason could be that Furiosa is a prequel and people are tired of prequels and of having to “do the homework” of having to see all the other movies just to understand what is going on in the new movie. I think Marvel definitely suffers from this and maybe Mad Max does now too.

The truth is that Furiosa’s failure is both a mystery and frustrating to me. It’s a mystery because I can’t quite pinpoint what caused it, and it’s frustrating because Mad Max is a perfect action franchise for our times and would be a great franchise for Warner Brothers to mine for film and tv projects going forward. But now with Furiosa’s failure, that won’t happen.

After having seen Furiosa, and having found it to be a very well made, extremely solid piece of action entertainment and a noteworthy bit of Mad Max franchise filmmaking, I really don’t know why people didn’t go see it and why word of mouth wasn’t better and more useful.

To end this discussion, here’s my ranking of Mad Max movies.

5. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome – Not an awful movie but easily the worst of the Mad Max movies.

4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – This movie is world’s better than Beyond Thunderdome, and is very close in the running with Mad Max and Road Warrior.

3. Mad Max – The original is a down and dirty and disturbing movie that is undeniable.

2. Mad Max: The Road Warrior – The franchise makes the leap into the big time with a gritty and explosive action extravaganza.

1. Mad Max: Fury Road – The best of the best. Truly extraordinary piece of action filmmaking.

And finally…my ratings for The Fall Guy and Furiosa.

THE FALL GUY

Streaming: Peacock

Rating: 1 out of 5 Stars

Recommendation: SKIP IT

FURIOSA

Streaming: Max

Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

Recommendation: SEE IT!!

Thus concludes today’s autopsy of a bomb…or bombs as the case may be.

 ©2024

Hollywood's Self-Inflicted Box Office Problems

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

There’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth in recent weeks because the box office has been so sluggish, most notably the failures of The Fall Guy and Furiosa, which both painfully underperformed in their opening weekends and beyond.

The Fall Guy had such bad box office numbers it actually went to VOD 17 days after premiering in theatres. Not good for a movie boasting two “movie stars” and a gigantic marketing push.

If one were to look at the dismal box office results this Spring and come away thinking the sky is falling, that would be understandable.

Ever the optimist, let me put your mind at ease though regarding the sky is falling pessimism. The sky isn’t falling regarding the movie business…because it’s already fallen. Many will point to last year’s duel strikes as a reason for this year’s box office gully…but that misses the big picture.

The movie business, like American empire, is a dead man walking. That doesn’t mean it’ll vanish off the face of the earth and never be seen again…no, it just means that it will continue its descent into irrelevancy year after year after year until a giant asteroid comes and wipes us off the earth.

The reasons for this are numerous but here are a few of the major ones. 

The corporatization of Hollywood that began in the Reagan years is now complete. The corporate mindset has destroyed the mid-level budgeted movie in favor of blockbuster hunting, and that has led to bloated budgets, and bad movies. The stark decrease in the quality of cinema is pretty dramatic (with notable exceptions).

Another issue is that movie theatres and the theatre-going experience are both abominable. Theatres throughout the country, thanks again to corporate short-sightedness, are equipped with sub-par projectors which result in a greatly diminished viewing experience. Why go to the theatre and pay all that money when you can have a better visual experience at home on your big screen tv in a darkened living room?

As Sartre once taught us…hell is other people…and that is never more apparent than when you go to the movies. Dipshits and dumbasses talking and looking at their phone throughout a screening makes for a very tense and distracting movie going experience….another issue that is resolved by watching a movie at home.

Add to this that very, very few movies are so culturally compelling that people NEED to see them right away in order to stay in the loop. Barbie and Oppenheimer filled that bill last Summer, but those are definitely outliers. For example, would you be “out of the cultural loop” if you didn’t see Dune II in theatres this winter? It’s now streaming on Max just a few short months after premiering in theatres and you can watch it without all the bullshit of theatres, in the comfort of your own home…and go to the bathroom when you want without missing anything and not have to tell people to shut the fuck up or put their phones away. Will a big budget film like Dune II be diminished at a home theatre? One would expect the answer is ‘yes’ as it was made to be seen on a big screen…but considering when I saw it at a movie theatre I felt like I was watching it under three feet of water because the projector sucked so bad, my answer would be no.

The same is true of Furiosa. I like the Mad Max movies, but I’m not itching to go see Furiosa in the theatre because it isn’t mandatory in order to stay current culturally. So, I’ll see it when it comes to Max in a few months…or sooner.

The same is true for the glut of Marvel movies. For the longest time Marvel movies were must-see because everyone was talking about them….and now they’re not. Marvel movies ran its course but Disney keeps cramming them down our throat expecting the same results. I’m sorry but The Marvels isn’t moving the needle. No one cares.

Speaking of Marvel and Disney, another issue is that the massive success of the Marvel movies pre-2020 totally skewed the expectation IN HOLLYWOOD for what constitutes a successful movie.

Marvel movies routinely hit the billion-dollar mark and that became the standard for success. But that was then and this is now and studios and analysts are delusional about the box office potential for most movies. And that delusion gets baked into the cake regarding the budget for films.

Once again Barbie and Oppenheimer were outliers in this regard, and ironically have done more harm than good in regards to setting expectations for studio executives (and the general public).

For example, spending over $300 million to make a new Indiana Jones movie or Mission Impossible movie, is frankly nuts since neither of those creaky franchises are going to generate the kind of interest that will satiate a billion-dollar box office yearning.

The same is true for the new Marvel movies, as the stars of that franchise and the characters they played, are gone. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark is not walking through that door…and I’m sorry but Brie Larson isn’t going to fill that void.

The solution to the Hollywood problem is to change the corporate strategy, and instead of trying to make a billion dollars with a single blockbuster that costs at a minimum $250-300 million to make and another$150-250 million to market, is to make six or seven medium budget films for $50 million or less each with a focus on quality, in the hopes that one of those movies will hit big and fill the coffers.

Examples of what I’m talking about are movies like Parasite, which costs $15 million to make and brought in $262 million at the box office. I understand that Parasite is a remarkable movie from a brilliant filmmaker, but it shows what is possible.

The same is true of movies like Spotlight, which had a $20 million budget and made $98 million. Or even Good Will Hunting, which starred nobodies (Affleck and Damon) and was directed by a non-mainstream guy (Gus Van Sant) on a $10 million budget and raked in $225 million.

The key of course is that the movies have to be good and they have to avoid bloated budgets. The other benefit of making good movies is that more often than not if you make a good movie, it will get Oscar recognition and thus free marketing and a second life at the box office.

It goes without saying that Hollywood will not change its approach if for no other reason than corporations are allergic to actually thinking. And so, the studios will continue to relentlessly bang their heads against the bank vault door in the hopes one of these times it’ll open, even if just for a moment…like it did with Barbie and Oppenheimer, but if Barbie and Oppenheimer type success only comes along every five years or so, that won’t work as a business model.

The bottom line is that Hollywood fucked up their business and fucked up movies in the process…and we are all paying for it and will continue to pay for it for years to come. As a cinephile it gives me no pleasure in saying this but movies, much like popular music, is essentially dying as an artform and is too beholden to corporate interests to be able to save itself.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Adventures in Idiocy - Thoughts on Dylan Mulvaney, Max and Monty Python

PUTRID PANTHER PISS

Yet another front in the never-ending culture war was opened in early April of this year when Bud Light decided to hire “transgender influencer” Dylan Mulvaney to be a “spokesperson” for their shitty beer brand.

To celebrate Mulvaney’s year anniversary of his “days of girlhood” Tik Tok series – which documented the travails of his first year of “girlhood” - which miraculously included the pain of menstrual cramps (or in this case minstrel cramps) despite his not having a uterus, Bud Light put his ridiculous face on beer cans.

The reaction from Bud Light drinkers to having trans Tinkerbell Dylan Mulvaney thrust upon them was entirely predictable to everyone with half a brain in their head, which obviously excludes the decision makers at Bud Light.

The people who drink Bud Light, or used to drink Bud Light, are mostly men, mostly working class and all have bad taste. Like most men, they have no interest in Dylan Mulvaney, trans issues, or the culture war. They just want to be left alone to drink beer, hang out with buddies and watch sports while they wait to for their life to come to an end.

Bud Light used to be the beer they’d consider drinking – I don’t drink but only God knows why anyone would drink that putrid panther piss…but to each his own, but now Bud Light is definitely off the table. The reason for this is simple…men love to bust each other’s balls…and now any guy drinking Bud Light gives his buddies endless ammunition to bust his balls into oblivion.

A guy brings Bud Light to a party or orders one at the bar and he will be serenaded with a cavalcade of humorously vicious insults questioning his sexuality, his gender and the state of his genitals. You may think that is cruel or barbaric or transphobic, but no one gives a flying fuck because it is, above all else, undeniably true.

The sales for Bud Light since Mulvaney became their spokesperson prove that the brand is now toxic among its core customers. For nearly two months since this all began Bud Light sales have plummeted in comparison to last year’s weekly sales averages…consistently down between 25% and 30% a week.

And this drop in sales is not going to just disappear because the stink left on the Bud Light brand from Mulvaney’s odious presence is going to last for a long time. Once a brand becomes a punchline it is nearly impossible to reverse.

What is baffling to me is how could the suits at Bud Light be so ignorant of their target audience and so blind to cultural reality? To say this is corporate malfeasance is a massive understatement.

As for Dylan Mulvaney, he is an adult and should do as he pleases with his own body…his transgenderism is his business (literally and figuratively), I just wish he wouldn’t be so craven as exploit himself or allow himself to be exploited by corporate entities…but unfortunately it seems the mentally ill Mulvaney is more interested in attention than anything else.

Mulvaney was what we call a theatre muffin (musical theatre actor) prior to becoming an “influencer”. Disingenuous, narcissistic, hyper-performative, annoyingly flamboyant gay men like Dylan Mulvaney are a dime a dozen in the theatre world. So Mulvaney seems to have decided to distinguish himself from the glamour boy hoi polloi by dressing up like a woman and saying he was trans. How clever.

His plan has worked remarkably well, as he’s made tons of money, gotten famous and even went to the Oval Office to talk to President Biden about Women’s issues…yes…you read that right….a man went to the White House as an expert on Women’s issues. Ultimately, Mulvaney strikes me as a rather repugnant culture war creature who during his shameless drive for fame has done more to denigrate women in the past year than most any other public figure.

One can only hope that Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney and the shitheads at Anheuser-Busch all disappear and right quick because the world desperately needs none of them.

As for Bud Light, it has successfully destroyed decades of branding and is now radioactive amongst its core customers. Congratulations…there is no coming back from that.

MAX

Speaking of corporate marketing malfeasance, the geniuses over at the corporate behemoth Warner Bros. Discovery unveiled their new streaming service this week and it stands as a monument to their moronity.

Warner Bros. Discovery owns the streaming services HBO Max and Discovery +. HBO Max is of course known for its prestige TV shows, like The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones and Succession, and for its deep library of films, which include the Harry Potter, DC Comics I.P. as well as Turner Movie Classics and a bevy of other great films.

Discovery + is known for its reality TV empire which includes all the shows from Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC, HGTV, Food Network, Travel, Investigation Discovery and CNN.

The suits at Warner Bros. Discovery, led by their brainless and toothless shark of a CEO, David Zaslav, decided to combine these two streaming services into one giant streaming service.

When naming the new streaming service, they decided to forego the well-established, prestige brand of HBO which has been arduously built over the lasty forty years. And they also decided to ignore the less prestigious but still very recognizable brand of Discovery.

Instead Zaslov and co. decided to name their big new streaming service…MAX.

The first thing that comes to mind with the name MAX is the low rent cable channel Cinemax, which is derogatorily called Skinemax because of its penchant for showing soft core porn in the wee hours of the night.

The second thing that comes to mind is MAXipad…or maybe MAXimum-security prison…or maybe for those old to remember, MAX Headroom.

HBO has become such a strong brand associated with prestige over the last 40 years that even when its shows aren’t that great, they are treated with great respect by the culture. For example, 2021’s Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet was shit, but the media and audiences treated it like some great work of art simply because it was on HBO.

And that’s the thing…HBO signaled prestige to both viewers AND talent…which is why great actors, writers and directors would be willing to make the jump to TV only if it was HBO.

Now with MAX…not so prestigious. Now if you’re a movie star you think twice before doing a series there because it’ll be lumped in with 90 Day Fiance and Dr. Pimple Popper.

That Warner Bros. Discovery could fuck up the naming of their gigantic streaming service this badly should be shocking…but it isn’t. Zaslav and his predecessors have been able to fuck up lots of things – like their DC films, over the years.

It should also come as no surprise that Warner Bros Discovery completely fucked up the actual Max streaming site. HBO Max was the easily best streaming service site to navigate and it wasn’t even close. It had easy to access hubs to all of the valuable sections of their library like Turner Classics, DC and Studio Ghibli which made navigation a breeze. The new Max site has idiotically eliminated that glorious convenience and replaced it with a haphazard, shit-thrown-against-the-wall incoherence that is frustrating, irritating and aggravating.

The Max site is a jumbled, muddled mess. It doesn’t even have a hub solely dedicated to the Discovery material which means, much like every other useless streaming service site, browsing is fruitless and you can’t really find anything unless you specifically type it into the search bar. Moronic. I hate it so much and I hate that the ease and perfection of HBO Max is gone.

The bottom-line is don’t be surprised if Warner Bros Discovery renames MAX (and hopefully does a full reboot and rebuild) in the next 3 years…and don’t be surprised if incompetent jackass Zaslav is out of a job…and don’t’ be surprised if the company sells off major portions of its entertainment business either.

THE LIFE OF BRIAN…AND LORETTA

And finally…three years ago this July I wrote a verbosely titled article “The Monty Python Classic 'The Life of Brian' Relentlessly Mocked Christianity Forty Years Ago, Comedy Needs to Do the Same Thing to the Church of Wokeness Today” in which I celebrated the film The Life of Brian for having transformed from being banned for blasphemy upon its release to being rated as acceptable for kids today.

I also praised the film for having masterfully mocking the old religion, Christianity, and for having the foresight to eviscerate the new religion, transgenderism, too, forty years ahead of time.

The mocking of the new woke religion occurs in a scene set in the coliseum of Jerusalem where the People’s Front of Judea meet to discuss their goals. One of the members, Stan – played by Eric Idle, declares he wants to be a woman and that it is his right as a man to have people call him Loretta.

Here is the scene which is absolutely, astonishingly brilliant from start to finish.

When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the proposed language…he is asked by Francis why he keeps bringing up women?

Stan -  “I want to be one….I want to be a woman….from now on I want you all to call me Loretta…It’s my right as a man.”

Judith – “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Stan – “I want to have babies…It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants.”

Reg - “You can’t have babies!”

Stan - “Don’t oppress me!”

Reg - “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”

After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.

Francis (to Stan) - “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have a baby, brother…ooops…sister, sorry.”

Reg - “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies if he can’t have babies?”

Francis – “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”

Reg – “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”

I wrote of the film and this scene that,

“The Office, Community, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs and Fawlty Towers, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins. Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd, that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.”

Well…just today I saw that John Cleese, one of the founding members of Monty Python, is staging a theatrical production of The Life of Brian, and he is being forced to cut the “Loretta” scene from the show.

Cleese said of the Loretta scene being cut,

“So here you have something there's never been a complaint about in 40 years, that I've heard of, and now all of a sudden we can't do it because it'll offend people. What is one supposed to make of that? But I think there were a lot of things that were actually, in some strange way, predictive of what was actually going to happen later."

Yes, Cleese and co. predicted the absurdity of transgenderism forty years before it became a state religion, and I predicted the knives of the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Twitter Torquemadas coming out for the The Life of Brian three years before it happened. Prophets both of us.

As the good book says (Mark 6:4), “no prophet is without honor except in his native place, among his own kindred, relatives and in his own house.”

And that is why my prescient Monty Python article, and most everything else I’ve written, could only be widely published at a Russian media outlet RT.com, and not here in the U.S. of A. where the Truth is anathema and people only want to read things that comfort, rather than confront, their vapid, vacuous and vacant belief systems built on disinformation, misinformation, propaganda and emotionalism. It's also why my wife left me, my dog bit me and my family disowned me.

As for Bud Light, MAX and Monty Python, these stories of misjudgments and massive failures are all just symptoms of a depraved decadence brought about by the broader disease of an empire in rapid decline.

Think this is bad? Trust me…things are going to get much, much worse…just watch and see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©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

Andor: TV Review - Andor shines as darkness descends on Darth Mouse and the Disney Empire

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a real spy drama that happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Well crafted, and very well acted.

Andor, the most recent Star Wars live action series, finished its twelve-episode first season on Disney + this past Wednesday November 23rd.

The series, which tells the story of Cassian Andor and his introduction into the early-stages of the rebellion against the Empire, is a prequel to the film Rogue One and is set prior to the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

To say I was reticent going into watching Andor would be a massive understatement. You can’t really blame me. The previous two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, were both utterly atrocious. These series, most specifically Obi Wan Kenobi, were so bad as to be embarrassing, so one can understand why any fan would expect the worst when it came to Andor.

But then I tentatively waded into the series and was at first relieved, and then surprised and finally excited. Andor may very well be the best Star Wars series thus far – at the very least it’s equal to The Mandalorian, and the reason for that is because an actual professional, Tony Gilroy, whose career includes writing the Bourne trilogy and writing/directing Michael Clayton, created the series…and it shows.

Andor is certainly the most sophisticated Star Wars series to date. It’s a real show about a growing, underground rebellion that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. You could set the story in modern-day Iran, China, US or Israel and you wouldn’t have to change all that much.

The acting in Andor is the best there’s ever been in any Star Wars story, be it movie or tv series. The cast across the board are truly phenomenal.

I’m not much of a Diego Luna fan, but he’s fantastic in Andor as the lead. His performance is contained yet kinetic. Luna reveals just enough, but never too much, of Andor, and it makes for compelling viewing.

Genevieve O’Reilly is spectacular as Mon Mothma, an Imperial Senator from Chandrila trying to thread the needle of her public image, personal politics and family life. O’Reilly is so good in the role, and Mon Mothma is such a fascinating character, that I was yearning for a series about her alone.

Stellan Skarsgard is also brilliant as Luthen Rael, a key figure in the rebellion who no one can seem to pin down. Skarsgard shines in the role because Rael, like the actor playing him, must constantly change the masks he wears and along with them his behavior. Skarsgard is a great actor, and having him bring his considerable talent and skill to a Star Wars series indicates how seriously the creators of the series took the story.

The rest of the cast, in big roles and small, are uniformly terrific, and it elevates Andor beyond the usual Star Wars fare and turns it into a legitimate spy drama.

For example, Rupert Vansittart plays Chief Hyne, a small supporting character, and in one small scene he is so good as to be astonishing. This is what happens when you cast skilled actors…everything gets elevated.

The overall aesthetic, most notably the set design, is also top notch. Each set feels real and not like some set on a studio backlot. Visually, everything has a visceral, tangible feel to it, and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of major science fiction like Blade Runner.

To be clear, not everything works perfectly. A few storylines felt forced and fell a bit flat, such as the odd relationship between Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious supervisor of the Empire’s Security Bureau, and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a-down-on-his-luck security inspector for a corporate entity working with the Empire.

Gough and Soller are both very good in their roles, but the arc of their characters and their relationship rang hollow and felt superfluous, and their climax is easily the weakest part of the otherwise well executed series, and it isn’t even close.

From what I understand, Andor is not generating big numbers for Disney +.  The situation is so dire that Disney is running the series on ABC in order to generate some interest in it. This is unfortunate but not surprising.

When you roll out second and third-rate garbage like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re not going to generate trust from fans, and so they don’t give a series like Andor the chance it deserves.

A great friend of mine, let’s call him Doug, is the biggest Star Wars fan I know. He’s truly a fanatic. But as Andor’s first season wore on I kept asking him if he’d watched it and he said “no”. He said he hadn’t given it a chance because he “didn’t want to be crushed with disappointment again.”

That Doug, who literally gets dressed up in costume and attends opening night of Star Wars movies, is reticent to watch a Star Wars show because he can’t take anymore soul crushing disappointment, is a sign of major problems for Disney.

I think Disney knows it too, which is why CEO Bob Chapek is out and guru Bob Iger is back in. Iger retired in 2020 and left Disney, the company he built up into a staggering entertainment powerhouse with acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, in the hands of his one-time protégé. But now he has some serious decisions to make if he wants to pull Disney out of its current tailspin - which includes a 40% drop in stock price over the last year.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Big Dick Bob Iger will wheel and deal his way out of trouble, maybe by buying Netflix, or maybe even by selling Disney to Apple.

Buying Netflix seems improbable to me because Netflix carries massive amounts of debt and brings nothing of note to Disney, which already has a robust streaming service.

Selling to Apple makes more sense, at least financially, as it would mean a boon for Iger personally as it would attach his vast Disney holdings to Apple, a Teflon tech company that isn’t going anywhere.

But these choices would simply be a distraction for Iger from the bigger decision he must make which is, he can either double down on the creative direction Disney is going now with its numerous properties like Star Wars and Marvel, or he can dramatically change course.

Doubling down means continuing with the cultural political stuff in Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, which is a big part of the reason Disney is in such trouble at the moment. It would basically mean Disney deciding to stay the course and do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In other words, it would be insane.

As insane as it would be, I could totally understand why it would happen. The Disney employees, like mindless cult members, truly believe in this woke stuff, and in their own righteousness. And the ruling class in the Disney executive suite live in the most isolated of bubbles that aggressively reinforces the importance of wokeness, and their own self-righteousness.

That said, Bob Iger is no moron. He has to know that his bottom line, and all of his personal stakes in Disney, are getting seriously damaged by the company’s embrace of wokeness, including denigrating and attacking fans as racist, sexist and homophobic who critique their product.

The other option is for Iger to reverse course and to go back to the middle of the road in terms of staying away from cultural politics. That’s no easy task, especially when his workforce and the social circles the executives run in, will put up serious resistance.

At this point the problem can’t be solved just by returning to making quality movies and tv shows, as evidenced by Andor being such a great series but no one tuning in. The disease of wokeness has taken deep hold and Disney is suffering from a stage four version of it, and it is killing the company by alienating customers.

Everything is trending down for Disney. The recent spate of dismal Star Wars series pre-Andor are seriously eroding fan interest. The same is true of Marvel, where the recent batch of movies aren’t just bad but underperforming at the box office…all while their budgets bloat beyond belief. Marvel tv shows are just as bad if not worse than the Star Wars shows, and they don’t pay any dividends anymore.

The reality is that the good ship Mickey Mouse was on its way to the utopia that is the Fantasy Island of Wokeness but it hit the Iceberg of Reality and is now quickly taking on water. It seems to me that bringing back Bob Iger to rearrange the deck chairs won’t solve any of the bigger problems.

Maybe I’m wrong and Iger will right the ship and Disney will be back to its robust self in no time. Or maybe Disney is doomed because it didn’t listen to Cassandras like me who were warning them early on that “get woke, go broke” was inevitable if they kept on the self-righteous path.

Regardless of all that, the truth is that building back trust from fans is a difficult thing to do and it takes years. There is no quick fix. But Andor, which is as good The Mandalorian, is a terrific first step.

Disney needs to put together a string of quality Star Wars series, and eventually Star Wars movies, in order to bring the bevy of Star Wars fans back safely into the fold. The same is also true of Marvel.

I hope they do it. I also hope you check out Andor, because it’s very well-made, and well-worth your time.

©2022

The Rings of Power: Amazon's Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens

Oligarch Jeff “Sauron” Bezos is using craven culture war issues like “diversity, inclusion and representation” to deceive liberals/progressives into fighting for his diabolical corporation and the 1%.

The Agenda. The relentless, tedious, ever-present Agenda, has come to Middle-Earth.

Amazon’s long-awaited, highly-anticipated, extraordinarily expensive, Lord of the Rings tv series, The Rings of Power, has finally arrived, and thus far it is only notable for its artistic shortcomings and its slavish commitment to the insidious Agenda of diversity, inclusion and representation over quality.

Amazon’s Sauron-in-Chief, Jeffrey Bezos, wanted his own Game of Thrones type fantasy series, so he paid $250 million for the rights to the appendices from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and committed upwards of a billion dollars of his sweatshop empire’s gains for five seasons of elves, dwarves, hobbits (harfoots) and orcs.  

The first two episodes of the series premiered on Amazon Prime Video Thursday September 1st, and they are, to be kind, rather uninspiring. The series may well improve dramatically over the next six episodes of season one, I certainly hope it does, but thus far it has been slow and rather unsteady going.

What is most enlightening about The Rings of Power though is that the heated discussion around the show is much more energetic than the show itself.

In case you haven’t heard, the series has a diverse cast of “actors of color”, and features three feminist heroines as its leads, which some argue is contrary to the source material written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

This debate around the show’s “diverse” casting and its centering of three female leads, which has infuriated some and delighted others, at least has passion, whereas The Rings of Power feels diabolically staid and sterile.

THE PLAYBOOK

As for that debate and the ever-insistent Agenda, the reality is that for Amazon, or any studio releasing a product into the public, controversy around casting “minority” actors and featuring female leads is a feature, not a bug.

This is all part of the plan and right out of a well-worn playbook.

The playbook is as follows.

1.   Cast “actors of color” or women in roles that traditionally would be played by white actors or men and heavily market the “diverse and inclusive” casting.

2.   Claim victimhood, which in our current era conveys cultural status, by alleging “racist/sexist attacks” on the diverse cast leading up to the premiere of the film or series.

3.   Create the paradigm where liberals/progressives feel that supporting the film/series is a way for them to signal their virtue and believe they are being actively “anti-racist/anti-sexist” (in other words it makes them feel like they’re actually fighting injustice by watching a movie or tv show).

4.   Stigmatize all criticism of the film/tv show by conflating criticism of the film/series with racism/sexism, which results in critiques of any kind from fans and professional critics being stifled and self-censored.

5.   Claim all negative fan reviews on various review aggregator sites are the result of “review bombing” by racist/sexist trolls on have banned or banished.

6.   As the controversy heightens, put out inflated viewership numbers as well as a carefully crafted statement declaring the parent company/studio “stands with” the diverse cast and against racism of all kinds.

7. Declare moral victory (“we did the right thing!”) no matter how spectacularly the film/tv show fails.

That’s the basics of the playbook, which Disney and Amazon in particular, have used extensively in recent years.

THE OBJECTIVE

These manufactured racial/gender cultural conflagrations and their paradigm of stigmatizing criticism as racism/sexism, are meant to trigger conservatives/traditionalist into attacking and liberals and progressives into defending.

The most troubling aspect is the libneral/progressives who are triggered into vociferously defending a corporate entertainment product, and by default unconsciously or consciously aligning with the nefarious corporation behind the film/tv product, all because a film/tv series is now nothing more than a proxy battle in the culture war.

In the case of The Rings of Power, the racial/gender casting issue is meant to inflame conservatives/traditionalist and actually distract liberals/progressives from a bigger issue. Instead of noticing that Amazon is a company that exploits its workers to a shocking and disgusting degree and that Bezos is one of the most deplorable people on the planet, liberals/progressives now go to battle for their ideological opponents, in this case Amazon and billionaire Bezos, rather than against them.

This distractionary tactic works incredibly well because liberal/progressives have been conditioned to downplay tangible economic issues in favor of more amorphous, emotionally resonant issues like race, gender and sexual orientation.

In addition, liberals/progressives have also been conditioned to never actually debate or discuss these topics but rather simply resort to bigoteering and calling anyone and everyone who disagrees with you a racist/sexist. In other words, no argument need be made, all one has to do is give a reflexive display of righteousness, virtue signal and claim victory.

The liberals/progressives currently baring their teeth to alleged “racists” and “sexists” over The Rings of Power, are the ones who should, in theory, be outside Bezos’ mansion with pitchforks and torches (think of how hyper-racialization in our cultural politics completely destroyed the Occupy Wall Street movement and spirit), or at least trying to hold Amazon’s feet to the fire in terms of unionization, not defending them.

THE EVIDENCE

Make no mistake, all of this outrage and controversy is staged and manufactured for corporate benefit. The playbook is obvious.

If Amazon had wanted to make gobs of money it could have followed the very clear path already cleared by director Peter Jackson, who made three Lord of the Rings movies and three Hobbit movies which in total made roughly $6 billion.

But instead, Amazon pushed aside Jackson and decided to go for social engineering rather than servicing Tolkien fans who have proven their loyalty and commitment to mostly faithful adaptations.

This is similar to how Disney continuously chooses to alienate its Marvel and Star Wars fans with social engineering instead of giving them what worked in the past, which is what they want and what they will gladly fork over their money for.

Also note how Amazon has flexed its muscles to get media outlets to rush out dubious sob stories from The Rings of Power cast about allegedly facing “racist” or “sexist” backlash prior to the series premiere, just like Disney does with every Marvel and Star Wars movie or series.

Also notice how Amazon, like Disney before them, shouts from the rooftops about the insidious racist “review bombing” against The Rings of Power on rotten tomatoes. Amazon has gone so far as to halt reviews of the series being placed on the Amazon website in order to stifle “racist trolls”.

Of course, there’s no proof that any review bombing is going on, or that people leaving negative reviews are racist…but that reality is inconvenient to Amazon and so it isn’t just ignored, but disparaged. And as an aside, why isn’t it ever considered review bombing when it is positive reviews inundating rotten tomatoes?

In keeping with the playbook, Amazon claimed without evidence that 25 million viewers watched the premier episode of The Rings of Power (this is contradicted by a SambaTV report with significantly lower viewership numbers – 1.8 million in US). Amazon also just put out a brave statement saying they stand with their actors of color and reject all “racist attacks” from deplorable fans – who they claim aren’t really fans at all. As Dan Rather would say, “courage”.

THE AGENDA

The fact is that Amazon sullying Tolkien’s timeless myth with the insipid cultural politics of today is not the least bit shocking considering that in 2021 Amazon Studios released its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” playbook which lays out the rules and regulations regarding diversity quotas (50% of all creative roles must be women and/or from under-represented groups) on all Amazon Studio projects.

In other words, the plan all along was to turn Tolkien into tokens for Amazon and Bezos’ cultural political gain. They tried the same thing with their deservedly-much-maligned and ultimately ignored fantasy series The Wheel of Time.  Of course, to speak this obvious truth is met with even more shrill cries of “racist!” and “sexist!”

Amazon’s “Diversity, Inclusion and Representation” playbook makes it very clear that the company is committed to a cultural/political agenda and is not interested in the quality of their product or…and this is still shocking to consider…how much money it makes in its entertainment division.

Of course, one wonders if Amazon and Disney and all the rest will hit a point where their social engineering becomes too financially untenable to continue?

The answer to that might be as simple as “get woke, go broke”. Either that or this social engineering is here to stay because these entertainment behemoths are too big to fail and will only expand their monopolies and eliminate all opposing voices. The current sorry, sycophantic state of professional film/tv criticism indicates they’re well on their way to snuffing out dissent.

THE LAPDOG

The easily manipulated liberal/progressive Pavlovian response to all things race and gender related is perfectly summed up in a review of The Rings of Power from LA Times critic Robert Lloyd. Lloyd reveals his inability to actually think, nevermind have an original thought, by regurgitating the most weak-kneed, shallow and vacuous drivel imaginable.

For example, Lloyd writes of The Rings of Power,

“And sometimes (some) fans defend the wrong things, as when attacking the production for its foregrounding of female roles and casting actors of color where Tolkien (and Jackson, following his lead) only saw white.”

Tolkien “only saw white” because he was writing a myth for Northern Europeans using folklore from those regions where mostly, if not all, of the people are white. It should also be noted that Tolkien created the entire Lord of the Rings universe…so it’s his and his vision. Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only saw white because he was, shock of shocks, trying to stay true to Tolkien’s written word.

Lloyd then actually unintentionally makes the case that the fans now being labelled “racist” have made all along, that Tolkien’s work is clearly designed as a founding myth for Norther Europeans/English, and casting it with “people of color” undermines the author’s intent.

“Evidence has been advanced to show that Tolkien was anti-racist in life, but there is no getting around the fact that in his books, Northern European types save the day from swarthy types from the South and East, who are characterized with giant elephants and (as in Jackson’s “The Return of the King”) quasi-Arabic garb.”

Lloyd’s use of the term “anti-racist” is revealing, as it’s a nod to his political tribe that he has “done all the reading”, including Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s egregiously vapid book How to be an Anti-Racist.

It’s also telling that the haughty and insolent Lloyd still manages, despite “evidence…that Tolkien was anti-racist” to smear the great author as a racist in the same sentence.

Lloyd then lets readers know that he’s truly one of the good white guys when he writes,

“To be honest, I was a little worried the series would continue in that distasteful vein and happy to see that it did not; Tolkien, some would say, was just a man of his time, but these are different times.”

Bravo Mr. Lloyd on the virtue signal! It’s glorious how Lloyd rides in on his white steed and tells us that he’s glad that Tolkien’s “distasteful” approach when writing one of the greatest selling books of all-time, has been discarded, which makes him “happy”. Lloyd sounds like like a toddler getting ice cream after his tantrum forces his parents to take the filet mignon away.

Lloyd then makes his intellectual insipidness completely clear as he writes,

“(I reject out of hand all arguments that employ the word “woke” or use “diversity” in a negative sense.)”

Replace the words “woke” and “diversity” with “Jesus freak” and “Christ” and this is the type of thing you’d say if you were some backwards ass bible-thumper.

Rejecting the notion that “diversity” can be anything but good is an indicator of one’s blind faith and strict adherence to dogma, not someone with a serious and vibrant intellectual yearning. “Diversity” to the woke is like the divinity of Christ to the Christian. It can never be up for debate. It only just is…and it is always good.

God knows I fear nothing more than being dismissed by Lloyd as an unserious critic, but I must say, Lloyd’s blanket banning of the term “woke” and his refusal to consider the nuances of “diversity” clearly outs him as a devout member of the Church of Wokeness and a frivolous, insignificant thinker to boot.

What is most amusing is that Lloyd then follows this supercilious inanity up with an admission that The Rings of Power does, in fact, do what many of the alleged “racists” claim it does.

“The Rings of Power” does, in a few instances, too obviously adopt the language of modern American prejudice to make a point, but that is a matter of poor writing rather than a bad idea.”

Because Lloyd is so self-righteous and has spent so much energy signaling his virtue, he believes he can make the same complaint other people have made – that the show is too contemporary in its cultural politics, but avoid being labelled “racist”, even as he himself calls those people with the same opinion as him “racist”. Incredible.

CONCLUSION

In the final analysis, all of this venting and vexing about “diversity’ and “inclusion” and “representation” is just meant to divide and distract.

Amazon uses the same bigoteering, divide and conquer playbook as Disney and every other major corporation in America which were so quick to shout “Black Lives Matter!” when it was a convenient way to signal their virtue and cover their asses. This is the same playbook the ruling elite use to maintain the corrupt power structure by keeping the proles at bay and constantly at each other’s throats.

Divide and conquer has kept the oligarchs and the American aristocracy on the throne of power time immemorial. And will continue to do so because the myopic, historically illiterate American populace is being relentlessly indoctrinated by an insidiously deceptive corporate media day in and day out, thus rendering the majority of Americans, who are emotionalist fools, completely incapable of any critical thought.

Ultimately, the sub-par series The Rings of Power is not entertaining, but it is enlightening, because it’s an obvious example of the strings of power being pulled by the elites to manipulate people into fighting for their true enemy (Amazon and Bezos), rather than against them.

©2022

The Last Movie Stars (HBO Max): A Documentary Review

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful and thoughtful examination of two Hollywood icons and their long marriage.

The Last Movie Stars is a six-episode documentary mini-series which examines the lives, careers and marriage of acting icons Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. The series was directed by actor Ethan Hawke and is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Since well before I was ever born, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were the standard for the perfect marriage. Newman was the impossibly handsome, gracious, generous and grounded movie star, and Woodward was his down-to-earth, doting wife, mother to his kids and a powerful, Academy Award winning actress in her own right.

I once had the surreal experience of sitting directly behind them at a play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about twenty years ago, and was struck by two things…how ridiculously beautiful they both were and how unnervingly normal they were as a couple. If it weren’t for their impeccable bone structure and piercing eyes, they could have been any other old couple out for a night at the theatre.

The Last Movie Stars attempts to go beyond the sterling façade of Newman and Woodward’s marriage and reveal their personal complexities and their deeply complicated relationship to one-another, their kids and their art.

Hawke obviously respects, admires and adores his subjects, and the series is much closer to hagiography than hit piece, but to his credit, he doesn’t dismiss or ignore the messier aspects of both Woodward and Newman’s lives. For instance, though it is done with a loving touch and no sense of animosity, Newman and Woodward’s children speak frankly and freely about their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s somewhat indifference to raising children. The rather uncomfortable topic of how the two met and started dating is also thoroughly explored and it isn’t the least bit flattering to Newman…or Woodward.

Hawke bases his documentary on a discarded memoir that Newman had intended to write with the help of a co-writer. Newman gave that writer permission to interview everyone in Paul’s life, which the writer did. But the tapes of those interviews were burned when Newman decided against the book…but thankfully the transcripts of those recordings have now been found and are the roadmap for The Last Movie Stars.

To bring those transcripts to life Hawke enlists a bunch of famous actor friends to voice the people from the transcripts. For example, George Clooney voices Paul Newman, Laura Linney is Joanne Woodward, Zoe Kazan is Paul’s first wife Jackie, Bobby Cannavale is Elia Kazan and so on and so forth.

It is somewhat ironic that George Clooney voices Paul Newman as his casting proves the title’s point. Newman was a mega-movie star with an Actor’s Studio background who dominated movies for forty years. Clooney was supposed to be as big of a star but he lacked, first and foremost, the craft and skill of Newman, but also his charisma and his artistic prowess.

There’s a very strong argument that Newman really was the last movie star because he was a “method actor” raised in the studio system who transitioned through the artistic/business revolution of the 60’s and 70’s without losing any of his star power.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and all the rest of the recent era wannabes have certainly had success, but their cinematic, cultural and artistic power is minuscule compared to Paul Newman.

Much to my surprise, Hawke’s decision to voice cast the film with well-known actors works astonishingly well. In addition, Hawke’s rapport with his cast in side discussions is endearing and brings a familial feel to the festivities.

 As for Newman and Woodward, their individual journeys and their journey together, are simply remarkable.

Newman came up during the Method Acting revolution of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. He attended the Actor’s Studio in New York with luminaries such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

Newman was born ten months after Brando, but he was no Brando. He wasn’t James Dean, either. But thanks to an undying work ethic and an astonishingly persistent relationship with luck he carved out a career path that outlasted (but not outshone) them both.

As an actor Newman was different than Brando and Dean in that he wasn’t about emoting but withholding. Everything happening in a Newman character is happening beneath the surface, in a cauldron boiling deep in his famous blue eyes. That somewhat reserved approach at first left him overshadowed by his supernova contemporaries, Brando and Dean.

But then luck intervened and James Dean’s untimely death opened the door to Newman’s ascension and directly led to his being cast in Somebody Up There Likes Me.

Brando’s erraticism and combustibility eventually led him to burn out and self-destruct, while Newman’s tightly contained personality kept his career from ever falling apart. And so, Paul Newman, by sheer force of will, perseverance and luck, became the actor of his generation.

Joanne Woodward was a great actress in her own right. She was the bigger star when the two met, and early in their relationship she won a Best Actress Oscar (Three Faces of Eve). But patriarchal demands forced parenthood to replace career ambitions for her just as Paul’s career went meteoric. That would be a thorn in her side for the rest of their time together.

Woodward’s filmography is often overlooked, and even Zoe Kazan, a terrific young actress who’s a talking head in the documentary – and who happens to be Elia Kazan’s granddaughter, shockingly admits she has never seen a Joanne Woodward film. That’s a shame as in her heyday she was as good as anyone on screen. Her work in Three Faces of Eve and Rachel, Rachel is impressive and worth a watch to get a taste of her talent.

Newman’s filmography needs no introduction, and his work in The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Cool Hand Luke, Hud, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict and The Color of Money is must-see for any aspiring actor.

Watching The Last Move Stars is enjoyable because it gives Woodward and Newman’s work a new perspective that reveals even deeper meaning to their artistry. And that’s the thing about this supposed Hollywood glamour couple that is so compelling and impressive, and that is their commitment to two things, their art and each other.

Through thick and thin they stuck it out. They didn’t bail when things got tough, and things often got very tough. They endured, and that is a lesson for every couple out there, even the ones who aren’t glamourous movie stars.

Yes, Woodward and Newman stumbled a lot, both artistically and as people. For instance, Newman was a terribly flawed man and a failed father, but he was ever on the search for forgiveness and/or redemption. His staggeringly impressive charitable work, including his camp for seriously ill children and his Newman’s Own food lines, speak to that yearning.

Despite the slings and arrows of life, or maybe because of them, Woodward and Newman never lost their humanity. It’s their flaws and failings and their steadfast refusal to give up in the face of them that make them relatable and even more captivating as a couple.

The Last Movie Stars is as insightful a documentary about movie stars as you’ll find because it focuses less on the myth and more on the humans embodying the myth. Ultimately, this documentary is, like the stars it attempts to explore, most notable for its humanity, and that’s a credit not only to the extraordinary Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but to Ethan Hawke.

©2022

House of the Dragon (HBO): Thoughts and Musings on Episode One

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

It’s surprising that Game of Thrones came to its rather ignominious end just three years ago, as those chaotic three years have felt like decades if not centuries. The way the once-glorious, must-see series badly stumbled at its conclusion seemed to make it disappear from the collective consciousness almost overnight. With stunning speed and alacrity viewers went from vociferously declaring “Winter is coming!”, to petulantly asking, “what’s next?”

Such is the nature of our current culture, where there’s a plethora of entertainment choices (notice I didn’t say “entertaining choices”) and virtually every movie or series ends up in the trash heap of forgettable fiction the moment it stops playing before our eyes.

2019 was a year of major endings, and not just for Game of Thrones. That same year Marvel’s miraculous narrative run from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) came to a smashing conclusion. So, the biggest tv series and the biggest movie franchise, both of which dominated popular culture for a decade, came to an end in 2019 and ever since, pop culture has been struggling and staggering to find a center, be it cinematic or on television, around which to orient itself.

Marvel has tried to keep its brand at the forefront of the culture by expanding to tv as well as extending its cinematic universe, and for the most part the results have been dismal. Marvel movies and TV series are no longer cultural landmarks but instead, little but fodder for tedious culture wars.

Which brings us to House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones series which premiered on HBO on Sunday, August 21st. The series is a prequel set 172 years before the events of Game of Thrones that tells the story of the rule of the dragon-blooded Targaryens.

The series is undoubtedly attempting to re-create the culturally dominating experience of its predecessor. After watching the first episode of House of the Dragon, which broke viewing records at HBO and overloaded the servers at HBO Max, I’m still reticent to declare that “Westeros is back, baby!”

Game of Thrones‘ fatally flawed ending left a putrid taste in a great deal of viewer’s mouths, my own included, so it’s just about impossible that House of the Dragon will be a similar smash hit. Audiences may well be wary of giving it the time it needs to grow, and after the calamity that was Game of Thrones’ final season, with good reason.

It’s too soon to tell whether House of the Dragon will find the magic that Game of Thrones did, but it’s early yet. The first episode was fine. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful. It just was. Some of the CGI was terrific, some of it wasn’t. Some of the characters were compelling, some of them weren’t.

I remember watching season one of GOT and liking it but not really thinking it was anything remarkable until episode nine (out of ten) of season one.

In that episode, Ned Stark is set to be executed and I kept wondering how they were going to save him. I mean, you can’t execute Ned Stark as he’s played by Sean Bean, the biggest star on the show. But then in episode nine…they cut Ned’s goddamn head off. I remember yelling out from my couch when it happened because it was so viscerally shocking to see a tv show completely upend the conventions of its medium.

House of the Dragon will not be able to do such a thing because it’s already been done. Audiences are harder to shock a second and third time around…and considering that Game of Thrones continued to shock throughout its run (think the Red Wedding – holy shit!), House of the Dragon has an uphill climb.

I don’t know if it’s a help or hindrance that I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I haven’t. On the plus side in terms of Game of Thrones, I had no idea what was coming, on the downside in terms of House of the Dragon, I don’t really know who anybody is or really care about them at the start.

In a real sense, I had almost no clue what was going on in Game of Thrones most of the time but enjoyed it because the acting was superb, the writing crisp, the production (sets, costumes, cinematography, sound) glorious and the world building brilliant. It also helped a great deal that there were a plethora of my three favorite things…nudity, strong sexual content and violence. You basically can never go too wrong with that combination.

With House of the Dragon, that same formula may be watered down in order to appease the social media Savanorolas who simply cannot tolerate anyone enjoying anything. Episode one of House of the Dragon had some violence and some sexual content and nudity, but not nearly enough for my voracious appetite, and certainly nothing up to the standards of Game of Thrones in its debauched heyday.

House of the Dragon does boast some fine performances thus far, most notably Matt Smith as rogue prince Daemon. Smith was last seen in The Crown playing a young Prince Philip (talk about a rogue prince – he’s the father of pedo prince Andrew…the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), and he’s a terrific actor. As Daemon he believably transforms into a villainous and oddly charming brute.

Daemon’s brother, King Viserys, is played by the wondrous Paddy Considine, who brings to the role a palpable sense of fragility that augers trouble for the king.

Also excellent is Rhys Ifans as Ser Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King. Ifans, like so many of the actors from the original series and now its prequel, is just a damn good British actor who brings a formidable amount of craft and skill to his role and elevates the series in the process.

That said, there’s a much smaller cast in House of the Dragon as compared to Game of Thrones, there’s also fewer interesting characters. Daemon, King Viserys and Hightower are decent characters, but nothing spectacular. If they were in Game of Thrones they’d be C or D level, fringe characters, not the main attraction.

Speaking of main attractions, Viserys’ daughter Rhaenyra, played as a teen in the first episode by Milly Alcock – and played by Emma D’Arcy in later episodes as a grown woman, thus far isn’t the least bit interesting. Like Arya Stark, she shuns the lady-life and bristles at the restrictions of the patriarchy, but she is also a deluxe dullard of the highest order. Maybe that will change going forward…hopefully it will change going forward.

Equally dull is Alicent Hightower, Otto Hightower’s daughter and Rhaenyra’s best friend, played by Emily Carey as a young woman and later in the series by Olivia Cooke as an adult. Alicent is paper thin as a character in episode one, and given that she had a potentially blockbuster scene with the King at one crucial point, that is disappointing if not devastating.

Again, the series just started and has the potential to grow into greatness, but it must be said that episode one is a bit middling. Part of the reason for that is that the production lacks the crispness and visual lushness of Game of Thrones, including in the CGI department.

Not surprisingly, dragons play a big role in the story of House of the Dragon, and the dragons themselves look as good as ever, but when placed into settings the scenes look uncomfortably cheap…like a quick cut and paste job.

The sets and costumes also look to be downgraded in terms of quality on House of the Dragon, as do the costumes, both of which may be a result of some cost cutting in the wake of Game of Thrones ever expanding budget.  

Also notably sub-par was the sound design, which left much of the dialogue muddled under ambient noise or music.

House of the Dragon, which is NOT produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, is apparently the first in a collection of Game of Thrones I.P. that HBO will be sending our way. The recent financial struggles at Discovery, which took on a massive amount of debt to purchase WarnerMedia (which includes HBO) could spell trouble for such pricey projects going forward though.

If belt tightening at Discovery/Warner leads to lesser quality in the Game of Thrones spin-offs, then they’d be better off not doing them at all. Of course, I’m only saying that from an artistic/fan perspective, as quality is my number one concern.

Speaking of fan perspective, House of the Dragon is chock full of fan service and Game of Thrones Easter eggs. No doubt fans of the original series will love that, but if House of the Dragon doesn’t improve in quality and catch dramatic fire sooner rather than later, fans will turn on it and HBO will be left with a bloody mess on their hands. Only time will tell.

I’ll check back in midway through season one of House of the Dragon with another review to see if things in Westeros are headed in the right direction.

©2022

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law - Episode One: Review

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is the new Marvel series that premiered on Disney + on Thursday, August 18th. The comedy series, which will drop a new episode every Thursday for the next 8 weeks (9 episodes in total) until its finale on October 13th, follows the trials and tribulations of Jennifer Walters, a not-so-mild mannered lawyer who becomes a hulk just like her cousin Bruce Banner.

The opening scene of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law basically tells you all you need to know about Marvel’s latest series.

In that scene, Jennifer (Tatiana Maslany) is in her law office and a Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead that says, “I’m not arguing, I’m explaining why I’m right” is prominently displayed next to her. So apparently just like her hero RBG, Jen/She-Hulk is going to be an attention-seeking, self-aggrandizing feminist lawyer who’s unfettered narcissism assists in aborting Roe v Wade! Just kidding.

What I meant to say was…Yay! Marvel is still committing mass entertainment malpractice with its relentlessly trite woke posing and pandering!

In case the RBG bobblehead was too subtle for the Neanderthals out there, the first episode also gives viewers one of the most ham-handed, gag-inducing, girl power garbage monologues in MCU history. In the rant Jen/She-Hulk womansplains to Bruce Banner/Hulk,

"Well, here's the thing, Bruce, I'm great at controlling my anger, I do it all the time. When I'm catcalled in the street, when incompetent men explain my own area of expertise to me. I do it pretty much every day, because if I don't, I'll get called 'emotional' or 'difficult', or might just literally get murdered. So I'm an expert at controlling my anger because I do it infinitely more than you!"

Hysterical. “Literally”. As in Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk, like so many privileged women today, is suffering from hysteria, a mental illness causing ungovernable emotional excess, in this case mixed with self-serving, decadent delusions of grandeur and persecution.

While I find this shameless brand of vapid virtue signaling in a series or film to be at its very best tedious (regardless of whether it’s from the left with its wokeness or the right with its vacuous flag waving and militarism), the reality is that in this day and age one must simply accept insipid cultural politics as part of art and entertainment and try to ignore it as best you can and judge the work on its other potential merits.

In other words, the question becomes, if you put aside the obvious malevolent misandry, neo-feminist foolishness and girl power garbage, is She-Hulk: Attorney at Law any good?

It’s difficult to decisively declare after watching just one episode, but I will say this…it doesn’t look promising…at all.

The first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of being a truly terrible bit of television and portends yet another miserable Marvel monstrosity in a string of miserable Marvel monstrosities.

Since Avengers: Endgame Marvel has churned out one piece of detritus after another. Just this year alone the Marvel machine has shat out the muddled mess of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and the insidiously silly Thor: Love and Thunder. On the tv side, Marvel has cranked the crap up to eleven with an array of fecal matter in the form of Moon Knight and Ms. Marvel, whose pungent stench is spectacularly repellent.

To be fair to the geniuses over at Marvel, I didn’t think they could do any worse than the recent Ms. Marvel series, but to their credit they really pushed themselves and it sure as hell seems that She-Hulk is even worse than that moronic shit show.

A huge issue with She-Hulk is that it’s supposed to be a comedy and yet seems deathly allergic to being funny. The show certainly loves itself and thinks it’s hilarious as it’s chock full of lame Marvel inside jokes (how clever!) and breaking of the fourth wall (how original and clever!) and a bevy of nonsense that is altogether too cute and faux clever for its own good. Never mind laugh, I didn’t even crack a scintilla of smile for the entire episode.

She-Hulk bills itself as a legal-comedy in the mold of Ally McBeal with a strong female superhero in the lead, an idea that would’ve made me throw up in my mouth at the pitch meeting…reason #2,467,942 why I’m not working as a suit at Disney.

Whatever creative genius thought, “hmmm…you know that Marvel needs to do? They need to make a…(checks notes)…legal comedy with a third-rate Marvel character and load it with divisive cultural politics!” should be found guilty of egregious bad taste, disbarred and ejected from the Writer’s Guild, the Producer’s Guild and all of Hollywood.

Of course, the oblivious Marvel marketing machine was in full swing leading up to the premiere with countless commissioned articles declaring She-Hulk to be the “best Marvel show!”

The other narrative around She-Hulk is that it’s vitally important for studios to support female-led superhero projects, especially in the wake of the Batgirl movie being thrown in the dumpster by Warner Brothers…or at least that’s what an absurd article at Yahoo news told me. Sigh.

How about we just support good shows and movies and abort this addiction to diversity, equity, inclusion horseshit now before it destroys cinema and television completely? And yes, I know I’m pissing in the wind with that exhortation but good lord Marvel is quickly circling down the drain and can’t seem to get out of their own way when it comes to this stuff.

Speaking of which, given that the politically correct cultural politics of the show make it nearly impossible for critics to give it the savaging it so rightly deserves, it’s still astonishing that it’s only getting very mild praise from a cornucopia of critics, many of whom delicately say it’s “good” but “could’ve been better”. In our current cultural climate of critical cowardice, that benign critique registers as a scathing review.

One of the biggest problems with She-Hulk, besides the fact that the character is a joke of a superhero that no one gives a rat’s ass about, is that the CGI in the first episode is God-awful to the point of being embarrassing.

There has been a lot of press about how over-worked and mistreated CGI artists are right now, so the show’s piss poor CGI is understandable in a certain respect, but it’s so egregious as to be unprofessional, and that’s a major problem.

I remember when I went to see Batman v Superman and Superman’s face looked really bizarre in a bunch of scenes…just grotesque, and then I read later that actor Henry Cavill had grown a mustache for another movie (a Mission Impossible movie if I recall correctly) and couldn’t shave it so when they did re-shoots for BvS they had to CGI out his mustache. That terrible BvS mustache removing CGI is a million times better than the junk in She-Hulk.

Speaking of technical misfires, the action sequences in She-Hulk, of which there are a scant few in the opening episode, are uncomfortably amateurish too, and feel like they were choregraphed and shot by a toddler.

Also abysmally atrocious is the editing and the overall cinematography. The first episode is poorly shot and the editing seems chopped together by a band of blind monkeys let loose in an editing room.

The biggest problem though is that the script…my God the script. The remarkable thing about the She-Hulk script is that it’s both too slow and too fast at the same time. The first episode, which runs forty minutes or so, feels like it takes 3 hours to watch. In that forty-minutes the story is completely rushed as there is no character development, no relationships fleshed out and no worthy story arc introduced.

For example, Jennifer Walters becomes a She-Hulk because she gets some of Bruce Banner/Hulk’s blood in her system. This sequence is so bland, forgettable and throwaway as to be astonishing. A kid playing with action figures would’ve given it more gravitas knowing that it’s the cornerstone of the entire series. In the show the event happens and is never commented on again…it’s just something that happened and is forgotten.  

As for the cast…well…they don’t fare well at all but you can’t blame them as the dialogue they have to regurgitate is asinine.

Tatiana Maslany was great in Orphan Black but here she seems…off. Maslany is forced, unfunny and aggressively anti-charismatic. Maslany’s inelegant recitation of the odious dialogue is wooden and lifeless.

Speaking of wooden and lifeless, Mark Ruffalo utters every line of dialogue like he’s locked in a coffin suffocating on his own farts.

She-Hulk has eight more episodes to go and things could improve over those episodes, but considering the startlingly low quality of episode one, and of Marvel’s recent cinematic and tv output, I’m extremely doubtful.

The bottom line is that She-Hulk episode one is bad, but I’ll check back in midway through the series and again at the end of the series to let you dear readers know my ultimate ruling and whether She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is guilty of egregious storytelling malpractice in the first degree and deserving of the death penalty.

©2022

Black Widow: A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie is a middling Disney money grab chock full of predictable Russophobic caricatures and #MeToo pandering that doesn’t propel the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s storyline forward.

This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for the movie Black Widow.

After a two-year, Covid-induced drought, Marvel is finally back in theatres with the much-anticipated Black Widow.

Black Widow was originally set to kick off Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in May of 2020, but Covid crushed those plans and Marvel fans have had to go to the streaming service Disney Plus to get their Marvel fix in the form of the series WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki.

Black Widow, in case you’ve forgotten, is actually Natasha Romanoff, the former KGB superspy turned Avenger who is portrayed by Scarlet Johansson.

The movie Black Widow, which besides being in theatres is also available to stream on Disney Plus for a hefty fee, is set right after Captain America: Civil War and five years before all the unpleasantness with Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because, spoiler alert, Black Widow actually dies in Endgame. Consider this movie to be cinematic CPR on Natasha Romanoff.

The fear heading into Black Widow was that it would be the wokest Marvel movie yet. That fear was formed when Ms. Johansson made some pre-release noise about how she was uncomfortable with how her character was “hyper-sexualized” in earlier movies, and also that this film was going to be Marvel’s #MeToo movie.

Adding to that sentiment were tweets from various kiss-ass woke media outlets triumphantly declaring that the film “passed the Bechdel test”, which measures size and substance of female representation in a movie, and “puts men in their place and makes them “squeem”, whatever the hell that means.

It seems an odd marketing strategy to alienate half of your potential audience by having friendly media outlets tell them if they watch your film they’ll “squeem” (which sounds uncomfortably like a cross between ‘squeal’ and ‘cream’) and be put in their place…but what do I know?

After watching the movie, I can report that Black Widow is a middling, rather unremarkable and unnecessary Marvel movie that contains a heavy dose of cultural and political propaganda.

The political propaganda is pretty derivative, just some good old fashioned Cold War Russophobia. Throughout the film Russians are painted as the shallow stereotype of innately ruthless, cold-blooded, heartless killers indifferent to human suffering. In one scene Natasha watches an old Bond film, Moonraker, as a sort of knowing wink from the filmmakers about the throwback Cold War caricatures.

The cultural propaganda doesn’t come in until the final act of the movie, which not surprisingly, is also when the whole venture goes completely off the rails with megadoses of Marvel monotony.

It’s in this third act that Marvel runs the #MeToo flag up the pole and turns the movie into a metaphor for breaking the iron spell of the nefarious patriarchy that brainwashes women and takes away their freedom and choice.

The bad guy, General Dreykov, played by a terribly miscast Ray Winstone who absolutely butchers his Russian accent, is meant to embody both the misogynist patriarchy and the inherent villainy of Russians. Dreykov has stolen little girls and trained them to be killers, and if they weren’t up to snuff, killed them. Dreykov is like a Russian Jeffrey Epstein in that he controls world leaders with his army of women, except he traffics in violence, not sex, and his island is in the sky, not the Caribbean.

In a literal sense, Black Widow must defeat Dreykov so as to free his army of mind-controlled females. In a metaphorical sense, she’s fighting to free all women from the prison of the patriarchy and to exact revenge for the abuse they have suffered at its hands.

I have to say Black Widow’s painfully obvious #MeToo metaphor didn’t make me “squeem” or feel put in my place, although it did make me throw-up a little bit in my mouth. And yawn profusely.

Whether it be the insipid Russophobia or the forced MeToo stuff, the overwhelming sentiment conjured by Black Widow is one of indifference. The movie, especially in the shadow of Infinity War and Endgame, just doesn’t seem to serve any purpose at all.

That isn’t to say there’s nothing redeeming about it. Some of the performances, particularly Florence Pugh and David Harbour, are quite compelling.

Pugh, who plays Black Widow’s sister Yelena, absolutely steals the show. Watching Pugh consistently out shine her more famous scene partner Johansson was glorious to behold. Pugh is a terrific actress, but the magnetism she displays in Black Widow reveals that she’s capable of being a gigantic movie star, much bigger than Scarlett Johansson.

David Harbour, who plays Black Widow’s father, the Russian superhero Red Guardian, is also terrific. Harbour is a dynamic presence and sinks his teeth into the Marvel movie inanity with gusto.

Other performances, most notably from two usually very good actors, Rachel Weisz and the aforementioned Ray Winstone, are uncomfortably sub-par, as is Scarlet Johansson’s bland and rather diffident portrayal.

The bottom line is, if you are a devoted fan of the Marvel formula with its forgettable fights, loud chases and snarky humor, you may enjoy Black Widow even though it is meaningless in relationship to the wider MCU canon. As for me, a fair-weather Marvel fan, I found it to be a rather tepid venture, devoid of any real purpose except to line Mickey Mouse’s coffers.

If you want to avoid the vapid cultural and political propaganda that permeates Black Widow, and keep your hard-earned money from the clutches of the Disney devil, I recommend you skip the movie, you really won’t be missing anything.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amazon Studio's Playbook to Ruin Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Amazon Studio’s new “playbook” makes it official, diversity, not talent, skill or merit, is the only thing that matters anymore in the entertainment industry

The stunning document is shameless in its disdain for artistry and individuality, and its aggressive worship of all things woke.

The entertainment industry and the art of cinema took a gargantuan step on their relentless death march into the hellscape of the woke Mordor recently when Jeff Bezos, the Sauron of Amazon Studios, released his new “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) playbook”.

Following in the footsteps of the Academy Awards, which implemented new diversity and inclusion mandates into awards eligibility criteria, and Disney, which has turned the happiest place on earth into the People’s Republic of Wokestan, Amazon Studios, the new home of James Bond and Rocky, has, like a suicide note, put in writing its demand that film and TV ignore talent, skill and merit when hiring in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s now clear that the corporate human resources junta has successfully transformed Hollywood into nothing more than the propaganda arm for the woke Savonarolas who burn art and entertainment on the bonfire of inanities that is DEI.

Among many things Amazon’s “playbook” demands are creative roles on productions being 50% women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups by 2024, and documentation and reporting of these diversity quotas is required both pre and post production. Unfortunately, the exact skin tone and percentage of “racial/ethnic” blood needed to qualify as belonging to an underrepresented group, and the papers you’ll need to show to the DEI gestapo to prove it, are not made clear.

The insidious “playbook” also declares its commitment to “authentic portrayals” and its intention to cast “actors in a role whose identity aligns with the identity of the character they will be playing (by gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability) and in particular when the character is a member of an underrepresented group/identity.”

In other words, Amazon appears to be outlawing the art of acting as only disabled actors can play disabled characters and only LGBTQ actors can play LGBTQ roles. This is what happens when human resources deplorables take over the creative process.

One wonders how exactly Amazon will check if an actor up for a lesbian, gay or bisexual role is the real deal or not? Will actors be forced to “prove’ their lesbian, gay or bisexual bona fides by performing a sex act with an appropriately aligned producer? Maybe the casting couch can get a public relations facelift if it’s used to help Hollywood achieve the woke nirvana of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Of course, from an artistic perspective, the absurdity of Amazon’s totalitarian woke decrees is only topped by its power to suffocate and stultify creativity.

Consider this, some of the greatest performances we’ve seen in recent years would be wiped out by Amazon’s DEI manifesto, and it wouldn’t be surprising if eventually they’re retroactively cancelled for not being aligned with the new mandates.

For example, Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors we’ve ever had, but despite not being disabled he won an Oscar for playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and won two Oscars for playing Americans in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln, despite being British and Irish.

In addition, Sean Penn isn’t gay but won an Oscar for playing Harvey Milk, Eddie Redmayne is able bodied but won for playing Stephen Hawking, Colin Firth won for playing King George VI but didn’t have a royal stutter and Jamie Foxx won for playing Ray Charles despite not being blind.

Even last year’s crop of movies would be affected by Amazon’s woke encyclical. Anthony Hopkins doesn’t have dementia but won the Best Actor Oscar playing a man suffering from that malady, Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor Oscar is British but won for playing an African-American, and in Amazon Studio’s own Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed was Oscar nominated for playing a deaf character but has perfect hearing.

Two of Amazon’s big hits from last year, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Coming 2 America violate this new woke law too as Brit Sacha Baron Cohen played a Kazahkstani, and New Yorker Eddie Murphy is played an African King. The horror!

Amazon’s decree is so specific it even states “But if the character has a distinct ethnic background, make sure that the actor’s ethnic background doesn’t conflict with this portrayal”, using as an example of a bad approach “are you casting a person of Puerto Rican heritage to play a character who is Colombian?” Under this edict Benicio del Toro’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a Mexican in Traffic wouldn’t happen because he is Puerto Rican.

Amazon’s “playbook” blatantly declares its repulsion at talent, skill and merit as a casting-criteria when it states that casting directors need to avoid “Relying on your “gut” or seeking “the best person for the job” as that’s an “inherently biased processes that may skew your decision making.”

If this relentless focus on hiring actors, creatives and even crew based on their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and nationality all sounds legally dubious if not outright discriminatory, Amazon agrees, as they throw in this playbook disclaimer to cover their backsides, “While this Playbook provides a general overview, it is not intended to provide legal advice, so it’s crucial to discuss these issues with your attorney.”

As a cinephile and lover of quality art and entertainment in movies and tv, I’m looking forward to the day when the despicable woke totalitarian philistines currently running and ruining Hollywood learn the hard way, at the box office and in the courtroom, that “get woke, go broke” is a universal law that supersedes their self-righteous, anti-merit, DEI declarations of blatant discrimination. They deserve nothing less.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

'In the Heights' and the Woke Albatross

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 34 seconds

The new movie musical ‘In the Heights’ is too woke for regular people and not woke enough for race-obsessed wokesters

The movie was relentless in marketing its diversity but is learning the hard way that you can never satiate the hunger of the woke beast.

In the Heights, the movie adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award winning musical about life in the Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City, was supposed to be ‘the movie of the summer!’

The film marketed itself as a “celebration” of diversity, and shamelessly boasted about its Latino writer (Miranda), Asian director (John Chu – Crazy Rich Asians) and all minority cast.

The film was aggressively marketed by Warner Bros., and was projected to rake in anywhere from $25 million to a staggering $50 million on its opening weekend, even though it was simultaneously being released on the streaming service HBO Max.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to blockbuster status… the movie embarrassingly underperformed. Despite rave reviews the movie made a measly $11 million and came in second at the box office to A Quiet Place II in its third week in theatres, it also fell flat on HBO Max.

Who would’ve thought that a rap-heavy musical that only has as its calling card its relentless diversity, and which features no stars but sells itself as the musical equivalent of a two hour and twenty-two-minute neo-liberal lecture on immigration and the DREAM Act, wouldn’t attract hordes of normal people to theatres or HBO Max?

Welcome to life in the Hollywood bubble.

The most hysterical thing about the In the Heights situation though is that in a delicious bit of irony, despite its supposed diversity bona fides, the film has come under attack from wokesters for its lack of “Afro-Latinx” representation.

During an interview Felice Leon of The Root challenged director Chu and cast members Melissa Barrera and Leslie Grace over the “white passing” and “light-skinned” cast and the lack of “black Latinx” actors in featured roles, and her criticism attracted much attention and support on Twitter and the media.

What makes this all so funny is that Lin Manuel Miranda, whose artistic talent at writing insipid raps and insidiously sappy tales is inversely proportionate to his over-sized ego, only became a cultural icon/pet of the establishment because he hungrily and wantonly embraced diversity, most notably with Hamilton.

The same is true of director John Chu, a filmmaker of gargantuan limitations whose only claim to fame is that he made a derivative rom-com (Crazy Rich Asians) but did it with an all-Asian cast.

With In the Heights, Warner Bros., Miranda and Chu were all trying to pander to the woke in order to line their pockets, and to see these proud politically correct poseurs squirm as they are hoisted by their own petard is, pardon the pun, in the heights of comedy.

As this glorious feast of woke cannibalism played out, Chu and Miranda both tried to assuage their attackers while barely concealing their own fury at being called before the tiny Torquemadas of Twitter as the newest woke inquisition raged.

Chu responded to the criticism by saying “…when we were looking at the cast, we tried to get people who were best for those roles…”. Uh-oh…that is a terribly “white” answer and sounds an awful lot like embracing meritocracy and not diversity.

Melissa Barrera, who plays Vanessa in the film, had an uncomfortably “white” answer to the lack of dark-skinned cast members too. Barrera said, “In the audition process, which was a long audition process, there were a lot of Afro-Latinos there. A lot of darker-skinned people. They were looking for just the right people for the roles, for the person that embodied each character in the fullest extent…”

I’m sure that Mr. Chu and Ms. Barrera’s newfound touting of meritocracy will quickly transform into a vigorous playing of the diversity card the second it works to their advantage.

As for the Patron Saint of Diversity, Lin Manuel Miranda, he originally replied to the uproar with a detached defiance saying, “it’s unfair to put any undue burden of representation on In the Heights”, which is woke-speak for ‘I am King of diversity how dare you question me?!’.

Of course, the mealy-mouthed Miranda, ever the craven eunuch, later changed his tune when the tide against him continued to rise, writing an embarrassing Twitter tome which started by his stating that he wrote In the Heights because he “didn’t feel seen” and ended with his tail firmly between his legs with, “I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honoring our diverse and vibrant community.”

The lessons in all of this In the Heights nonsense is two-fold. First, the film is “get woke, go broke” made manifest. Touting diversity instead of quality and entertainment as a main selling point for a movie, particularly a musical, is a sure-fire way to turn off regular people, particularly older ones, who are usually the audience for a movie musical.

Secondly, a business plan that puts placating the woke on the top of its list is doomed to fail. In the Heights is a corporate woke Frankenstein’s monster with its Latino writer, Asian director and all minority cast, and it still wasn’t enough for the woke. Nothing will ever be enough for the woke.

And if you like this ‘woke eating their own’ story about In the Heights…wait until December. That’s when the paleolithic woke pandersaurus himself - Steven Spielberg, premiers his remake of the Latino-themed musical West Side Story. It’s guaranteed to be ferventy woke but like In the Heights, not nearly woke enough to satiate the ever hungry woke beast.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

It's Maybe the End of the Golden Globes...and I Feel Fine

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

The Golden Globes are moronic, but Hollywood’s boycott of them is the height of idiocy and hypocrisy

Hollywood is holding the Golden Globes to account, not for its blatant corruption, but because the skin tone of its members isn’t dark enough.

Shock waves were sent through Hollywood this week when the esteemed Golden Globes became the target of a virtue signaling blitzkrieg and boycott by some of the movie business’ heavy hitters.

I am kidding of course, the Golden Globes are certainly not esteemed and no one is shocked by Hollywood virtue signaling over anything anymore.

The whole absurd firestorm started with Netflix and Amazon declaring they’d no longer work with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the parent organization of the Golden Globes. This was quickly followed by WarnerMedia joining in the boycott, Tom Cruise returning his three past awards, and then NBC declaring they wouldn’t telecast next year’s Golden Globes ceremony.

The HFPA are a notoriously corrupt and cinematically ignorant organization filled with people with only a passing and tenuous connection to the film industry. The HFPA’s awards, the Golden Globes, have long been a punchline for being so easily purchased by big studios looking to boost a movie’s profile and box office. These are the reasons why I am so glad that Hollywood is coming together to put an end to this blight on the movie business and blasphemy against the art of cinema.

I’m just kidding again, Hollywood doesn’t care about the Golden Globes being corrupt, instead, Netflix, Amazon, WarnerMedia, Tom Cruise and NBC are all piling on the Golden Globes because the HFPA, an organizationof roughly 90 individuals that is packed with “people of color” from Asia, India, the Middle East, and Central and South America, doesn’t have any members whose skin tone is dark enough to be considered “black”.

This horrifying lack of melanin caused such an uproar at this year’s ceremony that it led to one of the most unintentionally funny moments in the show’s history when HFPA members Meher Tatna and Ali Sar, an Indian woman and Turkish man respectively, sheepishly spoke about the organization’s dire need for “diversity” after being chastised by hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, two white women, one of whom, Fey, rhad episodes of her hit tv show 30 Rock pulled from streaming circulation last year because they featured scenes with blackface. Only in Hollywood!

It’s hysterically funny to me, but not the least bit surprising, that Hollywood is not concerned by the HFPA’s relentlessly corrupt practices, just that no people with dark enough skin tone are getting in on the egregious grift.

Speaking of grift, it may come as a shock to learn that NBC’s decision to not telecast the Golden Globes this year might not exactly be entirely motivated by a wholesome yearning for diversity. According to reports, NBC pays the HFPA $60 million to televise the Golden Globes, with most of that money going to production costs, but by refusing to televise the awards, NBC saves the vast majority of that money.

Considering that the Golden Globes ratings were down 63% this year and only attracted 6.9 viewers, and that ratings and viewership for awards shows across the board are plummeting, this seems much more like a savvy business decision by NBC and not one of conscience.

NBC isn’t the only one signaling its virtue for self-serving reasons, Tom Cruise’s returning of his Golden Globes, which he won over twenty and thirty years ago for Born on the Fourth of July (1990), Jerry Maguire(1997) and Magnolia(2000), is not only utterly absurd but calculated and contrived.

Much like when Cruise was “caught on audio” chewing out crew members for violating covid protocols on the set of the newest Mission Impossible monstrosity, a scenario which struck me as being completely staged for publicity purposes, Cruise’s Golden Globes flex is a public-relations maneuver meant to generate talking points and good will when he is out shilling for his big movies this year, Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible 7.

I assume Cruise is thinking that if he can distract people with his race-based virtue signaling people won’t notice how oddly contorted his face is becoming from plastic surgery. Not a bad plan.

I’m also assuming that Amazon is hoping that by signaling its phony virtue regarding race and the Golden Globes it can distract people from its horrendous treatment of its employees.

As for me, the Golden Globes have never been more than a Rickey Gervais delivery system, and an opportunity to watch rich, famous movie stars get drunk in public.

Gervais has hosted the show five times, each more glorious than the last. His final hosting gig was in 2020, before all of the covid unpleasantness, and it was a glorious thing to behold as he eviscerated the vacuous celebrities and their vapid awards with surgical precision and unabashed brutality.

I won’t miss the Golden Globes this year, and if they vanish forever, a distinct possibility, I could not care less. But with that said, I do wish that in their stead NBC gets Ricky Gervais in front of a room filled with movie stars and Hollywood big wigs and televises him comedically disemboweling them for their pretentious, self-serving nonsense. He could start with their ridiculous virtue signaling boycott of the Golden Globes over something so insignificant as skin tone.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Disney's Hostile Woke Work Environment

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

Insider documents reveal woke barbarians have breached the gates of the Disney Empire and transformed the ‘happiest place on earth’ into a totalitarian hellscape

Disney is going to find out the hard way that wokeness destroys everything that it touches.

In November 2019, Disney slapped a content warning on some of its classic animated movies. The warning read simply, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”

If you give the woke an inch, they’ll take a mile, and this was proven when less than a year later in October of 2020 when that concise and mundane warning was updated to state, “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

As I wrote at the time regarding the absurd verbosity of the updated warning, “…if brevity is the soul of anything than the Winston Smith wannabe who wrote this atrocious piece of human resources porn is as soulless as they are spineless and brainless.”

Thanks to journalist/filmmaker Christopher Rufo, who is the Woodward and Bernstein of all things woke-gate, we now know what sort of corporate cultural conditioning went into making the type of individual that would write such a woke monstrosity as that updated “content warning”.

In an article titled “The Wokest Place on Earth”, Rufo uses documents from whistleblowers inside Disney to reveal the woke racist hellscape that is the Walt Disney Corporation.

According to Rufo’s documents and statements from anonymous sources, Disney’s “diversity and inclusion” program “Reimagine Tomorrow” aggressively indoctrinates employees in woke politics and appears to create a hostile work environment for white employees.

The company has “launched racially segregated affinity groups” for minority employees such as Asians, Hispanics and blacks, but white employees are singled out for indoctrination and must fill out “white privilege” checklists and be grilled on their “white fragility”.

“Anti-racism”, which is little more than anti-white racism wrapped in intentionally vague and impenetrable academic language, has become the center of the company’s agenda, with “almost daily memos, suggested readings, panels, and seminars that [are] all centered around antiracism”.

Disney’s “white fragility” and “anti-racism” agenda is about “pivoting” from “white dominant culture”, which Disney describes as one that emphasizes “competition”, “power hoarding”, “predominantly white leadership”, “individualism”, “timeliness” and “comprehensiveness”.

 It’s pretty rich that Disney, which controls 40% of the U.S. box office after spending $83 billion buying up Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox in recent years, is lecturing low-level employees on the evils of “power hoarding” and “competition”.

As Rufo points out, it is equally rich that Disney’s four top executives, Bob Iger, Bob Chapek, Alan Bergman and Alan Braverman - white males with over a billion dollars of net worth, feel it appropriate to badger their hourly-wage employees to complete “white privilege” checklists and “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness about their whiteness.”

Speaking of these Disney executives, if they were really interested in “pivoting” from “white dominant culture”, they’d start by addressing “predominantly white leadership” by getting their pasty white asses out of the seats of Disney power.

These pale-faced bastards could also eradicate “competition” and “timeliness” by letting people pay what they want and stay as long as they like at Disney theme parks resorts. This way Disney theme parks would be “inclusive” to homeless, poor and low-income people, including many people of color, who currently cannot afford the exorbitant prices.

They could also renounce all of Disney’s copyright claims on their vast resources of intellectual property, allowing anyone to use them for gain. Of course, they would never do any of those things.

Disney’s diversity and inclusion push is hypocritical nonsense too, as like all woke totalitarians, Disney actually has no interest in diversity of opinion or the inclusion of differing viewpoints, only in enforcing conformity, just ask Gina Carano.

Examples abound of how the malignancy of wokeness has spread and radically transformed Disney.

The Pixar movie Soul is a perfect example. Instead of letting two-time Oscar winning director Pete Doktor make the best movie possible, Disney went to hysterical heights to appease the woke gods of diversity in making its first Pixar movie with a black protagonist. This included using a corporate “inclusion strategies” department, creating a “cultural trust” of black employees, hiring outside consultants and black organizations, and hiring a black co-director.

Disney’s walk to wokeness looks like a Bataan death march for artistry and entertainment when you see the radical transformation of the Marvel properties. The rollicking, insightful yet fun-loving action movie sentiment of pre-Disney Iron Man (2008) has morphed into the lifeless, soul-sucking woke propaganda of Captain Marvel (2019) and the relentlessly preachiness of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021).

The all-powerful Disney is the Roman Empire of the entertainment industry, and the woke barbarians aren’t at the gate, they’re well inside the walls and sitting at the seat of power. These woke parasites don’t build things, they only destroy them by draining them of vitality and driving out talent. This is why Disney’s business model shifted from making its own original content to gobbling up content creators like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox, and slowly sucking the life out of them.

Disney is going to learn that wokeness destroys everything it touches. It may take years or decades, but it’s just a matter of time before “get woke, go broke” becomes Disney’s reality and Mickey Mouse’s whole shit house goes up in flames. Good riddance.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Coded Bias: Documentary Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. The film tackles a fascinating topic but is too narrow and shallow to be of much use.

Coded Bias, directed by Shalini Kantayya, explores how artificial intelligence algorithms propagate racial and gender bias.

Big tech totalitarianism is one of the most important issues of our time, and I’m on board with any film highlighting the inherent perils of over reliance on insidious technologies. But Coded Bias, while being somewhat informative, ultimately falls flat because its focus on race and gender is much too narrow.

The film sets out to show how artificial intelligence dehumanizes people and encodes racial bias into the job, college, mortgage and loan application process as well as the criminal justice system, but this misses the techno-tyranny forest for the trees and is akin to complaining about a lack of art by people of color on the walls of the Titanic.

MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini opens the movie by recounting how she discovered racial bias in facial recognition software and then documents her attempts to combat it with her collection of activists named the Algorithm Justice League (AJL).

Buolamwini makes for a compelling protagonist on this journey into the Orwellian hellscape of artificial intelligence due to her superior knowledge of the subject matter and magnetic personality.

Equally compelling is the disturbing information about the totalitarian use of algorithms by the Chinese government to control their populace through a social credit system and the U.K.’s baby steps down the same authoritarian path as it implements its own flawed facial recognition program.

Americans are under the same invasive surveillance and are imprisoned by a similar social credit system, the only difference being that they are unaware of it and it’s being done by big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

But these issues are painfully complex and Coded Bias is often at cross-purposes with itself when confronting them. For instance, the film highlights the Chinese and U.K. government’s draconian use of technology, but then spotlights activists demanding the American government assert itself more aggressively regarding oversight.  

The same is true when Buolamwini takes her racial bias study to IBM to show them that their facial recognition tech fails to adequately work on black faces. In response, the company fixes the problem, which results in…more black people being able to be put in facial recognition databases. This pyrrhic victory makes the AJL seem like controlled opposition.

In this way the AJL is reminiscent of Black Lives Matter, in that they’re really a grievance delivery system designed to divide people and distract them from the much bigger issue. The race and gender obsessed AJL, just like BLM, makes enemies of potential allies by refusing to see all victims as equal.

For example, the conservatives and “conspiracy theorists” that have been de-platformed by algorithms from Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube are not considered worthy victims of tech totalitarianism by the AJL (and are never mentioned in the movie), but these ‘deplorables’ could be powerful allies in the fight to rein in the Sauron of Silicon Valley.

In one scene Republican Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio is aghast at the power and pervasiveness of the FBI’s extra-judicial facial recognition program. The AJL no doubt loath Jordan (an easy thing to do), but he could be an effective asset in attempting the Herculean task of restraining the tech behemoth.

In contrast to Jordan, in the same congressional hearing Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ignores deeper concerns and instead theatrically focuses her ire at the majority “demographic group” that writes the code for artificial intelligence…white males.

The arch-villains of big tech expanding their surveillance capabilities without the slightest thought to ethics or human rights makes the possibility and probability of a dystopian corporate and draconian governmental future (and present) extremely high, but the film and the AJL are simply incapable of moving beyond their slavish devotion to identity politics and their own biases against white men to focus on that truly horrifying bigger picture.

The reality is that artificial intelligence doesn’t just dehumanize black people, it dehumanizes all people, and any movement that fails to put that fact front and center is deserving of distrust if not disdain.

If the AJL were serious about stopping techno-tyranny they’d be fighting vociferously to restore every person’s right to privacy and freedom of speech, especially if that speech is ugly and hateful, and for the right of people to own their personal information and data, and to stop tech companies from collecting and selling that data, and to either shatter the tech monopolies into a million pieces or transform them into public utilities. But they aren’t serious and they don’t aggressively address any of those issues.

Coded Bias ends by recounting the true story of Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet soldier in 1983 who defied technology during a missile scare and refused to launch a nuclear counter attack against the U.S. The film states that if the artificial intelligence of a Strangelovian “doomsday machine” were in charge, and not Petrov’s humanity, then the world would have been obliterated. This nod to individualism is a nice sentiment but rings hollow after 90 minutes of relentless identity politics. It’s also somewhat amusing since the heroic Petrov is a member of the dreaded white male demographic.

In keeping with the Dr. Strangelove metaphor, Coded Bias and the activists it spotlights unfortunately aren’t truly interested in fighting against big tech’s artificial intelligence “doomsday machine”, they just want to make sure the war room is diverse and inclusive enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Run Hide Fight: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Run Hide Fight sets out to reverse that trend.

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

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

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

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

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

But there are also some bright spots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Disney's New Content Warning and the Woke Slippery Slope

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

As the insatiable woke beast runs rampant across our culture, the category of things deemed offensive becomes ever more bloated, meaning an increasing number of classics are now in danger.

If you are anything like me you have been losing copious amounts of sleep worrying that Disney’s content warning for racism that runs before some of their classic animated films like Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Jungle Book and The Aristocrats, wasn’t long-winded enough.

Well, thanks to the geniuses at everybody’s favorite frozen anti-Semite’s entertainment mega-corporation, we can all rest easy because they’ve attached a new disclaimer to these allegedly offensive films.

The old content warning was first posted last November and stated, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”.

Disney’s updated content warning is the polar opposite of the gloriously concise and resolutely mundane original. The new disclaimer reads,

“This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of peoples or cultures. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together.

Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.”

I can’t remember who it was, but some jerk once wrote, “brevity is the soul of wit”…well, if brevity is the soul of anything than the Winston Smith wannabe who wrote this atrocious piece of Human Resources porn is as soulless as they are spineless and brainless.

What makes the verbosity of this woke monstrosity all the more hysterical is that the kids who might be trying to watch Disney’s talking animal cartoons either won’t be able to read it at all, and if they can, they sure as hell won’t understand it.

The other thing of note about this disclaimer is that it is absolutely unnecessary as there was no huge groundswell to update the old content warning by making it more wordy and less coherent.

What Disney is actually doing with this new content warning is shamelessly signaling its corporate virtue and trying to appease the woke beast rampaging relentlessly and maniacally across our culture. This beast has an insatiable appetite for outrage and when none appears organically, the woke manufacture some to feed it.

Like an annoying software update, Disney’s updated content warning will no doubt soon need yet another update. The slippery slope of political correctness will force Disney to expand its definition of ”offensive” material and bloat the category of films needing these self-serving content warnings.

Recent history has taught us that the road to woke perdition is never ending. No gesture or change will ever be enough for the p.c. mob. This results in content warnings needing perpetual updates to acknowledge sins of commission, then sins of omission – such as “we are sorry that Dumbo is not centered on characters of color or from the LGBTQ community”, then the sin of too many cis-gendered white characters, or too many white voice actors, and on and on and on…until finally the woke noose tightens enough to suffocate all of entertainment history.

For example, Song of the South(1946) is a controversial Disney classic that depicts a black character, Uncle Remus, as content with life in the cotton fields. Song of the South currently has no content warning or disclaimer…and that’s because Disney has flat out banned it. It isn’t on video, DVD or streaming. It is lost down the memory hole, which is where the woke slippery slope inevitably leads.

The problem for Disney is that through the lens of wokeness all things appear “problematic”, and this means Mickey Mouse may very well have to sacrifice his cash cow core film canon on the altar of political correctness to appease the woke beast. This will be “get woke, go broke” on steroids.

You may think this far-fetched, but if you doubt the woke slope is that slippery, consider the recent chilling example of the word “preference”.

In last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings Amy Coney Barrett mentioned the term “sexual preference”. In response Senator Mazie Hirono excoriated her for that term claiming it was “offensive” to the LGBTQ community.

That morning “sexual preference” was an entirely acceptable phrase, by lunch it was deemed “homophobic”, and by sundown it was so verboten that Merriam-Webster had literally changed its definition to describe it as “offensive”.

As the speed of history increases, so will the woke over-reaction to it. It starts with content warnings on cartoons and Gone With the Wind…but how much of the entertainment we enjoy today will tomorrow get a content warning and by the end of the week get the Song of the South memory hole treatment? The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy are no doubt already on the endangered species list.

Our civilization used to rely on outrage fatigue to cool the embers of irrational and emotionally driven furies, but among the woke, outrage ossification has set in like intellectual rigor mortis. It is those of us in opposition to the vacuity of political correctness that now suffers from fatigue…and as Patton once said, “fatigue makes cowards of us all”.

My warning of discontent is this…the woke beast slouching toward Bethlehem, via Hollywood, Washington and corporate America, is relentless, consistent, deliberate and insatiable, and in our battle against it we need to screw our courage to the sticking place…because failure is too culturally catastrophic to contemplate.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Trailer for Girl Power Spy Movie 'The 355' Wraps the Same Old CIA Propaganda in a Woke Feminist Cloak

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The long running CIA-Hollywood partnership is at it again trying to fool audiences with a female driven action movie set to release in January of 2021.

Hollywood is churning out yet another feminist action flick for the cinema going public to ignore.

The 355, directed by Simon Kinberg and starring Jessica Chastain, tells the story of five female intelligence agents from different nations – U.S., U.K., Columbia, Germany and China, who come together to recover a top secret weapon.

Besides Chastain, the film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Penelope Cruz, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing.

The trailer features such eye-rolling pieces of dialogue as “now we have a common enemy…and if we don’t stop them they’ll start World War 3” and “we put ourselves in danger, so others aren’t”.

If the final film is as dreadfully absurd as the trailer, then it’s sure to be an odious piece of cinematic garbage.

What is most interesting to me about The 355 though is that while I don’t know this for sure, it certainly appears to be just another in a long line of pro-intelligence agency Hollywood products that propagates America’s nefarious global agenda under the ruse of promoting female empowerment.

For example, in 2001, America’s sweetheart Jennifer Garner starred as CIA super-agent Sydney Bristow on the hit tv show Alias (2001-2006). Despite the show being a fawning CIA propaganda piece, Garner went the extra mile and filmed a recruitment video for the agency. The CIA’s press release announcing that video is insightful.

“Ms. Garner was excited to participate in the video after being asked by the Office of Public Affairs. The CIA’s Film Industry Liaison worked with the writers of Alias during the first season to educate them on fundamental tradecraft. Although the show Alias is fictional, the character Jennifer Garner plays embodies the integrity, patriotism, and intelligence the CIA looks for in its officers.”

Anyone who unironically claims the CIA is filled with integrity, patriotism and intelligence either is completely historically illiterate or actually works for the CIA.

Garner’s ex-husband, movie star Ben Affleck, is also no stranger to working with the CIA as evidenced by the films The Sum of All Fears and Argo. In 2012 Affleck said, “Probably Hollywood is filled with CIA agents”. I wonder if he was referencing himself or his ex-wife in that statement?

Another pro-CIA, female driven narrative was Showtime’s award-winning Homeland (2011-2020). The producers of Homeland reached out to the CIA early in the making of the show and agency hands are all over it. The CIA even had consultants on set to make sure the depictions of the agency were “realistic”.

The star and producer of The 355, Jessica Chastain, is also no stranger to collaborating with the CIA, as she starred in the infamous CIA propaganda piece Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

On that film, which claimed to show the true story of the CIA hunt for Bin Laden, the agency went to great lengths to control and falsify the narrative. The CIA granted remarkable access to the filmmakers, including classified briefings, in exchange for veto control over what went on screen. The agency took full advantage of that control and made the CIA out to be heroes and torture to be highly beneficial in finding and killing Bin Laden.

Intriguingly enough, it was Chastain herself who pitched the idea for a female James Bond – Mission Impossible type of spy movie which became The 355. Is it possible that Chastain is one of the CIA people in Hollywood that Ben Affleck mentioned? I don’t know, but it certainly seems like she is more than happy to make projects that uncritically show the CIA as the good guys as long as it garners her money and prestige.

Chastain is becoming the female version of Tom Hanks, a talented actor who, as evidenced by Saving Private Ryan, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Post and Bridge of Spies among many others, is always eagerly and reliably in the bag for the intelligence community and military industrial complex.

A damning piece of evidence against Hanks was his cringe-worthy refusal to say that Edward Snowden was not a traitor while doing press for The Post (2017) - a film about Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsburg. When directly asked if Snowden was a traitor the cowardly Hanks replied, “that’s above my pay grade”. Tom Hanks pay grade has earned him a net worth of $350 million.

As for Chastain and The 355, the CIA consistently uses Hollywood to promote the notion of intelligence agency women as American Jane Bonds and that has real-world consequences. Feminists cheer that the agency is now headed by torture enthusiast Gina Haspel, and has women leading three of its top directorates. The pussy hat brigade also proudly embraced former female CIA personnel, Democrats Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, as they ran and won congressional seats in 2018 by touting their background as CIA ‘badasses’.

Sadly, by co-opting vociferous feminist voices like Chastain and Captain Marvel star Brie Larson – as well as the feminist movement which has historically been anti-war and pro-peace (think Jane Fonda), this ensures that not only does the CIA have no opposition from famous women, but actually has their endorsement.

Progressive women, like Chastain and Larson, say they care about women’s issues, but by making a Devil’s bargain with the military and intelligence community, they are selling their souls and moral authority to promote predatory power. Their silence in the face of America’s violent militarism and imperialism, which murders and maims countless women and children worldwide, is shameful and damning.

Thankfully, from the looks of its atrocious trailer, The 355 will probably face the same box office fate as the cavalcade of recent busts like Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean’s 8, Charlie’s Angels (2019) and Birds of Prey that put feminism first and quality filmmaking second.

Sadly though, that won’t stop the CIA and Hollywood from continuing to use gullible and ambitious women to mendaciously sell the agency as a beacon of all that is patriotic and progressive – when in reality it is the antithesis of both, because as Ben Affleck once astutely observed, “Hollywood and the clandestine services both spend most of their time convincing people that something that is not true is, in fact, true.”

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Academy Awards New Diversity and Inclusion Rules do not do Enough to Purge Hollywood of the Evil of Straight White Men

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 13 seconds

If Hollywood wants to become a true woke utopia, it should follow my guidelines to rid itself of the plague of white men.

The Academy Awards have set stringent new diversity guidelines to which all films must adhere by 2024 if they want to be considered for the prestigious Best Picture award.

The new guidelines require films to meet on screen representation standards where at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be either Asian, Hispanic, black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Cinephiles can sleep well knowing that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s movies will still be eligible for Best Picture.

If a film doesn’t meet the actor requirement then it can still pass the test by having representation from those same minority groups along with women, LGBTQ and people with cognitive or physical disabilities or who are deaf or hard of hearing represented in acceptable numbers behind the scenes on the crew, in apprenticeships or internships or in executive positions.

The bottom line is basically if you are a straight white guy in Hollywood you’ve just been served notice that your skill and talents are only needed for as long as it takes to train your female or minority replacement.

As someone who has long felt that hiring people based on their talent and skill was a devout evil, I for one welcome our new diversity and inclusion overlords and want to let them know that as a straight white male I could be useful in sniffing out other straight white men in Hollywood trying to scheme their way into being considered a worthy minority.

La La Land being La La Land I’m sure there are a plethora of desperados already strategizing on how to circumvent these new rules that will make Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug look like pikers.

As of right now the Academy is saying that the new standards will be enforced by “spot checks” on set….but I am deeply concerned that those “spot checks” won’t be strenuous enough to rid the movie industry of the damned straight white male menace that plagues it.

I have a few proposals to help strengthen inclusion enforcement and assure diversity compliance.

1. I think Academy Gestapo, oops, I mean enforcement officers, should be armed with a standard color chart where they can hold up the color card next to a person and see if their skin color matches the “right” (aka non-white) tone to be allowed to work on a movie. If someone is too light skinned they can immediately be escorted off of the set and counselors can be brought in to soothe the traumatized left in the white male devil’s wake.

2. In order to ensure that no white men ever slip through the cracks, I also propose a partnership between the DNA testing company 23 and Me and the Academy Awards. Everyone working on every movie must be forced to give a DNA test in order to prove their ethnic or racial heritage.

And let’s be clear, we want pure minorities…none of this “my mother is black and Latina and my father is Asian and white” business because that still means the curse of whiteness is coursing through their veins. Any drop of white blood in a person should be unacceptable in Hollywood.

It will also be L.A. law that everyone must carry their DNA papers with them at all times. Failure to have your papers will result in immediate expulsion from the movie industry.

The 23 and Me results could actually become a fun part of Oscar night where an envelop is opened on stage revealing the film with the most diversity, which is then declared Best Picture. I think we can all agree this is how Best Picture should always be determined, not by the antiquated measure of artistic quality and worth.

3. One troubling diversity and inclusion loophole is that some deplorable straight white male could claim to be gay, thus qualifying as a minority. Let it be known throughout Hollywood that just using unorthodox pronouns like They/Them or Ze/Zir will not be enough to prove minority status!

I am sure there is some enterprising young man or selfless older male studio executive out here in Tinsel Town who’d be willing to advance his standing in the Academy by doing special intimacy examinations, preferably on camera, to see if these white men are “gay enough” to be allowed to work.

Obviously the Academy should hire me as a turncoat consultant, but if they don’t I’m already getting deviously entrepreneurial by hoarding hearing aids that I can rent out on the white market for $200/a day to other straight white men so that they can claim to be “hard of hearing” just to keep their grueling gigs as gaffers.

My sincere wish is that Hollywood succeeds in curing itself of its straight white male pandemic. Straight white men, be they Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis or regular working Joes, have stained cinema with their straight white maleness for long enough.

Somewhere there is a deaf, transgender Indigenous actor signing the phrase, “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up!” Let’s hope these new diversity and inclusion rules make They/Them into the biggest star in the universe and the dream of a woke Hollywood utopia relentlessly churning out cinematic mediocrity into a reality.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Worm Has Turned

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 02 seconds

Back in 2011 I attended the USC-UCLA football game on a Saturday night at the LA Coliseum. Me and my companion - the incomparable Lady Pumpernickle Dusseldorf, were the guests of my brother and sister-in-law for the game.

The first hurdle to attending a game at the Coliseum is to find safe parking.

After driving up and down various Coliseum side streets, we noticed that all the homeowners were offering parking on their lawn, driveway and the sidewalk in front of their house for a fee. This exercise in capitalism was a robust business and families were able to cram eight, nine and ten cars onto their property at $50 a vehicle. Not a bad money maker.

We settled on a spot, parked and paid and as we prepared to walk to the stadium we were approached by a rambunctious man who was very animated, spoke very quickly and reeked of alcohol. He introduced himself to us, machine-gunning out his name in near incoherent fashion. As far as anyone could tell his name began with a “W” and so my sister in law, in as kind hearted a manner as possible, tentatively asked, “Warren?”.

It was made decidedly clear that the name wasn’t “Warren”, but clearly enunciated to be…”WORM”.

Worm was a consummate salesman. He was basically in the insurance business, no doubt unlicensed…and his pitch was simple…he pledged to “make sure nothing happened to our car” for a nominal fee.

In L.A, most particularly in bad neighborhoods, and the area surrounding the Coliseum qualified, crime is an ever-present possibility if not likelihood, so Worm’s business model was extremely sound. It seemed to me that what Worm was really saying was that if we gave him $15 he wouldn’t break into our car….which, again…is a very sound business model.

Pressed for time, we relented and agreed to Worm’s proposal.

In the midst of finalizing our transaction Worm quickly ran off to confront a car driving down the street. It wasn’t clear what transpired between Worm and the driver, but whatever it was, Worm returned in a fury.

He was shouting emotionally to anyone and everyone that could hear that the driver of the car had “called me out by name"!” Apparently calling someone out by name, whatever that may mean, was a serious violation of the code of conduct in this particular area.

Worm kept frantically repeating that phrase in agitated credulity like it was some sort of drunken mantra.

“He called me out by name!”

“He called me out by name!”

Regardless of all of the sound and fury, we finally paid Worm and went to the game and watched the Trojans obliterate the Bruins. A good time was had by all.

When we returned to our car, Worm was nowhere to be found, but he was certainly good to his word as our vehicle had not been touched. If Worm was on Yelp I would’ve given him a positive review.

The reason I tell this drawn out tale is because I thought of Worm yesterday when the PAC 12 cancelled football games for 2020.

The cancellation of college football wasnt surprising to me, as I have previously written how I thought the season just couldn’t and wouldn’t happen.

What made me think of Worm was that while no college football is sad for the college athletes and fans who’ll miss out on their sport, it is financially devastating for the people on the fringes who survive on the crumbs of the sport…like Worm and all of those home owners turned parking lot entrepreneurs.

USC plays a minimum of six home games a season which means that those parking lot/home owners were pulling in anywhere from $2,000 - $3,000 in extra money a season. That tax-free money may not seem like much, but if you are counting on it in your budget it’s a huge deal if it goes away, and can mean the difference between paying or not paying your mortgage, rent or car payment.

Worm was an independent contractor, and even though his fee was a reasonable $15 (which was on top of the $50 parking fee), he wasn’t confined to just the cars parked at one house. Worm worked the whole block.

I can’t know for sure since I haven’t seen Worm’s tax returns - and something tells me Worm LLC is based in the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes, but I’d wager Worm was probably raking in at least $300 a game, and probably much more.

For a guy like Worm, losing out on $1,800 or more from his yearly budget is catastrophic.

Not surprisingly, Worm and the parking lot/homeowners are not going to be receiving any government subsidies for their lost revenue…they are just shit out of bucks and luck.

The parking lot entrepreneurs and Worms of the world don’t just live and hustle in Los Angeles. Every college town has a hidden infrastructure of people making money when the local team plays a home game. There are Worms in cities and towns like Ann Arbor, Columbus, State College, Madison, Berkeley, Seattle, Pullman, Eugene, Corvallis and on and on and on.

The side hustle t-shirt salesmen, food vendors, parking lot attendants, security guards and various other people, are taking a huge financial hit with the cancellation of Big Ten and Pac 12 college football. And the chance of that pain spreading to the cities and towns of the Big 12, SEC and ACC seems pretty likely if not inevitable.

I am not arguing here that the college football should happen, I don’t even remotely think that. All I am doing is shining a light on the mostly unseen suffering that is going on across America as a result of the coronavirus.

I think it is important to remember that a lot of regular, working and lower class people, like Worm, who were already hurting a great deal, are in for a whole lot more pain as the fallout from coronavirus continues.

Once again, things are going to get much worse before they ever get better.

©2020