UFO Week - Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown (MGM+) - A Documentary Review

BEYOND: UFOS AND THE UNKNOWN

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. One of the very best UFO documentaries I’ve seen. Highly informative and insightful. Well worth watching whether you’re a seasoned ufologist or a newbie to the topic.

It is day three of UFO Week here at the home office and things got off to a decidedly bumpy start with two less than stellar documentaries in day one and two.

Thankfully, day three is a gem.

The documentary today is Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown, a four-part documentary miniseries from JJ Abrams’ production company Bad Robot that released it’s first episode on October 27th and its last episode on November 8th.

Bad Robot released their first UFO documentary back in 2021, simply titled UFO, and I found it to be professionally made but underwhelming in a style over substance kind of way.

Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is not underwhelming in the slightest. Simply said, it is exquisitely made, abundantly researched, and one of the very best documentaries on the subject I have ever seen.

The documentary series, which runs roughly four hours long in total, hits upon a myriad of angles related to the UFO topic. It examines it scientifically, historically, politically and spiritually.

If you’re looking for a murderer’s row of UFO experts Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is the documentary miniseries for you.

The stellar first episode opens up with a bang with Dr. Gary Nolan, an esteemed medical professor at the prestigious Stanford University, speaking about his scientific and medical work with various intelligence agencies on deathly serious UFO-related topics.

It then dives into the bevy of sightings and experiences of Navy pilots who witnessed and recorded their interaction with various entities in the last twenty years…resulting in the Gimble and Go-Fast videos made famous in the New York Times article of 2017 that brought the UFO topic into the mainstream.

This episode features prominent Naval personnel like former pilot Ryan Graves, Rear Admiral Tim Galudet, as well as Leslie Kean, the journalist who wrote the NY Times piece in 2017, and Christopher Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense – and now prominent UFO disclosure advocate.

Also examined are the maze of various UFO programs in the Pentagon over the years and the mind-numbing acronyms that go along with them. As well as the very complex political situation around the subject, which is explained by Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who describes the military’s handling of the UFO situation, “duplicitous and inappropriate.” Wow.

Episode two delves into the history of ufology and features a who’s who of UFO heavy-hitters, like the godfather of ufology, Jacque Vallee, and the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried, PhD Hal Puthoff.

Also explored are the early days of ufology, including Donald Keyhoe’s important work and the curious case of J. Allen Hynek.

One of the most important things discussed in this episode is how it is the Navy pilots who are reporting UFO encounters, with nary a peep from the Air Force. The reasons why this might be are fascinating, not the least of which is that the intelligence agencies take a large chunk of the Air Force budget for black projects, so they are deeply intertwined with the Air Force…and not the Navy.

The other big topic in episode two is Whitley Strieber and alien abduction. Strieber, who was a novelist who was allegedly abducted in the 1980s in upstate New York and wrote a best-selling book about it titled “Communion”, was a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of regular people across the country to come forward with their abduction stories in letters to him after he published his book.

Strieber’s story is an intriguing and compelling one, and he is a terrific spokesperson - articulate, humble and serious.

This leads into episode three and four which feature Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of philosophy and religion at Rice University, who has begun to gather UFO source material from Strieber and Vallee among others in one place so that scientists and academics can do serious study of the subject without ridicule. He has also has begun conferences on esoteric subjects that brings together experts and experiencers to discuss once taboo subjects academically and scientifically.

Episodes three and four delve deeply into the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of UFOs and what they may be beyond physical objects, and what they may mean to science, philosophy and humanity going forward.

Episodes three and four are so rich with deeply serious and thoughtful discussions on elevated esoteric matters that they are worth watching over and over again…as is the rest of the series.

For seasoned followers of the UFO topic, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a gloriously rich documentary that not only informs but seriously challenges.

For newcomers to the subject, this documentary is a great starting place if for no other reason than to give a brief glimpse at the scope and scale of the subject matter, and to do so with a seriousness that it deserves.

The biggest problem with Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is that it is very difficult to find. The documentary is currently only available on the streaming service MGM+. Not only do I know no one who is a subscriber to MGM+, I myself had never heard of it until I went looking for Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown. That’s not a good thing because unless if you’re a UFO nerd like me, you wouldn’t know this documentary series exists, and therefore won’t ever stumble upon it unless you explicitly are looking for it.

Hopefully it will eventually become available to rent through Amazon or Apple in the future, but for now the best thing to do to see it is to sign up for MGM+…which will give you a free week before it’s month to month subscription at $6.99 kicks in. Watch Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown during your free week…in fact I’d recommend you watch it twice, like I did…and then cancel your subscription before you actually have to pay.

The bottom line is this…whether you’re a ufologist or a newbie, Beyond: UFOs and the Unknown is a must-watch documentary miniseries if you want to have a deeper understanding of the UFO phenomenon and topic. I highly recommend you put in the effort to find and to watch it because considering what is going on in our world at the moment, arming yourself with as much knowledge as you can is a very good idea.

©2024

Conclave: A Review - Committing a Cinematic Cardinal Sin

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A well-crafted and well-acted film that ultimately condemns itself to hell with an inexcusable plot twist that is so inane as to be infuriating.

Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan (adapted from Robert Harris’ book of the same name), tells the story of Cardinal Lawrence, a man struggling with his faith who must navigate palace intrigue in the Vatican as the College of Cardinals assembles to elect a new pope.

On the surface, Conclave has a lot going for it. For example, it stars a cavalcade of top-notch actors, with Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence, Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini, John Lithgow as Cardinal Tremblay and Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes among the cast.

In addition, it is directed by Edward Berger, whose last film, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), was a phenomenal, Academy Award nominated piece of work, my favorite of that year because it was so beautifully shot and masterfully executed.

On a personal note, as a Catholic myself (I’m not a good one…but I definitely am one) who has visited the Vatican on numerous occasions, I find the subject matter of a conclave in the wake of a Pope’s death, and the pomp and circumstance and politicization and jockeying for positioning that takes place, to be extraordinarily compelling.

And speaking of politics, in the wake of the US presidential election, Conclave is perfectly positioned to have something interesting to say about elections and liberals versus conservatives and the power of convictions and possibilities of backlash.

This is all to say that Conclave, which was released in the U.S. on October 25th and is still in theatres, had me in the palm of its hand even before I sat down in the theatre to watch it.

And yet…it failed to capitalize on all of its advantages and, in fact, alienated me in such a profound way with an excruciatingly egregious and inane plot twist, which I found to be a mortal moviemaking sin and entirely unforgivable.

In order to avoid spoilers, I will not reveal the specifics of the plot twist but will only say that it occurs in the final ten minutes or so of the film and is so contrived, bizarre, atrocious and appalling, and is such a grievous dramatic error, and so narratively unsound, that it ruined everything good about the film that led up to it and completely scuttled the good ship Conclave.

But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? Truthfully, it was pretty good.

The film is well shot by cinematographer Stephane Fontaine, who uses a soft light and wonderful composition to often times create scenes reminiscent of Caravaggio’s great works.

Fontaine is aided by the spectacular work of the set and costume designers who masterfully recreate the distinct look and feel of the Vatican and the Cardinals’ outfits.

In addition, the entire cast all do tremendous work.

Ralph Fiennes in particular is outstanding. His Cardinal Lawrence is the Dean of the College of Cardinals and must wrangle the Cardinals to come together to vote for a pope and make sure everything is on the up and up…and it is never quite clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

Fiennes is a supremely gifted technical actor whose skill is as good as anyone working today, and he brings all of those skills to bear as Cardinal Lawrence, a man who is struggling with his faith and his self.

An Oscar nomination, and even a win, could and should be in Fiennes future for his work in Conclave.

The supporting cast are also excellent.

Stanley Tucci is as reliable an actor as there is and he brings a subtle power to portrayal of liberal Cardinal Bellini that is enjoyable to behold. Tucci expertly embodies the illiberal liberal who is enthralled by himself more than humanity.

John Lithgow’s Cardinal Tremblay is a character that in lesser hands would’ve been forgettable, but here, Lithgow never breaks and lets the audience off the hook, so even after the film has ended, you’re still wondering if he’s a mistreated martyr or an exquisite liar.

And Isabella Rossellini has a small role as Sister Agnes, but every time she is on screen she crackles with an incandescent light and life that is undeniable.

But despite all of the magnificent artistry on display in the form of the acting, cinematography and costumes and set, Conclave commits too egregious a sin to ever be forgiven.

That sin, which is not venial sin but a mortal one, is the cheap, absurd and unearned plot twist that turns a compelling Catholic mystery and thriller into a pandering and pathetic cinematic exercise that feels like it deceived and betrayed you and stole two hours of your life.

For Catholics, Conclave will hold some appeal because it is a look behind the curtain of something familiar but still mysterious, namely the inner working of the Vatican and the conclave. In this way the film is compelling for Catholics…until the plot twist…which not just many, but I would say most, Catholics will find at best annoying, and at most infuriating (I’m in the infuriating camp).

Non-Catholics will find the majority of the film impenetrable for its disorienting maze of Catholic-ness. For example, I’m not even sure I can ask my podcast partner Barry, who is not Catholic, to watch this movie because he’s not going to know, or care, about all the Vatican and Catholic stuff that made at least the premise of the film interesting to me.

Regardless of all that, the bottom line is that I simply cannot, and will not, recommend Conclave to readers because the plot twist near the end eviscerates any artistic good the film achieved which led up to it.

If you’re interested in watching a challenging yet entertaining piece of Vatican/Pope artistry, I recommend you go back and watch The Young Pope (2014) series on HBO starring Jude Law. That overlooked, off-beat, exquisitely avant-garde series is very insightful and spiritually invigorating.

And if you’re just looking for a great story of Catholicism and Catholic priests, I highly recommend you check out Xavier Beavois’ 2010 film Of Gods and Men. It is a extraordinarily moving and spiritually insightful piece of work.

Both The Young Pope and Of Gods and Men are everything Conclave should be but ultimately isn’t. Go watch them, and skip Conclave…I certainly wish I had.

©2024

The Fabelmans: A Review - The Naked Truth Is That Emperor Spielberg Has No Clothes

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terrible, self-indulgent, truly awful film that features poor performances, an abysmal script, and dreadful direction.

This past year has been a boon for self-indulgent film directors and a bane for movie audiences, as auteurs have shat out a bevy of sub-par autobiographical movies about their childhoods and the magic of cinema.

First there was Alejandro G. Inarritu’s atrocious Bardo, followed quickly by James Gray’s artistically anemic Armageddon Time, and then there was Sam Mendes’ universally panned Empire of Light (which, to be fair, is less blatantly autobiographical), and finally there is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

I’ve seen all of the above except for Empire of Light. What has been alarming is that each of these films I have seen has gotten progressively worse than the one I saw before it. Armageddon Time is shlocky, politically correct garbage, but Bardo is simply an astonishing cinematic atrocity. Bardo is supremely awful, but it’s at least visually and narratively ambitious if not audacious, which is in stark contrast to Spielberg’s newest flatulent film The Fabelmans.

The Fabelmans describes itself as a coming-of-age drama, co-written by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, that chronicles aspiring filmmaker Sam Fabelman (a stand in for Spielberg), a precocious young man in love with moviemaking, as he navigates his childhood and teen years growing up with a scientific father, Burt, and an artistic mother, Mitzi.

The Fabelmans is easily the worst of the Spielberg’s late-stage movies, which is quite an accomplishment considering the garbage he’s churned out over the last twenty years or so. This film is, quite frankly, so bad as to be an utter embarrassment. I watched a screener of the movie with my wife and we laughed out loud numerous times AT the movie, but never with it. The movie is such an amateurish, after-school special level production that we literally stopped it on multiple occasions and turned to each other and asked “what the fuck?”

At one point in the film, aspiring director Sam Fabelman is watching the footage of a movie he’s shot with his Boy Scout troop, and he shakes his head and mutters to himself in disappointment, “Fake. Totally fake.” Too bad Spielberg didn’t have the same discerning eye at 76 that he did when he was 14 as The Fabelmans rings so egregiously phony that I actually pondered “how could Spielberg watch this and agree to release it?”

There are so many scenes and sequences in this movie that are simply mindboggling for how appallingly awful they are. Just when you think the worst scene is behind you a new cinematic and dramatic atrocity steps in to take its place.

There’s the dinner scene which is staged and acted like the worst high school play you’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. Then there’s the masturbatorial scenes where audiences of Boy Scouts and family are overly amazed to the point of ecstasy at Sam Fabelman’s “brilliant” movies that aren’t brilliant. And then there’s the ultimate cringe worthy scene where Mitzi Fabelman does her best Corky St. Clair “Penny for your Thoughts” from Waiting for Guffman imitation as she “dances” in a see-through nightgown in front of a campfire and car headlights while on a camping trip.

Then there’s the scene where Sam edits the footage of this camping trip and discovers a family “secret”, which is shot like it’s from a bad pre-teen show on Disney Channel. Then there’s the scene where family friend Benny gives a camera to Sam as a going away present, which is staged with all the grace of monkeys having a shit fight at the zoo. Then there’s the scenes of gay, neo-Nazi, Schindler’s List wannabe, anti-Semites who bully Sam in high school which all feel like they’re from the worst episode of Happy Days you’ve ever seen. And on and on and on.

There is literally only one scene in the entire film which crackles with any life or dynamism, and that’s the last scene of the movie. This exuberant scene only goes to remind how badly mismanaged the dismal and dull preceding two-hours and thirty-minutes truly were.

Spielberg has always been addled by his addiction to a saccharine sentimentality, and The Fabelmans is no exception, except here the sentimentality is, to reference another Christopher Guest movie, turned all the way up to 11. Unfortunately, this sentimentality has blinded Spielberg to the stark lack of craftsmanship across the board in this movie.

John Williams score and Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography are banal, underwhelming and shockingly second-rate. Tony Kushner’s (and Spielberg’s) script is so inelegant and so lacking in cohesiveness and humanity, as to be cinematic malpractice.

Speaking of cinematic malpractice, there’s a scene in the film where Judd Hirsch, who compellingly plays a sort of crazy-genius grand-uncle, is spewing contrived pieces of wisdom to young Sammy Fabelman, and yet throughout the scene you can see his mic pack bulging through his wife beater t-shirt. This is a $40 million movie, not some $1,200 student film…how the hell does that level of shoddiness make it to the screen?

The performances are just as abominable as the rest of the work on the film.

Michelle Williams is an actress I like, but her Mitzi, featuring a haircut from hell, is one of the most hollow, disingenuous and grating pieces of acting I’ve witnessed in recent years. Everything is so mannered and so contrived that it feels like watching a toddler ham it up in grandma’s clothes to entertain the family after rowdy Thanksgiving dinner.

Paul Dano is an actor I greatly admire, but his performance in The Fabelmans is so vacuous and devoid of any inner life or intention as to be remarkable. Dano is dead-eyed as he mechanically utters his lines like he’s auditioning for a job at either a wax museum or a mausoleum.

And just when you thought the acting couldn’t get any worse…Seth Rogan shows up. Good lord. Seth Rogan is to acting what a dirty diaper is to ambience.

On top of all the bad acting, every character is extremely unlikable (the same is true in Armageddon Time and Bardo…why are director’s families so repulsive?). Early in the film, Mitzi, for some incoherent reason, drives the family towards a tornado and all I could do was hope that they would all be thrown miles away and end up a red stain on the dashboard. Once that didn’t happen, I was left praying for a pack of coyotes to come along and maul them all in their sleep, or a gas leak or a septic tank explosion, to take them out and put me out of my misery.

There’s also a very strange and frankly very ugly strain of anti-Christian sentiment that rears its head about two thirds of the way through the film. I’m not someone who ever cares about this sort of thing but Spielberg goes out of his way to demean and belittle a Christian character in the movie, and explicitly mock her religion. The treatment of this girl and her Christianity is nasty and mean-spirited and totally out of place with the tone of the rest of the film. It’s the equivalent of what the gay Neo-Nazi anti-Semites do to the Sam Fabelman character when they call him ‘Bagelman’ and demand he apologize for killing Christ. In other words, it isn’t clever or insightful or amusing, it’s just vicious and small-minded. That Spielberg, who is allegedly a man of faith (he’s made quite a show of his connection to Judaism over the years), would demean, disparage and denigrate the lone character of a differing faith in his film and gleefully embrace this repellent but culturally acceptable prejudice, speaks volumes about his lack of character.

The Fabelmans has been a major box office flop, as it has only made $25 million against a $40 million budget. But Spielberg didn’t make this movie to make money, he made it to win an Oscar….and he might just succeed.

It's a testament to Spielberg’s iron grip on Hollywood that this movie, this dreadful, no-good, really bad movie, is nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Judd Hirsch).

Spielberg’s power over Hollywood and the lack of intellectual integrity among critics, also accounts for why the movie is adored by most critics (92% critical score Rotten Tomatoes). But don’t be fooled by the vacuous opinions of these sycophants and philistines.

The reality is that the once great Emperor Spielberg, who gave us cinematic marvels like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, has no clothes.

The naked truth for all to see but few will admit, is that The Fabelmans is an embarrassing and humiliating failure of a film. To claim otherwise is either dishonest, delusional, or both.

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©2022

Is TV Too Woke?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Is TV too woke?

As someone who works with a lot of producers, writers and directors who all privately tell me that if their TV project isn’t woke in conception and rigidly diverse in execution, then it won’t ever move forward, the answer is eye-rollingly obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the epidemic of wokeness is just as virulent across the pond in the UK TV world as it is in Hollywood and New York.

Proof of this was evident at the Edinburgh TV Festival panel discussion of TV professionals unironically titled “Diversity of Thought: Is TV Too Woke?”

At the discussion, Ash Atella, the producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, admitted, “I’m in a lot of meetings now where people tell me, ‘This will never get on because it’s not woke enough.”

The reality is that any sentient being with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think, can tell you that TV is so awash in wokeness as to be hysterical.

Whether it be ideologically biased, identity-obsessed news coverage, or entertainment featuring the performative absurdity of a black Anne Boleyn, the obscenity of white male erasure in Marvel’s What If?, or incessant LGBTQ cheerleading, the trend is clear, the woke revolution is most certainly being televised.

What’s interesting about TV’s woke affliction is that while it’s obvious to regular people, many industry insiders are either afraid to speak publicly about it or blind to it.

A specially commissioned Ipsos Mori survey supports this notion, and shows that the TV industry in the UK is wildly out of step regarding wokeness compared to the viewing public. The survey found that 62% of British TV viewers believe political correctness on TV has gone too far, while only 19% of TV industry professionals agreed. It also revealed that 40% of viewers were proud of the UK, as opposed to 20% of TV professionals, and that 23% of viewers were ashamed of the British Empire while 63% of TV insiders shared that sentiment.

Obviously, TV professionals live in an alternate universe to audience members, and that is reflected in the lack of ideological diversity we see on our screens. But TV doesn’t care about ideological diversity, only in the surface diversity of identity.

The Egyptian-born Atella, who is a big proponent of diversity in TV, gave voice to the reality of the pro-diversity agenda and its effect when he told the panel, “I’m amazed how fast the white people have thought, ‘We can’t get on television’, that’s come in hard and fast in the last two years, and it’s a bewildering experience to be in those meetings after 15 years of the opposite. Now white people think there’s no place for them.”

Well, “the white people” think there’s no place for them in the culture because news channels consistently label them evil and entertainment endlessly denigrates them.

The corporate behemoths that run Hollywood have made it very clear too that white people, straight white men in particular, are not welcome in the industry.

For example, Disney and Amazon have made their worship of all things “diverse and inclusive” official company doctrine with insidiously specific identity quotas that above all target reducing straight white males from the creative and production process.

The same is true of the Academy Awards, which have made racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation box-ticking, as well as straight white male exclusion, mandatory, in order to be eligible for awards contention.

The woke bias of other panelists in Edinburgh, such as Louisa Compton, Head of News, Current Affairs and Sport at Channel 4, was also exposed, as was a shocking level of contempt for the audience.

Compton first claimed that being woke is benign as it literally means, “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone, which seem like fairly important principles.”

Compton heads a news division and the fact that her fidelity is to the subjective principles of “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone” as opposed to searching for the objective truth, is alarming but illuminating.

Compton did admit that wokeness can “alienate some audiences who feel that the world is moving on faster and leaving them behind” and also claimed, “I don’t think anyone in TV would be surprised to hear that a lot of the people who work [in the industry] think differently to the audiences we’re making progress for.”

Broadcast journalist Mobeen Azhar shared a similar holier-than-thou attitude when speaking of the type of shows needed to “move forward the people who think PC’s gone mad, because it hasn’t.”

To Compton, Azhar and their ilk, wokeness is the proper religion populated by the evolved and the pious, and they and their fellow TV professionals are working hard to make “progress for” and “move forward” those knuckle-dragging barbarians in the audience who feel left ”behind”.

Wokeness is now the state religion and entertainment and news its propaganda wings, brimming with missionaries like Compton and Azhar, filled with self-righteous superiority and evangelical zeal.

To these people TV is just an indoctrination machine used to do the public service of spreading the good news of the woke gospel to help spur evolution among the filthy, backwards proles.

So, is TV too woke? If you don’t think so then either you don’t watch TV or you’re a self-involved, delusional TV executive suffering from a severe case of stage 5 wokeness. Hopefully it’s the former and not the latter, as that’s the decidedly healthier and more enlightened choice.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Riz Ahmed says Hollywood under-represents and toxically portrays Muslims...but he isn't telling the whole truth

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

The Oscar-nominated British actor and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the US’s University of Southern California (USC) have jointly published a study that’s long on complaints and short on facts.

Riz Ahmed, the first Muslim to be nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, is spearheading an initiative to increase the visibility of Muslims in film and eradicate toxic stereotypes in Muslim characters.

As evidenced by his stellar work in, among others, the films Nightcrawler and The Sisters Brothers, the mini-series The Night Of, and his Oscar-nominated portrayal in Sound of Metal, Ahmed is one of the finest actors around, and he seems to be a very thoughtful artist and man.

Unfortunately, on reading ‘Missing and Maligned’, the study by Ahmed’s Left Handed Films and USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, it becomes apparent that his noble venture is a deeply disingenuous one.

The study obviously started with its conclusion, that Muslims are under-represented in film, and then intentionally limited its investigation and cherry-picked its evidence to make it appear that its preconception was accurate.

The fatally flawed study focuses only on the top-200 grossing films from 2017 to 2019 in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. It also fails to look at those on any streaming service, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, which are among the biggest producers and distributors, and didn’t examine representation in TV shows.

Its disingenuousness is clear when it declares that Muslims make up 24% of the world’s population, but represent only 1.6% of speaking characters in films. This is a deceptive statistic, as the Muslim populations of the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand combined actually constitute roughly 1.5%. In other words, Muslims are slightly over-represented in film in comparison to their population percentage in the countries measured.

The study also gets specific about these individual countries. For example, it decries the fact that the US films on which it focused featured only 1.1% of characters who were Muslim, despite the fact the US has a Muslim population of… 1.1%. It also finds but fails to highlight that Australia actually features more than twice as many Muslims in its films, at 5.6%, than there are Muslims in its population, at 2.6%. And, according to the study, the UK and New Zealand, with their 5.2% and 1.3% Muslim populations, represent Muslims in film to the tune of 1.1% and 0%, respectively.

But, again, limiting the metric to just these four countries as opposed to the English-speaking film industry’s target audience, the entire Anglosphere – the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand – is deceptive. For instance, if you tally the Muslim population in the Anglosphere, it is 1.5% of the overall population, which is slightly less than the combined percentage of Muslim characters in films in the four countries examined in the study.

The second part of Ahmed’s complaint, which focuses on the toxic stereotyping of Muslim characters, is certainly more compelling, given that vacuous ethnic caricatures are one of Hollywood’s trademarks, but even on this slam-dunk topic, the Annenberg/Ahmed study is shallow, vapid and lop-sided.

For example, in a section titled ‘Modern-day Muslim Characters are Rare’, it uses statistics that reveal that 48.9% of Muslim characters are shown in “present-day settings”. Is slightly less than 50% now considered “rare”? Indeed, the “rarity” claim is even more absurd, as the study also finds that 11% of those characters were featured in scenes “in the recent past”, meaning 59.9% were in scenes in the present or recent past and 40.2% were from “the historical or fantastical past”. These sorts of statistical and rhetorical shenanigans only undermine Ahmed’s credibility.

Another odd study topic, titled ‘Disparagement is Directed at Muslim Characters’, lists words and phrases directed at 41 primary and secondary Muslim characters, such as “terrorist”, “Paki” and “fundamentalist”. The obvious counter to this is that, if films did not show the sometimes vile treatment and harassment of Muslims, then Annenberg and Ahmed would instead accuse them of ignoring Islamophobia.

Further undermining Ahmed’s argument are statements from Ahmed himself. According to the BBC, “Ahmed recently said he enjoyed the fact that the religion and ethnicity of his character Ruben in ‘Sound of Metal’ was not mentioned at all in the movie.”

So, Ahmed wants more Muslim representation in film, but is glad not to be representing a Muslim in a film? Why didn’t he want Ruben to be Muslim? Wouldn’t that have normalized the featuring of a Muslim on screen?

As an Irish Catholic, I totally understand Ahmed’s frustration with under-representation and negative portrayal in film, as Hollywood seems incapable of portraying anyone of faith – regardless of which faith – as anything other than alien or villainous. But Annenberg/Ahmed needed to prove their intellectual integrity by diving into the uncomfortable topic of which ethnic or racial groups are over-represented on screen and even behind the scenes of the film industry.

The pat answer would be white people. They make up 76.3% of the US and 86% of the UK population, yet, in 2018, represented only 69.1% of characters in films. So, which group or groups should have their representation in film decreased to make room for the Muslims Ahmed fails to prove are under-represented?

Until Annenberg, Ahmed and the rest of those raising representation issues acknowledge and address that awkward question, they and their claims will be viewed as disingenuous and short on rigour. If they want to be taken seriously when it comes to under-representation and mis-representation, they need to do more than just churn out a deceptive piece such as ‘Missing and Maligned’, which misses the mark and maligns the intelligence of its readers.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021

Final Account: Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 58 seconds 

New Nazi documentary ‘Final Account’ is a powerful and prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age

Luke Holland’s film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary German’s in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that it’s easy to label our enemies as Nazis…but the true search for evil should begin with a look in the mirror.

The new documentary Final Account is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Director Luke Holland, whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust and who himself died of cancer in 2020 after the film’s completion but before its premiere, goes on to prove Levi’s thesis.

Holland began production in 2008 and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project, and his bare-bones, oral history approach, works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.

Holland’s subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one becoming a member of Hitler’s elite body guards, the Leibstandarte.

Their recollections regarding the holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admitted the egregiousness of the crime but doubt its scale. And one, a former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.

This former bodyguard of Hitler says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should’ve been deported and not exterminated. He’s so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because “then I would dirty myself”. His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasn’t a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.

Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.

Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.

None of these revelations are met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter of fact-ness.

The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.

The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the sight of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.

After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems they’re resistant because they think he’s lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear they’re actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German and having fought for Germany.

This scene is electrifying because it’s the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to “don’t let yourself be blinded”.

Werk’s warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it – the “not-see” disease, is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. “Not seeing” the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.

The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York attacking Jews, blacks viciously attacking Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighers being held in Chinese concentration camps.

This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate American.

This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of “functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” which populate the Nazi nightmare of Final Account.

Final Account is not a great film, it is somewhat derivative in style as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps, but it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.

It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in Final Account will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

A Decaying Culture Diminishes the Value of Life

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In a culture obsessed with serial killers and murder stories, it is the state-sanctioned violence we ignore that is most corrosive

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has me questioning my choices in entertainment, but it’s the brutal actions of my government over the years that have done more to create a society desensitized to the value of life.

In the wake of the grisly murder of 33 year-old Sarah Everard in London earlier this month, there has been much debate about how to make women feel safer.

For example, the rather radical idea of a 6 p.m. curfew for men has been discussed. Considering that men stuck at home will just marinate in our morally twisted media which features a plethora of programming that highlights men killing women…that might not make women feel any safer.

Having just finished watching the Yorkshire Ripper documentary on Netflix, I couldn’t help but wonder if the prevalence of such gruesome subject matter in our culture cheapens the sanctity of life and thereby inspires killers.

Our culture’s fascination with violent death can often intentionally or unintentionally transform into a celebration of people who kill. In our fame-obsessed, reality-tv world, being famous and infamous are now virtually synonymous, and it doesn’t matter how you get the spotlight, just that you do. By lavishing our attention on murdering monsters we often turn them into celebrities.

I’m not immune to the lurid appeal of a serial killer story, but it feels like a chicken and egg debate pondering if I watched the documentaries on the Night Stalker and the Yorkshire Ripper because Netflix made them or did Netflix make them because they knew I’d watch them?

The most interesting serial killer narratives are the ones that explore not so much the serial killers but our obsession with them.

For example, Zodiac is one of David Fincher’s best movies as it tells the true story of Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist who turns into an obsessive Zodiac Killer researcher. Fincher mining our fear of becoming obsessed with the Zodiac Killer rather than our fear of the Zodiac Killer is what makes the film so captivating.

Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter dives even deeper into that theme as it follows two FBI agents as they interview serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz and Charles Manson in order to try and understand how they think. Ultimately, the brilliance of the show is that it mirrors its audience by being obsessed with the minds of serial killers.

But does immersing oneself in the crimes and mindset of a killer do damage to our individual or collective psyche?

It is much too simplistic to argue tv shows and movies about serial killers transform men into murderers.

It’s more accurate to say that the moral guardrails of our culture, most notably religion, have so decayed and been so diminished, that there seems no counter-balance to the darker things that naturally intrigue us. In other words in our fallen world there is no flicker of illumination to give us respite from the relentless darkness.

These serial killer narratives once felt cathartic and even psychologically healthy when contained within a culture with clear moral and ethical boundaries that acknowledged the precious nature of life. Now that these moral and ethical boundaries have blurred, and the religious foundation for them has been removed or revealed to be fraudulent, these serial killer stories now feel much less cathartic and much more toxic.

The result of this is, as killer John Doe tells us in Fincher’s iconic Seven, “We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it is common, trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night.”

This is true of our culture as news and entertainment are inundated with murder, mayhem and depravity morning, noon and night.

Whether it’s scenes of attacks on Asians, or cops brutalizing civilians, or “mostly peaceful” violent protests, or documentaries on The Night Stalker or Nazis, we are perpetually force-fed a toxic media stew leaving our bellies bloated with bile and barbarity.

It is unimaginable that the culture’s consistent mantra of “if it bleeds it leads” is healthy, as it destabilizes the weak-minded, desensitizes us to the value of life and dehumanizes all of us.

Nearly a decade before the flag-waving pornography of the Iraq War’s “shock and awe” bombing campaign, Oliver Stone’s under appreciated Natural Born Killers (1994) skillfully explored this idea of a violent culture creating murderers and a malignant media transforming them into celebrities.

It is not surprising that a culture that made media sensations of Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez and Charles Manson, celebrated more “respectable” serial killers like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld when they unleashed their carnage.

It seems to me that the media’s glorification of the industrial scale, state sanctioned, military industrial complex murder machine does more to damage our collective psyche and diminish our sense of the preciousness of life than stories about lone murderers.  

I’m less worried about the psychological effects of a serial killer documentary than I am about America’s ambivalence regarding their war crimes committed in Yemen.

I’m less worried about Seven inspiring a lunatic than I am about the U.S. and U.K. killing people in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran.

I’m less worried about Ted Bundy’s body count than I am about the body count of Bush, Blair, Obama, Trump and Biden.

The murder of Sarah Everard is a tragic symptom of the disease of indifference to the sanctity of life that ravages our culture. But the majority of blood on our collective hands is not just a result of watching too many serial killer movies but from turning a blind eye to the violence done in our name to innocent people across the globe.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice - A Review

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

 MY RATING: 3.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT - This intimate, gut-wrenching glimpse at the lengths that parents will go to keep their children, and hope, alive…is a surprisingly poignant portrait of familial love and grief.

In Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice, filmmaker Pailin Wedel masterfully documents the compelling story of the Naovaratpong family, comprised of father - Dr. Sahatorn, his wife Nareerat and their teenage son Matrix, who suffer the terrible loss of their beloved two year-old daughter Einz from ependymoblastoma, a rare and aggressive brain cancer.

During Einz’s illness, her father frantically uses his science background (he is an engineer) to try and learn on the fly and discover a cure for his ailing daughter as she deteriorates.

After a dozen surgeries and 20 chemotherapy and radiation treatments, it becomes readily apparent that time is running out for little Einz. In response, Sahatorn then turns his attention to cryogenics, in the hope that he could freeze his daughter after death, in order to one day re-animate her when a cure for her disease is found.

Immediately following Einz’s heart-breaking demise, doctors from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation go about cryogenically freezing her. Once that process is completed, Einz’s body is sent from Thailand to storage in Arizona.

This story sounds like some bizarre science fiction, but Hope Frozen masterfully turns this strange tale into a morally and ethically complex story that is intensified by the emotional power of grief.

In addition, the film raises a plethora of profound philosophical questions, but to its credit it never presumes to know the answers.

The film ponders what is consciousness? Is consciousness attached to the body? Are memories kept in tact when someone is cryogenically frozen? Is that frozen body really a person or just a collection of flesh and bones? Can death be scientifically defeated? Will cryogenics even work? Can people be re-animated in the future? Will a cure for cancer ever be found?

These questions are made even more complicated by the family’s fervent faith in science coupled with their spiritual belief in Buddhism. This results in the family grappling with issues such as will freezing Einz stop her from reincarnating? And is cryogenics just imprisoning Einz’s soul in a lifeless body?

The most intriguing member of the Naovaratpong family is the son Matrix, a smart and sensitive young man haunted by his sister’s death.

At his father’s prodding Matrix is a scientific genius that dedicates his life to finding a way to bring his sister back to life. Ever the big brother, he even becomes a novice Buddhist monk in an attempt to try and protect his dead sister’s soul.

Like his mother and father, Matrix will never shed the painful burden that is the death of Einz. The Naovaratpong’s simply can’t let go…of their daughter, of the dream of their daughter’s future and of their grieving wound.

By cryogenically freezing Einz, the family freezes themselves into a perpetual state of hope and grief…this keeps Einz fresh in their minds. Their hope and grief are all they have left so they do not want to let them go. As long as hope for her return and grief for her loss are frozen in place, Einz lives on.

As the film progresses, the story takes on multiple twists and turns that makes for interesting viewing – particularly a scene where Matrix calls home after a trip to America, but the most fascinating part of the film is the love for Einz at the core of it.

You can question the family’s decision to cryogenically freeze their daughter and their quest to keep the hope of her alive in the face of death, I know I did, but what I never did was question the purity of their motives or the profundity of their love.

As a parent it is impossible to watch Hope Frozen and not have compassion and empathy for Sahatorn, Nareerat and Matrix. Their love for Einz is exquisitely beautiful to witness even when it is wildly contorted by grief and despair.

The family’s devotion to science in the form of cryogenics in the hope of overcoming death is no different than any other faith taking center stage in an existential crisis. Faith is our shield against the slings and arrows of life and the inevitability of our own annihilation.

The Naovaratpongs wrap themselves in the cloak of science in order to maintain the illusion that Einz will rise from the dead, just as a Catholic like myself clings to that same delusion that death can be conquered through God’s love and power.

This need to believe in something, anything, to make the colossal pain of grief, and the terrifying prospect of the eternal abyss of death, subside, is all too human, and is strikingly highlighted in Hope Frozen.

In conclusion, Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice is a deeply moving documentary because it reminds us that life is fleeting and that love isn’t everything…it’s the only thing.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Crime of Critical Race Theory Indoctrination in Kindergarten

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 11 seconds

The Orwellian indoctrination of kindergarten kids with Critical Race Theory is outrageous and must be stopped

Woke teachers and school administrators are waging a culture war for the minds of kids as young as four by inculcating them with toxic social justice teachings.

This summer I got an unpleasant initiation into the culture war when, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, my 5 year-old child’s K-8 public charter school here in Los Angeles went from an academic institution interested in preparing students for the workplace and college to an ideological hot bed devoted to promoting Critical Race Theory over all other subjects.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a philosophy of hyper-racialization that looks to radically transform our “inherently racist” society, including children. Under CRT, Martin Luther King’s dream is abolished as racial identification is mandatory and white children are taught self-loathing and black children to embrace victimhood. Like a religion, it is unfalsifiable, elevates subjective experience above objective reality and crumbles under intellectual scrutiny.

A shameless example of CRT indoctrination in action is that the very first lesson taught to my child’s kindergarten class this autumn is “how to be an activist”.

Merriam-Webster defines activist as - "a person who uses or supports strong actions (such as public protests) in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue." My child’s school decided to perniciously redefine “activist” as “someone who notices that a system is unfair to another person, group of people, or animals and then creates a new system that ensures fairness for every person, group of people, or animal.”  

Redefining “activist” is as Orwellian as it gets. Words have meaning and meaning matters, for instance calling an ass an eagle doesn’t make it sprout wings and fly. But the mendacity doesn’t stop there. The school also teaches the four traits of an “activist”, which they claim to be “Observe. Ask questions. Have Empathy. Show compassion.” These positive traits are more defining of a good neighbor or good friend…rather than “activist”.

Contorting the meaning of activist to suit an ideological need and claiming that all “activists” have “empathy” and “show compassion” is the kindergarten equivalent of teaching “war is peace”, “freedom is slavery” and “ignorance is strength”.

Do the “activists” of the Westboro Baptist Church, Antifa, or KKK “have empathy” and “show compassion”? Some of the greatest “activists” (using the Merriam-Webster definition) in history - Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Osama Bin Laden, are not exactly profiles in empathy and compassion.

George Orwell once wrote, "if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought". It seems obvious that CRT has corrupted the language used by my child’s school, and that corrupted language is intended to corrupt the thoughts and minds of young students.

This intentionally deceptive “activist” lesson runs throughout the school year and is accompanied by the “activist song”, sung everyday to the tune of “row, row, row your boat”. The lyrics are… “I am an activist, I look and I observe, I ask questions and find out, what has been unheard  -  having empathy, helps me understand, I can make a change, working hand in hand.”

This isn’t education - this is blatant indoctrination. The school isn’t teaching children how to think but rather what to think.

The school claims its mission is to develop “critical thinking” but does misinforming children about the definition of “activist” spur critical thinking? I’ve asked the leadership of the school this question…as well as for their specific definition of “equity” and “anti-racism”, terms they frequently espouse? Does “equity” mean “equality of opportunity” or “equality of outcome”? Does “anti-racism” mean “opposing discrimination in all its forms” or “discriminating to benefit minorities”? These questions have been entirely ignored.

I also asked if my child would face discrimination at the school, and the principal and CEO steadfastly refused to answer that question too…which unfortunately seems like an answer unto itself…one that may carry legal liability.

The fact that this tax-payer funded charter school which, according to reports, just received between $2 and $5 million in PPP funds from the federal government, refuses to say it won’t discriminate against a 5 year-old, is quite an indictment and reveals the ethical rot at the center of CRT and the catastrophic error the American education system is making by embracing it.

At best CRT is an intellectually flaccid and insidiously vacuous ideology that focuses on “unlearning” alleged “implicit bias” at the expense of learning the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. At worst, it is a malevolent, mendacious and cancerous cult that demands discrimination against some children under the guise of “equity”.

Parents should be in charge of their children’s moral and ethical education, and if parents want CRT taught to their kids, let them teach it at home. Just like I wouldn’t impose my Catholic faith upon other people’s children, I don’t want their CRT cult imposed on mine.

Many parents privately tell me they’re horrified that CRT is being taught in kindergarten, but are reluctant to speak out for fear of being labeled “racist”. This is part of the “social justice” game, where people are shamed into silence and compliance with scurrilous labels. But parents must screw their courage to the sticking place and fight back now because the war for children’s minds is being waged and teacher’s unions, school boards, woke faculty and administrators are moving fast and pushing hard to make CRT the default foundation for all education in America.

Indoctrinating children with CRT is akin to systemic child abuse as it steals innocence, twists minds and crushes spirits. Parents must move heaven and earth to protect their children, and they can start by coming together and aggressively rooting out CRT from their schools by any and all legal means necessary.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

New HBO Max Teen Comedy UNpregnant Seems to Suggest Abortion is Nothing but a Barrel of Laughs

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds

UNpregnant appears to ignore the moral complexity of abortion in favor of promoting an insidious amorality on the issue. 

UNpregnant is the controversial new abortion buddy comedy movie set to premiere on HBO Max on September 10th.

The film, based on the novel of the same name, tells the story of Veronica, a pregnant 17 year-old girl, and her friend Bailey, as they go on a wild and whacky road trip from Missouri to New Mexico so that Veronica can get an abortion.

In its trailer, UNpregnant sells itself as a zany road picture where hilarity ensues when a goofy odd couple of teenage girls steal a car and try to hop a train on their epic odyssey down the yellow brick road to abortionland.

The road picture narrative is a long time Hollywood staple, think Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with their numerous “road to” musical comedies of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s…except in UNpregnant, Crosby and Hope are teenage girls crossing state lines to get an abortion. Hilarious!

It is easy to see why pro-life advocates are up in arms over UNpregnant as the trailer makes the film appear to be a piece of pro-abortion agitprop specifically designed to antagonize them by making light of abortion and demonizing Veronica’s Catholic parents as “Jesus freaks”.

2020 has been a banner year for decidedly pro-abortion films with UNpregnant, the critically acclaimed drama Sometimes, Always, Never, Rarely, and the indie dramedy Saint Frances, which all have an amoral attitude toward abortion, all being released.

Notice I described these films as pro-abortion and not pro-choice, that is because pro-choice implies a grappling with the moral gravity of the abortion decision, whereas pro-abortion removes any moral dimensions at all, and reduces abortion to being akin to getting a nose piercing.

This amoral approach to abortion is perfectly summed up by Kelly O’Sullivan, writer and star of Saint Frances, who told Time magazine, “I wanted to write a story where it’s a non-traumatic depiction of abortion. It’s ordinary and light and sometimes funny…”

Yes, because if abortion is anything it is ordinary, light and sometimes funny.

Hollywood has not always been so devoid of nuance in its depiction of the extraordinarily complex issue of abortion.

In 2007, Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress all portrayed their female protagonists wrestling with an unwanted pregnancy and highlighting the choice part of the pro-choice position, with each ultimately choosing to not have an abortion.

These films were wildly successful, with Juno and Knocked Up raking in $231 million and $219 million respectively, and Waitress pulling in a respectable $22 million with just a $1.5 budget.

Juno also garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, while winning for Best Original Screenplay.

The commercial and critical success of these films was a result of their mirroring American’s extremely conflicted feelings on the subject of abortion.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans are pro-choice in some form, but as Barbara Carvalho of Marist Poll told NPR, “People do see the issue as very complicated, very complex. Their positions don't fall along one side or the other. ... The debate is about the extremes, and that's not where the public is."

In the thirteen years since Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress hit big screens Hollywood has abandoned the nuance and dramatic complexity of American’s view of abortion in favor of the extremist pro-abortion message of UNpregnant.

Tinsel Town is no longer interested in connecting with as wide an audience as possible but rather prefers to signal their self-professed virtue with cultural propaganda that directly targets underage girls while preaching to the minority of pro-abortion zealots in their midst.

Most troubling for movie lovers is that internal moral conflicts are what make for the most interesting drama and comedy, and to ignore them in favor of self-aggrandizing political posturing is self-defeating for both artists and the movie industry.

An example of a mainstream filmmaker successfully embracing morally complex issues, including abortion, is Knocked Up director Judd Apatow, who has made a career of wrapping moral debates in his signature raunchy humor.

Apatow’s films, which include 40 Year Old Virgin, This is 40, Funny People and Trainwreck, are “conservative” comedies where adult protagonists face moral dilemmas and though tempted to make the libertine choice, eventually make the difficult but responsible one instead.

As Hollywood’s cultural politics become ever more strident, Apatow’s formula, which has made him a gazillionaire, will become anathema in the movie industry and “get woke, go broke” will most assuredly be made manifest in La La Land.

The UNpregnant trailer, which boasts such cringe-worthy dialogue as “it’s my life, my choice” and the insipid tag line “when life gets off track, forge your own path”, makes clear the popular 2007 approach of entertaining adults with moral complexity is now abandoned in favor of indoctrinating kids with extremist agitprop.

Maybe when UNpregnant comes out we’ll discover that it’s a terrific film and more morally complex than its trailer suggests…or maybe it is the canary in the cultural coalmine reflective of how the new, grotesquely woke Hollywood is desperate for its cancer of vapid amorality and decadent depravity to metastasize to the next generation of girls and young women. My bet is on the latter.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes 33 seconds

The woke are winning the culture war and comedy needs to step up and expose these ludicrous fools for their fanaticism before it’s too late.

The Life of Brian, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy back when it was released in 1979, that it was actually banned by some British theatre owners, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X-rating.

An X-rating in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying “Jehovah!”

As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the last forty years, the BBFC now rates The Life of Brian a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.

The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore…and I say that as a practicing Catholic.

Christianity with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature.

That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.

If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this…in most places in the U.S. you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests - which apparently confer some magical and mystical powers of immunity upon attendees.

Meet the new religion…same as the old religion.

Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force they not only obliterated the old religion in The Life of Brian, but also ridiculed the new one too, forty years before it rose to power.

In the film there is a scene - which would never get made in today’s stultifying p.c. environment - that deals with transgenderism.

Set in the Coliseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea…not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front…comprised of Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies), meeting to discuss their goals.

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.”

It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.

“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the The Life of Brian did Christianity…maybe call it The Life of Karen.

Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable p.c. jargon, is a gloriously target rich comedy environment.

Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is Saturday Night Live, and they’re shameless, politically correct lap dogs.

In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python forty years ago, watching SNL’s impotent, flaccid, woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement a hundred years ago.

SNL is so neutered by wokeness, in 2019 they actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter…the horror!

Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring tv and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.

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.

By today’s woke standards they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!!

“On the bright side”…if Monty Python does get crucified at least they’ll go out singing!

The bottom line is this…wokeness must be stopped and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because unlike Monty Python forty years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth…and we are all worse off because of it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

6th Annual Mickey™® Awards: 2019 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: The Mickey™® Awards are much more prestigious than the Oscars, and unlike our lesser crosstown rival, we here at The Mickeys™® do not limit acceptance speech times. There will be no classless playing off by the orchestra here…mostly because we don’t have an orchestra. Regardless… expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 5 hours and 48 minutes.

The ultimate awards show is upon us…are you ready? The Mickeys™® are far superior to every other award imaginable…be it the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Grammy, the Pulitzer or even the Nobel. The Mickey™® is the mountaintop of not just artistic but human achievement, which is why they always take place AFTER the Oscars!

This year has been a fantastic one for cinema with a multitude of outstanding films eligible for a Mickey™® award. Actors, actresses, writers, cinematographers and directors are all sweating and squirming right now in anticipation of the Mickey™® nominations and winners. Remember, even a coveted Mickey™® nomination is a career and life changing event.

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

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

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

Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin...

Ladies and gentlemen…welcome to the fifth annual Mickey™® Awards!!!

Best Cinematography

Joker - Lawrence Sher : Sher was a relative unknown, at least to me, prior to Joker. His work on the film is truly remarkable as he composes really exquisite classical shots and juxtaposes them against fluid shots that in a thrilling dance with lead actor Joaquin Phoenix.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - Robert Richardson : Richardson is one of my all-time favorite cinematographers. His work with Oliver Stone in the late 80’s and early 90’s was revolutionary (JFK for instance). He has proven himself to be a very flexible and adaptable talent and his work in this film is sublime. The last shot of the film, where Leo Dicaprio’s Rick Dalton walks up Sharon Tate’s driveway, is a glorious piece of cinematic myth making.

1917 - Roger Deakins : Deakins is Deakins. The guy is a master, as evidenced by his previous Mickey award for Sicario (2015) and he brings all his formidable talent and skill to bear on the “one-shot” structure of 1917. For all the gimmickry of the one-shot approach, what impressed me so much about Deakins work here is how he was able to continually frame such gorgeous shots while constantly on the move.

Ad Astra - Hoyte Van Hoytema : Hoytema is another of my favorite cinematographers working today. He is already a Mickey Award winner (Dunkirk 2017) and his work on Ad Astra is magnificent. He paints the film with a bleak palette and vivid contrast that accentuates the narrative and is gorgeous to look at.

The Irishman - Rodgrio Prieto : Prieto’s work on The Irishman is superb as he perfectly paints the film with a rather lush and nostalgic sense that contrasts well with his camera movement and framing.

Parasite - Hong Kong-pyo : Hong is someone I am not familiar with…but his work on Parasite is so precise it is a joy to behold. Hong’s greatest strength is in his camera placement, as he uses it as a a way to draw the audience into the narrative while also keeping them at a cool emotional distance.

And The Mickey goes to…Lawrence Sher - Joker : Sher pulls off the big upset going against heavyweights like Deakins, Richardson and Hoytema. Joker is beautifully and artfully photographed and Sher’s work was a major factor in the films artistic success.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Irishman - Steven Zaillian’s ability to contain and focus the sprawling story of Frank Sheeran while keeping things tight and dramatic, is impressive.

Joker - Todd Phillips was able to imbue comic book intellectual property with profoundly insightful political and social commentary. Wow.

The Two Popes - Anthony McCarten created multi-dimensional characters where others would have made card board cutouts. Too bad his director undermined his fantastic writing.

Transit - Christian Petzold adapted a book about the holocaust and made it about modern times. It is chillingly effective in subtly showing the similarities of the rise of fascism then and now.

And The Mickey goes to…Todd Phillips - Joker : Todd Phillips must have sold his soul to the devil because nothing in his prior career would give any indication he was capable of such intelligence and artistry. Now he has a Mickey™®! The world is a wonderful place.

Best Original Screenplay

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - Tarantino is an even better writer than he is a director…which is a staggering thought to contemplate considering his directing greatness. OUATIH is a crackling script that holds on tight…but not too tight that it loses its humanity. Extraordinarily well done.

Parasite - Bong Joon-ho’s script is a whirling and twirling piece of magnificence. As original and well-crafted a screenplay as you’ll find.

Ad Astra - James Grey’s script is the most psychologically mature and resonant of the entire year. It is an utter field day for anyone with any background in Jungian psychology.

A Hidden Life - Terrence Malick brings the spiritual struggles of a anti-Nazi crusader down to earth in the most glorious and profound way.

Ford v Ferrari - James Mangold gives us a rip-roaring script that covers a lot of ground but never loses its way.

And The Mickey goes to…Quentin Tarantino - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Tarantino’s ability to write characters, dialogue and story is unparalleled in modern cinema. Guy is amazing…now he has a Mickey™® to prove it!

Best Supporting Actress

 Margaret Qualley - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood: Qualley, a Breakout Performance Mickey™® Award winner (2017), makes good on her promise and delivers a deliriously intoxicating turn as one of Manson’s seductive minions.

Margot Robbie - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Robbie doesn’t say much as Sharon Tate…because she doesn’t have to. An effervescent and luminous performance that highlights her supreme craft and skill and proves she is way, way more than just a very pretty face.

Park So-dam - Parasite : Park is super sexy cool as the sister who poses as an art teacher. She imbues her character with a certain sense of almost spiritual fatigue cloaked in a devilish charm that is beguiling to witness.

Lee Sun-kyun - Parasite : As the mother of the rich family, Lee is wonderfully funny as her desperation to be worthy and perfect keeps wrapping her tight and unwrapping her too quickly.

Zhao Shuhzhen - The Farewell : Zhao’s turn as an ailing grandmother is delightful for its humor, humanity and power. Zhao’s Nai Nai is no wilting flower, she is both tough and tender…and reminded me so much of my late wee Scottish grandmother I was thoroughly enchanted.

The Mickey goes to…Margot Robbie - Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. The usual suspects complained this film was misogynistic because Robbie’s Tate had a paucity of dialogue, but it’s a testament to her talent and skill that she was able to convey an affecting story with more than just words.

Best Supporting Actor

Brad Pitt - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In an industry with a paucity of genuine stars, Pitt gives the movie star performance for the ages…where women want to be with him and men want to be him.

 Joe Pesci - The Irishman : Pesci is usually plays combustible characters, but his Russ Buffalino is an imposing figure of self-containment. Maybe the very best and most subtle work of his career.

Al Pacino - The Irishman : Pacino brings Jimmy Hoffa to life with a vibrancy and dynamism only he could muster. A truly masterful performance.

Jonathan Majors - The Last Black Man in San Francisco : A finely crafted and glorious performance that is filled with a deep humanity and vivacity.

Sam Rockwell - Jojo Rabbit : Rockwell is an absolute joy to behold as he subtly but magnificently devours scenery as a down on his luck Nazi.

Song Kang-ho - Parasite : Song is the epicenter of Parasite as a man without answers trying to figure out the questions. He is blessed with a face that tells a story all its own.

The Mickey goes to…Al Pacino - The Irishman. Pacino has become a sort of parody of himself in his later years, but his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa was a perfect manifestation of self-defeating tenacity and combustibility that is one of the highlights of his superb career.

Breakout Performance of the Year - Julia Butters : Butters is mesmerizing as the whip smart child actor who works with Rick Dalton as he hangs on to his career by his finger nails. Butters is just a kid but has the presence and magnetism of someone twenty years older. I hope child stardom does not weigh heavy upon her…because down the road she has the opportunity to be very special.

Best Foreign Film

Transit - This is a close-up view of what fascism feels like…and it does not feel good.

A Hidden Life - A profound examination of the spiritual battle a man must wage to save his soul in Nazi Germany.

Parasite - A masterful contemplation of class and family dynamics set in Korea.

Rojo - A terrific under the radar movie that shows the corrosive effects of our old friend fascism as it descends upon 1970’s Argentina.

Shadow - A terrific Chinese Wuxia film with spectacular fights and inventive visuals.

And The Mickey goes to…Parasite - Exquisitely directed with an amazing cast. One of the very best films, foreign or domestic, of the year.

Best Actress

What a dismal year for female performances. I literally cannot think of any actresses worthy of even nominations never mind wins. After a very testy emergency meeting of the Mickey™ council, a compromise was reached.

The Mickey goes to…Florence Pugh - Midsommar. Pugh, a Breakout Performance Mickey Award winner (2017), is on her way to becoming a movie star and her two Mickeys will no doubt only accelerate her ascent.

Best Actor

Robert DeNiro - The Irishman : DeNiro does the very best work of the latter part of his career as Frank Sheeran, the cog in the wheel of the mafia and union who sells his soul to survive.

Franz Rogowski - Transit: Rogowski is just a phenomenal actor and his intricate work in Transit is transcendent for its humanity and honesty.

Robert Pattinson - High Life : Who knew Pattinson could actually act? In High Life he does surprisingly complex and detailed work as a man condemned to be lost in space.

Leonardo DiCaprio - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : DiCaprio has been among the biggest movie stars for decades now…but his performance as Rick Dalton is the very best of his remarkable career.

Joaquin Phoenix - Joker : As precise, dynamic and committed a performance as we’ve seen in years. Phoenix is the best actor of his (and maybe every other) generation and he proves it with Joker.

Brad Pitt - Ad Astra : :Pitt proves himself to be more than a pretty face with a powerfully subtle, skilled and nuanced performance as a man in search of his father. This is easily the very best acting Brad Pitt has ever done.

The Mickey goes to…Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix’s work in The Master (2013) was a gargantuan evolutionary leap for the craft of acting, and his performance in Joker is a powerful continuation of that evolution.

Best Ensemble

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - DiCaprio, Pitt, Margot Robbie, Pacino, Bruce Dern…an absolutely loaded cast that all give top notch performances.

Parasite - This cast overcomes the language barrier and does exquisite work in bringing Bong’s twisted vision to life.

The Irishman - DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci do some very heavy lifting and elevate Scorsese’ late era masterpiece.

And The Mickey goes to…Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - The very best of Pitt, Robbie and Leo is the very best of the Mickeys™®!

Best Director

Quentin Tarantino - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Tarantino truly is one of the great directors of his time, and OUATIH is his very best film . Not a flaw to be found.

Martin Scorsese - The Irishman : Scorsese brilliantly turned this late era gem into a referendum on his entire stellar career and imbued the movie with an existential power than would have been missing in any other auteur’s hands.

Todd Phillips - Joker : Who knew that Todd Phillips, the guy who made The Hangover movies…was capable of such exquisite direction as Joker. This movie is so well conceived and executed it is astonishing.

Bong Joon-ho - Parasite : As detailed, specific and skilled a piece of direction as you’ll find.

James Grey - Ad Astra : Grey finally puts all the pieces together and makes the great movie he’s been striving for for years.

Terrence Malick - A Hidden Life : Malick is a master…and A Hidden Life is a monument to his talent, skill and spiritual inquisitiveness and intellect.

And the Mickey goes to…Bong Joon-ho - Parasite : All of the nominees did extraordinary work but Bong’s direction of Parasite was extraordinary. Parasite is an intoxicatingly detailed, precise and specific master class in the art and craft of film directing.

Actor/Actress of the Year - Brad Pitt : Pitt flexed his movie star muscles in Once Upon a Time and also proved himself to be a formidable thespian in Ad Astra. That sort of high level versatility earns him the Mickey™®. Now maybe women will find him attractive.

Best Comedy of the Year - Jojo Rabbit : Taika Waititi hysterically dons Hitler garb and brings an ecstatic Mel Brooks-ian humor with him to great affect. The film isn’t great...but the comedy parts of it certainly are.

Best Blockbuster of the Year - Joker . Avengers: Endgame was the obvious favorite in this category…and it is a fitting end to this phase of the MCU, but it got out beat by the scrappy lunatic from Gotham. Joker cost $60 million to make and grossed over a billion dollars, and actually made more profit than Endgame and is the most successful R-rated movie of all-time. That is a blockbuster by any standard. The fact that it was a real movie hidden within the cloak of a comic book story, makes it the most unlikely, but most delicious blockbuster in recent memory.

Best Picture

10. Transit - This is such a finely crafted and effective film. I can’t recommend it enough to people who think in the abstract about fascism. The suffocating sense of impending doom is palpable…and unnerving.

9. High Life This ingenious movie can be at times frustratingly French (even though it is in English), but I found it mythologically resonant and dramatically impactful.

8. The Last Black Man in San Francisco A fantastically interesting and entertaining film that tackles a serious subject but never panders or takes the easy road.

7. Ford v Ferrari Good old fashioned Hollywood movie making at its very finest. A captivating tale of men trying to accomplish something great…and overcoming the corporate overlords who kill everything worthwhile.

6. A Hidden Life Malick puts us into the shoes of a man who must choose between Hitler and God…and must face the consequences of his choice. A deliberate, contemplative and deeply moving film that should be required watching for any and all Catholics.

5. Ad Astra This movie is devastatingly profound and it is among the most insightful movies made in recent years about the psyche of men and the meaning of masculinity. It also boasts a great Brad Pitt performance.

4. The Irishman – Martin Scorsese turned the story of a mafia hitman’s regrets into a surprisingly poignant and existentially insightful referendum on his own spectacular career. Seeing Scorsese being Scorsese and meditating on what it means to be Scorsese…is glorious to behold.

3. Parasite – A startlingly original film and one of the most entertaining and interesting dramatic investigations of class struggle and social structure to come along in ages. A brave and unflinching movie that never pulls a punch.

2. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood – A fork in the eye of woke Hollywood, this film is the very best of Tarantino’s career as it is chock full of outstanding performances and crackling dialogue.

1. Joker - The best picture of the year….and also…

The Most Important Film of the Year - Joker

The fact that Todd Phillips, the guy whose previous claim to fame was making The Hangover movies, made the dramatically electrifying Joker is one of the great miracles of modern cinema.

Joker is a deeply profound and insightful film that eloquently and artistically expresses the palpable sense of despair and rage that permeates the consciousness and animates the intentions of the dispossessed in society. Disguising this sentiment within the cloak of comic book intellectual property was a stroke of genius.

The elites loathed Joker because it didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, but rather had the temerity to speak the ugly, unvarnished and unnerving truth.

For its efforts Joker made over a billion dollars…and now it earns the equivalent of that in prestige with the coveted Mickey™ Award for Best Picture.

Thus concludes The Mickey™® Awards…SEE YOU AT THE AFTER PARTY!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

It's a Miracle...Hollywood Finds Religion!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

Hollywood is Allowing Catholics Who Are Not Corrupt or Pedophiles to Appear on Screen Again

Hollywood is currently making some surprisingly good Catholic entertainment with a refreshingly traditionalist bent.

As a practicing Catholic and a devout cinephile, I am constantly frustrated that Hollywood rarely gets religion right. Films and tv shows that touch upon Catholic and religious themes are often reduced to being either saccharine adoration in the hands of believing “conservatives” or vacuous vilification in the hands of agnostic “liberals”.

Considering there are 1.2 billion Roman Catholics in the world, and 84% of all people believe in one religion or another, it would seem a wise choice for Hollywood to explore Catholic and religious themed stories with much more regularity, artistic integrity and sincerity.

Hollywood and the Catholic Church need not be adversaries, as they have a lot more in common than one might think. For instance, they both have gobs of money and their hierarchies are littered with perverts and pedophiles. I’M KIDDING! As I said, I’m a practicing Catholic…and as my Catholic gallows humor shows…I definitely need more practice because I’m not very good at it.

Truth be told, now is actually a great time to be a Catholic cinephile because that den of iniquity, Hollywood, has recently shaken off its allergy to organized religion and turned its storytelling eye toward Catholicism with a striking spiritual seriousness and cinematic verve.

Tinsel Town’s recent mini-Catholic renaissance began in late November when it dipped its toe into the holy water font with the Netflix film The Two Popes. The movie, which features two compelling performances from Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis respectively, is visually uneven but surprisingly philosophically vibrant.

This was followed in short order by Terrence Malick’s artistically gorgeous and profound film, A Hidden Life, which hit art house theatres in late December and told the story of Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic Austrian farmer turned saint for his conscientious objection to Hitler and the Nazi war machine.

Then in January, HBO premiered The New Pope, which is a continuation of the network’s highly stylized 2016 drama The Young Pope, a fictional account of Vatican intrigue starring Jude Law as an enigmatic Pontiff. The Young Pope and its new iteration The New Pope, are cinematically lush and quite theologically robust shows.

Considering that Hollywood is so reflexively liberal, especially in cultural matters, what makes these three projects so striking, beyond their simply being about religion, is that they shine an unabashedly positive light on traditional Catholic ideology.

For instance, I’m not conservative but even I was reticent to watch The Young Pope when it first aired in 2016 because I assumed it was going to be an intellectually lazy and predictably liberal spin on church matters. Much to my cinephile delight the show has consistently defied expectations, with Jude Law’s character Pope Pius XIII being a brazen crusader for old world traditionalism as an antidote to the menace of new world moral relativity and meaninglessness.

The Young Pope is certainly not reverential toward the Church, and this along with the show’s narrative audacity and occasional racy nature is maybe why some conservative Catholics find it blasphemous. But conservatives who dislike The Young Pope/The New Pope are missing the forest for the trees, as the show is a mature meditation on faith and is extremely respectful to Catholic teachings and belief in God.

The truth is that if conservative Catholics were cinematically literate and culturally sophisticated enough they would understand that The Young Pope/The New Pope is a beacon for potential religious traditionalists converts lost in the storm of pop cultural vacuity and idolatry.

The same is true of The Two Popes, which treats Catholicism, its adherents and God with the utmost seriousness. The debates in the film between Pope Benedict and Pope Francis perfectly encapsulate the present Catholic conundrum and the film goes to great lengths to respectfully highlight both men’s arguments as well as their personal failings.

 A Hidden Life furthers the traditional Catholic cause by showing the faith in action. Protagonist Franz Jagerstatter is the living embodiment of the commitment to Catholic faith and while his story certainly isn’t a happy one, for serious Catholics, it is ultimately a spiritually joyous one.

The entertainment industry acknowledging and exploring Catholicism is remarkable, bordering on the miraculous, as religion is usually either ignored, ridiculed or vilified in Hollywood productions.

This is why I find The Two Popes, A Hidden Life and The Young Pope/The New Pope to be such a breath of fresh air. Religion, particularly Catholicism with its hierarchical structure and global nature, is a veritable gold mine of dramatic potential, and it does my Catholic cinephile heart good to see it being so exquisitely utilized in artistically and spiritually satisfying ways.

Art and cinema are about asking difficult questions and potentially opening hearts and changing minds, and it seems we are currently in a cultural moment where the madness of the world has become so disorienting that even Hollywood is considering the unthinkable, that traditional religion might be of value in trying to make sense of it all.

I am sure, soon enough, Hollywood will revert back to its relentlessly diabolical ways and this glorious mini-Catholic artistic renaissance will be but a faded, distant memory…but for now…I am going to enjoy it in all its glory while it lasts.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

 The similarities between the eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion and the Sparrows cult from Game of Thrones are uncanny.

I have a long held a theory that film and television can be tools of prophecy used to glimpse the future. Here are a few examples that support my unconventional thesis.

In the 1990’s, numerous films, such as Armageddon, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Godzilla and The Siege, showcased the New York City skyline being decimated by one calamity or another. In addition, on March 4, 2001, the X-Files spin-off series, The Lone Gunman, aired an episode where hijacked airliners were being flown into the World Trade Center. Then six months later 9-11 happened and the devastation to the New York City skyline by hijacked planes was all too real. 

Another example was in 2016, when the films Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman reigned supreme at the box office. These films highlighted internecine warfare between superheroes, even pitting the colors red (Iron Man/Superman) versus blue (Captain America/Batman). These movies were released in the spring of 2016 and predicted the contentiousness of the coming November election and the raging of a vicious culture war in its aftermath.

The Handmaid’s Tale was in production when Trump won the 2016 election, and when it first aired in the Spring of 2017 gave voice to liberal women’s fears of patriarchal misogyny under a Trump administration. The show was also a precursor and predictor of the #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017.

Game of Thrones in particular is a bellwether when it comes to entertainment as prophecy. The show’s first episode, “Winter is Coming”, aired in 2011 and that phrase quickly became the series tag line. Billboards warning, “Winter is Coming”, portending an invasion by undead White Walkers and their zombie minions, soon loomed ominously over cities and towns across America. In the ensuing years a metaphorical winter did indeed descend upon the U.S., as the cold wind of political correctness swept across the land while an army of mindless ‘woke’ scolds waged war on free expression and diversity of thought.

Game of Thrones ended this past May, but with every passing day its creator George R.R. Martin looks more and more like Nostradamus. For example, when I saw the recent Extinction Rebellion climate crisis protests, I immediately thought of Game of Thrones.

Why would eco-activists who snarled New York City traffic by supergluing themselves to a boat in Times Square, took a hammer to a government building in London, grounded a flight from Dublin to London, and plotted to use drones to shut down Heathrow, remind me of Game of Thrones? Well, because these fanatics are eerily reminiscent of a group of religious zealots from Game of Thrones called the Sparrows.

If you’ll remember, the Sparrows and their leader, the High Sparrow, came to prominence in King’s Landing after the death of Tywin Lannister. The cult attracted great numbers of followers to their devout way of life, including some royals like Ser Lancel Lannister, who was former incestuous lover to his cousin, Cersie Lannister.

The similarities between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion are numerous. For instance, both groups were born out of noble intentions, as the Sparrows set out to alleviate the suffering of the down trodden, and Extinction Rebellion were concerned about the environment.

Both groups are also religious in nature. The Sparrows ardently worship the Faith of the Seven and brutally torture sinners and violently coerce them to confess, such as Cersei who was forced to do a public naked walk of shame to atone for her sins.

The eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion are a religious cult too, as their members blindly worship at the altar of “scientism”, claim to have a monopoly on truth, demand purity and punish heretics. Extinction Rebellion has also gotten celebrities such as Radiohead’s lead mope Thom Yorke, among many others, to do their own walk of shame and sign a confession admitting to their past climate crisis sins.

Extinction Rebellion even has its own Joan of Arc character in Greta Thurnberg. Thurnberg, a heart felt 16 year-old who suffers from mental and emotional issues, has been held up as an eco-saint and had her passion, youth and innocence exploited as both weapon and shield by cynically manipulative activists.

It should be noted that there are some differences between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion. For instance, the Sparrows are religious ascetics who live a life of monk-like devotion and simplicity in order to save their souls, whereas Extinction Rebellion are not ascetics themselves, but instead insist that everyone else live ascetic lives by giving up their worldly goods such as cars or traveling by plane.

{The Sparrows also work to feed the poor, while in contrast Extinction Rebellion demand that people grow their own food, which would starve the poor since they have no land upon which to grow sustenance. }

Another difference is that the leader of the Sparrows, the High Sparrow, gave up a vast fortune in order to become a member of the religious order, while the co-leader of Extinction Rebellion, Dr. Gail Bradbrook, is a professional malcontent who makes her living through various protest movements with Extinction Rebellion just being the most recent.

While the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion do have differences, the bottom line about both groups is that their true purpose is to usurp power in order to implement their radical agenda.

On Game of Thrones the High Sparrow played a masterful game of political chess setting the Lannisters and Tyrells against one another in order to wrest control of the Iron Throne for himself. The High Sparrow exploited the political ambitions of the Tyrells and the weakness of Cersei Lannister’s impressionable young son, King Tommen, in an attempt to gain power and turn his religious beliefs into royal decree.

Extinction Rebellion’s strategy is equally Machiavellian. Their abrasive tactics of creating traffic jams and airport delays are only going to irritate and aggravate working people, thus creating enemies instead of allies. But Extinction Rebellion doesn’t care about gaining popular support. The movement believes in Gene Sharp’s theory of non-violent action that claims that protest movements only need the support of 3.5% of the population to trigger mass changes. So Extinction Rebellion is using peer pressure and social fear among the elite in the establishment media and the entertainment industry in order to acquire endorsements and donations they believe will assist the movement in reaching cultural critical mass while bypassing populist sentiments.

Extinction Rebellion are just as devious and duplicitous as the High Sparrow, as evidenced by founding member Stuart Basden revealing the movement’s real agenda is not combating climate change but destroying “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “Euro-centrism” and “hetero-sexism/heteronormativity”. In other words, Extinction Rebellion is nothing more than a Trojan horse to normalize and codify into law ‘woke’ hatred of straight, white males in the name of environmentalism.

What is even more alarming about Extinction Rebellion is that investment banks like HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and Citi all share their radical environmental agenda because they see the “climate crisis” as an “opportunity”. These banks also saw an “opportunity” in mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations during the housing bubble. That turned out to be a catastrophe for working class people and so will the Wall Street backed Extinction Rebellion agenda, which will be just another replay of the tried and true formula of stealing from the poor to feed the rich.

I am a committed environmentalist and am not skeptical of climate change science, but I am deeply skeptical of Extinction Rebellion, their intentions and their tactics…and you should be too.

On Game of Thrones Cersei eliminated the plague of the Sparrows in the most explosively spectacular of ways, but paid a steep price by losing her son, King Tommen. Hopefully Extinction Rebellion will go much more quietly into their good night. But if they don’t, and these eco-moralist clowns do impose their delusional environmental agenda, it will be Joker, with its depiction of an angry populist uprising that becomes cinematic prophecy.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2019

Joker: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW.

Joker, directed by Todd Phillips and written by Phillips and Scott Silver, is the story of Arthur Fleck, a mentally-ill, down on his luck clown-for-hire and stand up comedian, who transforms into Batman’s arch-nemesis, the super-villain Joker. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Fleck, with supporting turns from Robert DeNiro, Frances Conroy and Zazie Beetz.

Early Thursday night I put my life in my hands and made the dangerous trek to the local art house to see Joker in 70mm. Thankfully, no angry white incels were laying in wait for me, so I lived to tell the tale of my Joker cinematic experience…here it is.

I went to Joker with very high hopes, but paradoxically, because I had such high hopes, I assumed I’d be disappointed by the film. My bottom line regarding Joker is this…it is a brilliant film of remarkable depth and insight, a gritty masterpiece that is a total game-changer for the comic book genre, and a staggering cinematic achievement for director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix.

Joker is the cinematic bastard son of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of 1970’s New Hollywood, Taxi Driver. Beyond being an homage, it is more an updated bookend to that classic, engineered for the corporatized Hollywood of the 21st century.

The film’s Taxi Driver lineage is hiding in plain sight, as it has similar music, shots, camera angles and even re-purposes the famed finger gun to the head move. Joker’s Gotham, is eerily reminiscent of Taxi Driver’s New York City of the 1970’s, which Travis Bickle aptly describes as “sick and venal”. I couldn’t help but think of my Los Angeles neighborhood when seeing Joker’s dilapidated Gotham, with its garbage piled high on every sidewalk and a layer of filth covering the city. In “sick and venal” Los Angeles, we are much too evolved to have garbage piled high on our sidewalks, no, out here in La La Land, even in million dollar neighborhoods, people are disposable and so we we have them piled high on the sidewalks instead, as homelessness is epidemic. Joker’s Gotham, Bickle’s New York and my Los Angeles also share a deep coating of grime as well as a thriving rat population that is disease-ridden and increasingly bold, both in and out of public office.

Joker’s depiction of Gotham as a Bickle-esque New York is fascinating bit of sub-text, as it is a throwback to a time before Manhattan was Disney-fied and Times Square turned from degenerate porn hub to hub of capitalism porn. Joker is also a throwback to a time before cinema was corporatized/Disney-fied, a pre-Heaven’s Gate age, when filmmakers like Scorsese could flourish and make movies like Taxi Driver, unhindered by suits blind to everything but the bottom line.

Joker ‘s genius is also because it is a “real movie”, a Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy covertly wrapped in the corporate cloak of superhero intellectual property. Unlike the sterile Marvel movie behemoths, which Scorsese himself recently described as “not cinema" and which are more akin to amusement park rides than movies, Joker is, at its heart, a down and dirty 1970’s dramatic character study, for this reason alone the film is brilliantly subversive and a stake into the heart of the Disney Goliath.

It is astonishing that Todd Phillips, whose previous films are the comedies Old School and The Hangover trilogies, was able to conceive of, and execute, Joker with such artistic precision and commitment. Phillip’s success with Joker is reminiscent of Adam McKay’s astounding direction of The Big Short (2015). Previous to The Big Short, McKay had basically been Will Ferrell’s caddie, making silly movies well, but they were still silly movies. McKay’s long term film making prowess is still in question, as is Phillip’s, but that does not diminish their mastery on The Big Short and Joker.

Phillip’s direction really is fantastic, but he is also greatly benefited by having the greatest actor working in cinema as his leading man. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker is an astonishing feat. Phoenix famously (or infamously depending on your perspective) lost a great deal of weight to play the role, and his wiry, sinewy frame at times seems like a marionette possessed by a demon outcast from American bandstand or Soul Train. Fleck/Joker’s madness is seemingly chaotic, but Phoenix gives it an internal logic and order, that makes it emotionally coherent.

Phoenix is a master at connecting to a volatile emotionality within his characters, and of giving his character’s a distinct and very specific physicality. What is often overlooked with Phoenix is his level of meticulousness and superior craftsmanship in his work. Joker is no exception as his exquisite skill is on full display right alongside his compellingly volcanic unpredictability. Phoenix’s subtle use of breath, his hands, as well as his attention and focus are miraculous.

Phoenix is a revolutionary actor. He is so good, so skilled, so talented, that he is reinventing the art form. His work as Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) was a landmark in the art form, and his performance in Joker is equally earth shattering. If he does not win an Best Actor Oscar for Joker, whoever does win the award should be ashamed of themselves for stealing the statuette from its rightful recipient.

Contrary to establishment media critical opinion, Phoenix does not make Arthur a sympathetic character, but he does make him an empathetic one, and one with which we empathize. We don’t feel sorry for Arthur, we feel kinship with him as he struggles to maintain some semblance of dignity in a society allergic to compassion.

Joker was described by its detractors as being “dangerous”, and I can attest that the film is indeed dangerous, but not for the reasons laid out by its critics. Joker is dangerous because it dares to do something that corporate controlled art has long since deemed anathema…it tells the very ugly truth.

Joker has the artistic audacity to peel back the scab of modern America and reveal the maggot infested, infected wound pulsating in agony just beneath our civilized veneer. Joker’s chaotic madness is a perfect reflection of the sickness of our time. Think Joker is too “nihilistic” or “negative”? Turn on a television, read a newspaper or take a cross-country flight, and you’ll see that the nihilism and negativity of Joker are nothing compared to the madhouse in which we currently live.

Arthur Fleck is America, as the country, populated by narcissists, neanderthals and ne’er do wells, has devolved and self-destructed, rotting from the inside out after decades of decadence, delusion and depravity. America is rapidly degrading and devolving, and that devolution is mirrored by Arthur Fleck has he transforms into Joker.

Joker is unnerving to mainstream media critics because it shines the spotlight on the disaffected and dissatisfied in America, who are legion, growing in numbers and getting angrier by the hour. As I have witnessed in my own life, the rage, resentment and violent mental instability among the populace in America is like a hurricane out in the Atlantic, gaining more power and force as every day passes, and inevitably heading right toward landfall and a collision with highly populated urban centers that will inevitably result in a conflagration of epic proportions.

Joker, the consummate trickster, is devoid of politics and ideology and exists only to feed and satiate his own voracious madness. Fleck is an empty vessel and the Joker archetype co-opts and animates him. Fleck, born again as Joker, is adopted as a symbol for the struggles of the angry and the desperate, in other words, Joker is the archetype of our times, a Trumpian figure, who unintentionally inspires others, friend and foe alike, to release their inhibitions and unleash their inner demons. Joker is dangerous because he is an avatar for the rage, resentment and desperation of millions upon millions of Americans who have been forgotten and left behind and are utterly despised by the elite. Joker is both apolitical and all political. The populist Joker is both Antifa and the Alt-Right. Joker is everything and nothing to everyone and nobody all at once. The media in the movie, and in real life, make Joker into a monster, an icon and an iconic monster for the dispossessed, elevating him in the eyes of those desperately seeking a savior.

In a perverted and brilliant way, Phillips and Phoenix make Fleck into a Jesus figure, who as he transforms into Joker, becomes an unwitting Christ/anti-Christ. The line between messiah and madman is a thin one, and depends almost entirely on projection and perspective.

Arthur Fleck, like Jesus, is literally someone who is repeatedly kicked when he is down. Like Jesus, society ignores and despises him. Like Jesus he is berated, belittled and beaten…and yet all he wants to do is make people smile. Like Jesus, Fleck’s birth story is convoluted and lacks coherence.

What makes Phoenix’s portrayal so chilling is that his Fleck earnestly desires to bring joy to the world just like Jesus…and just as Jesus is actually a good magician/miracle worker, Fleck is actually a good clown, filled with energy and purpose. But Arthur soon realizes that there are two jokes at play in the universe…the one where he is the punchline, and the one in his head, of which he is self-aware enough to realize regular people “won’t get it”. Jesus makes the same sort of discovery during his temptations, he hears a “joke” in his head too, but it is the voice of God, and he comes to realize no one else will “get it” either. Fleck and Jesus are presented the same two paths, Jesus takes the one of self-sacrifice and becomes the Christ, and Fleck takes the road of human sacrifice, and becomes The Joker/Satan.

At its core Joker is a character study, and so there is not a lot of heavy lifting among the cast besides Joaquin Phoenix. That said, Frances Conroy, Robert DeNiro and Zazie Beets all do solid work with the material they have.

The film is shot with an exquisite grittiness by Lawrence Sher. Sher pays adoring homage to Taxi Driver by using certain specific camera shots and angles throughout the film. Sher also uses shadow and light really well to convey Fleck’s/Joker’s perspective and his tenuous grasp on reality. Sher, like Phillips, does not have a resume that would make you think he was capable of doing such substantial work, but in the case of these two men past was not prologue.

Joker is one of those movies that reminds you why cinema matters, as it uses the tired and worn comic book genre to draw viewers in, and then sticks the knife of brutal cultural commentary deep into their chests.

Joker has been at the center of of a cultural storm ever since it premiered to a raucous ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September. The film won the Golden Lion (Best Picture) at Venice and was quickly catapulted into the Oscar discussion, which created a fierce backlash against the film from certain American critics and woke twitter. The common refrain from those critics who saw it at Venice, and those who hadn’t, was that the film was “dangerous” because it would incite disaffected white men to become violent. In researching an article I recently wrote about the controversy, I came across a stunning number of articles with the imploring and weak-kneed headline, “Joker is Not the Movie We Need Right Now”. Of course, the converse is true because Joker is exactly the movie we need right now.

The critical opinion of Joker, especially among the critics at influential media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Time, is aggressively negative and dismissive, riddled with a belittling and condescending commentary. The criticisms leveled at the film from these effete establishment critics are obviously contrived, petty, personal, political and entirely predetermined. The amount of intentional obtuseness on display about Joker, its cinematic sophistication and its artistic merits, by these supposed important critics is stunning and revealing.

The critical malevolence toward Joker is undoubtedly fueled by a need to virtue signal and pander to woke culture, and is born out of personal contempt for the filmmaker (who dared defend himself against “woke culture”) and manufactured anger at the subject matter. The poor reviews of Joker by these American critics says considerably more about those critics, their dishonesty and lack of integrity, than it does about Joker. Make no mistake, Joker is a masterpiece in its own depraved way, and the critics who succumb to the myopic social pressure and cultural politics of the moment by reflexively trashing the movie as immoral and artistically and cinematically unworthy, will be judged extremely harshly by history.

In looking at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Joker currently has a critical score of 69 and an audience score of 91. The disconnect between critics and audience on Joker is similar to the disconnect on display regarding Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix stand up special Sticks and Stones. Chappelle’s show was pilloried by critics who were horrified by the comedian’s “unwoke” and decidedly politically incorrect take on the world, as the critical score is currently at 35, while the audience score is a resounding 99. It would seem that in our current age, bubble-dwelling, group-thinking critics in the mainstream media, are no longer interested in artistic merit, cinematic worthiness, skill, craftsmanship or talent, but rather in personal politics, woke ideology, political correctness and conformity, and are dishonest brokers when it comes to judging art and entertainment.

Joker is a watershed for the comic book genre. In the future film historians will look back on this time and say that there comic book films pre-Joker and comic book films post-Joker. There is no going back for the genre. That does not mean that Marvel will immediately crumble and fall into the sea, but it does mean that the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back in. Jason Concepcion and Sean Fennessy at The Ringer recently pondered if Joker is to the superhero genre what The Wild Bunch was to westerns back in 1969. They are not so sure, but I certainly think is as genre redefining or killing as The Wild Bunch. The Disney/Marvel model, post-Endgame and post-Joker, will only see diminishing cultural resonance and relevance, as well as financial returns, from this point forward. The superhero genre will not disappear overnight, but it has begun its long retreat from its apex, and God only knows what will eventually replace it.

In conclusion, Joker is a mirror, and it reflects the degeneracy, depravity and sheer madness that is engulfing America. Joker is an extremely dark film, but that is because America is an extremely dark place at the moment. Joker is unquestionably one of the very best films of the year and should be, but probably won’t be, an Oscar front-runner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. I highly recommend you go see Joker in theatres as soon as you possibly can, as it is must-see viewing for anyone interested in cinema, art or in understanding what is rapidly coming for America.

©2019

Cold War: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic foreign film that is both personal, political and philosophical that boasts tremendous performances from both of its leads.

Cold War, written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a Polish drama set during the Cold War that tells the story of the love between a young singer Zula, and the musical director who discovers her, Wiktor. The film stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor.

Just when I thought 2018 was to be officially designated as cinematically irredeemable, a bunch of foreign films have appeared late in the year that have been a lifeline to artistic redemption. Four of the best movies this year are foreign films I’ve seen in the last month, Shoplifters (Japan), Roma (Mexico), Happy as Lazzaro (Italy) and now Cold War (Poland).

Of course, context is everything and a less gracious interpretation of my adoration of these four foreign films could be that their artistic success is a result of their being in such stark and glaring contrast to the cinematically vapid garbage vomited upon the movie-going public by Hollywood this year. Regardless of why foreign films are so good this year and Hollywood films so bad…the fact remains that it is decidedly so and I will simply enjoy quality cinema without compromise where I can find it.

Which brings us to Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War. Cold War is a beautiful and brilliant film that is both personal and political, poignant and prophetic. Shot in a stunning black and white that highlights a bleak but bold aesthetic, Cold War is both visually striking and dramatically potent.

Pawlikowski, who also directed the Academy Award Best Foreign Picture winner Ida (2014), deftly crafts a lean film that is able to thoroughly tell the story of Zula and Wiktor amidst the wider Cold War that comes in under 90 minutes. Pawlikowski trims all the fat from the narrative and we are left with a strikingly effective and deeply insightful film that flows seamlessly through decades of personal and political history without skipping a beat.

Cinematographer Lukasz Zal masterfully uses the stark black and white to enhance the sub-text and narrative by deftly painting with shadow and light. Zal’s framing is impeccable, as evidenced by his very subtle but extremely effective and polished use of mirrors throughout the film to highlight the difficulty in discerning what is real and what is illusion. There is a shot of an after-concert party with a mirror for a wall that is so ingenious, precise and finely detailed I nearly fell out of my seat.

Pawlikowski and Zal never hit you over the head with their artistic virtuosity, as it is so understated as to be sublime, and creates an exquisite cinematic experience that is not only gorgeous to behold but extremely useful in propelling the narrative.

Joanna Kulig gives a transcendent and mesmerizing performance as the singer Zula. Kulig is a luminous talent and she is blessed with a vivacious, vibrant and voluminous magnetism that is unrelentingly irresistable. Ms. Kulig’s Zula is a wild animal from the hinterlands of Poland and she is as palpably dangerous, untamable and uncontainable as she is volcanically compelling, charismatic and complicated. Zula is a singer of traditional Polish folk songs and jazz, but she has a rock and roll soul as evidenced by her ecstatic and deliriously contagious reaction upon hearing Bill Haley and the Comets in one electric scene.

Ms. Kulig is like a Polish Jennifer Lawrence, stunningly beautiful with a relatable groundedness and charming fearlessness. Simply said, viewers, much like the character Wiktor, are unable to take their eyes off of Zula whenever she is on screen.

Tomasz Kot is equally effective as Wiktor but in much less dynamic ways than Ms. Kulig. Mr. Kot’s Wiktor is much more intellectual than the visceral Zula, but once she awakens the primal nature within him there is no putting it back to sleep. Wiktor is at first a rational man who is securely contained in a distant coolness, but as the film progresses and he gets ever closer to the inferno that is Zula, the ice melts and with it goes Wiktor’s rationalism.

What is fascinating in Cold War, is that the love story of Zula and Wiktor is such fertile ground for very profound political, social and philosophical symbolism. Zula is not just a firebrand from the back woods of Poland, she IS the Polish anima. While she may be swayed from one camp to another, be it the lure of western decadence or the security of Soviet protection, she is ultimately true only to the “folk” of Poland. In this way, Cold War is a meditation on the nationalism that is currently spreading across the globe in general and Europe in particular. Throughout history, Poland may fall under the rule of the Soviets or the West or some other power, but it will never fall under their spell. As Zula and Wiktor show us, Poland is for the Poles, and only Poles can truly understand it…which is true no matter what nation you plug into that statement.

Both Wiktor and Zula find “freedom”, at least as freedom is defined by western capitalism, but they don’t experience it as freedom at all but rather as decadence that is corrosive to their hearts and souls. The “easy living” of the west is a fool’s gold and Zula and Wiktor would rather be prisoners to political oppression in the east than slaves to their own desires in the “free” west. Zula and Wiktor learn that the “lie” of Soviet communism is dreadful, but the even bigger lie of the capitalist west is even more destructive to them.

Zula struggles to survive no matter where they go in Europe because at heart, she is the Polish countryside, and it is only there where she can find transformation and transcedence, and only with Wiktor. Early in the film Wiktor stumbles upon the ruins of a church and discovers giant female eyes painted on the wall that look right through him and watch him wherever he goes. Wiktor then looks up and sees a large round opening where the church roof used to be that reveals the sky. This circle, a symbol of wholeness, is the key to the film, as it reveals that both Wiktor and Zula, must go on their grueling journey of heart and soul in order to complete that circle and be transformed. The circle is atop a Catholic Church because the Catholic Church is the container for the spirit of the Polish people and the Polish anima - Zula. The Catholic archetypes are the ones that resonate in Poland, and Wiktor and Zula need to transcend the limitations of not only the Cold War powers that govern them, but also the religion trying to contain them. Their love is a love of wholeness that is as boundless as the heavens that dance above that whole in the church’s circular roof, but they can only attain it by going through the archetypes of the church.

In conclusion, Cold War is a stunning film about love, loss, identity and artistry that is dramatically powerful and politically poignant. Visually stunning and propelled by glorious performances from its two leads Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot, Cold War is a must see for any cinephile. More conventionally inclined viewers may struggle with the film as, like most foreign films, it is rather existential in nature and is less rudimentary in its storytelling. That said, if you love movies or have a cinematically adventurous heart and open mind, then you should definitely see Cold War.

©2019

Happy as Lazzaro: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful Italian fable that eloquently and poignantly speaks to our modern world and our fallen nature. Be forewarned, it is a foreign film, so those with more conventional tastes may find it a bit odd…but it really is worth giving a try if you can.

Happy as Lazzaro, an Italian drama written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher, is the story of a good-hearted simpleton, Lazzaro, who lives and works in a farming community in Italy that gets turned upside down as the modern world encroaches upon the isolated village. The film stars Adriano Tordiolo as Lazzaro, with supporting turns from Nicoletta Braschi, Sergi Lopez and Alba Rohrwacher.

Happy as Lazzaro is a fable that insightfully exposes the “progress” of 21st century capitalism that has crushed most under its heel and has broken the spirit and stolen the souls of all those fall under its spell.

Lazzaro is exquisitely portrayed by Adriano Tordiolo who imbues the character with a genuine humanity that is impeccably good-hearted without ever being cloying or gratuitous. Tordiolo gives Lazzarro a distinct physicality, his arms hanging straight down by his sides, his posture erect, his heart exposed. Like a rural Italian Chauncey Gardner, Tordiolo’s doe eyed Lazzaro is immune from cynicism and illuminated by an eternal optimism.

Lazzareo is at once a holy fool, a saint and a martyr. He is the memory of innocence and the hope of salvation. His entry into the modern world is reminiscent of the scene from The Brothers Karamozov where Christ meets The Grand Inquisitor, echoes of which are seen when Lazzaro is thrown out of a Catholic church and the sacred music follows him. Lazzaro, like Christ, is a shepherd who is unwanted in our cruel and dehumanized world.

Writer/director Rohrwacher deftly tells this gem of a story and allows the narrative to unfold at a leisurely but effective pace. Rohrwacher exquisitely creates Lazzaro’s idyllic world, and then masterfully pulls the rug out from underneath it and the viewer.

In the latter portion of the film, Rohrwacher expertly uses tempeture, both climate and color, to indicate how Lazzaro’s world has changed, from the warmth of the old village to the foreboding bleakness of the modern city.

Lazzaro’s village, Inviolata, is a symbol of both innocence and a quaint version of shared feudal exploitation. The simplicity of the earlier part of the film is then overtaken by the dark inevitability in the latter part of the movie. Everyone from Inviolata is violated and learns from this violation to spend their time out of that Garden of Eden violating others. Rorhwacher shows that the old ways of exploitation in the village have metastasized and are now global in scale, but the modern world is actually much worse because its exploitation strips the comfort, security and solace of community away from people. The modern world turns everyone into a hustler and grifter, afflicted with a narcissistic myopia focused solely on their own survival at the expense of others.

As the film teaches us, capitalism is exploitation upon exploitation, a cancer of competition where everybody is exploiting somebody…the lone exception being Lazzaro who only gets exploited but never exploits, for he is in this world but not of it. Only saints like Lazzaro can keep their integrity and humanity in tact under capitalism, but integrity and humanity is no protection from the corrupting beast of the free market or the wolf of mankind’s darker nature.

Lazzaro stands guard against the wolf, he communicates with the wolf, he knows the wolf and the wolf knows him. Lazzaro is not afraid, he is immune to fear, which is epidemic in capitalism and is also its fuel…fear of lack, fear of other, fear of self…keep us all on in a state of pain and capitalism sells us the snake oil to soothe our discomfort. Lazzaro is devoid of all of these fears and, even though he is a tireless and selfless worker, is an existential threat to capitalism.

Lazzaro is a saint, literally the last good man, an innocent whose soul and spirit is pure even though he has been exploited many times over. In the modern capitalist world all things are violated and violate…the church, government, business, people. It is no coincidence the climactic scene of the film takes place in a bank and shows that the spiritual corrosive of capitalism turns everyone into wolves…hungry and insatiable and afraid…always on the hunt for the weaker, needing to exploit…in the end, the actual wolf is replaced by us.

In conclusion, I was deeply moved by Happy as Lazzaro as it is a powerful fable that insightfully speaks to our current spiritual void and how capitalism feeds our darkest impulses. Lazzaro is like a character from a dream who comes to remind us who we really are but have long forgotten, it will do you good to spend two hours with Lazzaro trying to remember. Happy as Lazzaro is currently on Netflix and I whole-heartedly encourage you to watch it.

©2018

The Sisters Brothers: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An at times funny and also surprisingly moving French, art house “western” that boasts a career best performance from John C. Reilly and a very stellar cast.

The Sisters Brothers, written and directed by Jacque Audiard, based upon the book of the same name by Thomas Bidegain, is the story of the Sisters brothers Eli and Charlie, assassins in 1850’s Oregon. The film stars John C. Reilly as Eli and Joaquin Phoenix as Charlie, with supporting turns from Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed.

The Sisters Brothers is a strange film that American audiences, conditioned by Hollywood to expect certain things from certain genres, will probably find frustratingly obtuse. On the surface, The Sisters Brothers is a standard western, with all the revenge fueled shootouts and horse-ridden treks through wilderness you’d expect from that genre, but buried just beneath that veneer of conventionality is the gold of a rich and complex foreign art house film and biblical parable.

I had no idea what to expect from The Sisters Brothers, as far as I knew it could be a slapstick western in the vein of Jack Nicholson’s Goin’ South or something, so I just went along for the ride on which the film took me, and I am ever so glad that I did.

Director Jacques Audiard is a terrific filmmaker, having made three distinctive and at times fantastic French films, A Prophet, Rust and Bone and Dheepan. Audiard’s directing touch on The Sisters Brothers, his first English language film, is exquisitely deft, and his artistic vision and cinematic aesthetic are a perfect match to turn the western genre on its head.

The film is a comedy, of sorts, with the Sisters brothers Eli and Charlie acting like an old married couple, bitching and bickering with one another to much hilarity. But the film is also gripped with an existential and hereditary darkness that gives it a resonant dramatic power.

The film is elevated by four outstanding acting performances. The best of them all is John C. Reilly, a remarkably versatile actor, who gives a nuanced and complex performance as Eli which is the very best of his stellar career. Eli is the more thoughtful of the Sisters brothers, who has a gentle heart and caring soul. Reilly imbues Eli with a palpable sensitivity that, like the character, evolves and reveals itself over the duration of the story. Reilly’s ability to make Eli a genuine human being, rather than a buffoonish caricature, gives The Sisters Brothers a dramatic grounding that is the heart and soul of the film.

Reilly’s Eli is the archetypal feminine in the movie, which is symbolized by his relationship to the spider. In Jungian psychology and in Shamanic traditions the spider is representative of the feminine and of the weaving of fate. Eli has a fateful and intimate encounter with a spider in the film and literally gives birth to a brood of spiders.

Eli’s kindness extends not only to his troubled younger brother Charlie, but to his second rate horse, with whom he grows a deep bond that is quite moving. It is Eli’s feminine nature that is both his greatest strength and also his crippling weakness as it has led to his being usurped and passed by his more archetypally masculine brother for the position of leading brother in the family.

Joaquin Phoenix is one of the best actors on the planet, and he is in the midst of a terrific year in cinema. Thus far in 2018, Phoenix has given stellar performances in both You Were Never Really Here and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, and he keeps that streak alive as the combustible Charlie in The Sisters Brothers.

Phoenix is an actor that vibrates with a viscerally chaotic and unnerving unpredictability, and his Charlie is the perfect avatar to highlight that talent. Phoenix’s performance is one of understated brilliance as it is filled with some startling moments of primal anguish and pain.

Phoenix’s Charlie is a deeply wounded soul carrying a grievous original sin, but who has been elevated to the “right hand” of the Father not in spite of that sin, but because of it. Charlie’s great weakness is that he is so wounded he can never mature and evolve enough to survive in such an exalted position. In other words, crazy will only get you so far, but to be fair to Charlie, he comes by his crazy honestly.

What makes both Phoenix and Reilly shine is that they are blessed to have each other off of which to play. Eli ingests spider energy and is transformed, whereas Charlie slays a bear, a symbol of the power of the unconscious and the dawning of a personal spring. Eli’s encounter with the spider leads to transformation, whereas Charlie’s encounter with the bear is symbolic of his breaking of the connection with the unconscious and with that connection goes his chance at self-realization and transformation.

Jake Gyllenhaal gives a solid performance as John Morris, a tracker and wannabe Thoreau who, like the Sister brothers, is trying to understand and deal with the affliction that his father passed on to him. John, Eli and Charlie are all victims of the archetypal father wound, and the malady they carry unconsciously guides them through their lives and propels the film forward. Gyllenhaal’s Morris is more aware of his ailments than the Sisters brothers, or at least becomes more aware of them, which leads him to question the entire purpose of his life.

Gyllenhaal is always at his best when he is understated, and his John Morris is a perfectly subdued and technically proficient performance. Gyllenhaal never pushes or prods with Morris, he simply let’s him be, and that decision makes for a solid contribution to the film.

Riz Ahmed plays Hermann Kermit Warm, a chemist who is hunted by the Sister brothers. Ahmed is absolutely fantastic in the role. Ahmed has a, pardon the pun, warmth about him as an actor that is captivating on screen and that trait serves him well in The Sisters Brothers. Ahmed’s Warm is a Christ-like figure, who radiates a near-defiantly fervent gentleness that is remarkably compelling.

Besides being a biblical and Jungian parable, the film is also a political, religious and economic parable. Mr. Warm is a pied piper for a socialist (and Christ-like, but not necessarily Christian) utopia which is alluring to the idealist and dreamer in all of us. In contrast, the uber-capitalist corporate town of Mayfield is held up as a bastion of deception and debauchery.

The film also touches upon the need for a dismantling of a patriarchy that produces such twisted and tormented forms of masculinity as the Sisters brothers and much of the other violent men in the film. The patriarchy in its old form, namely the character the Commodore, needs to die for these men to ever have a chance to be free from their afflictions and to find the utopia that deep down they have yearned for their entire lives.

The religious aspects of the film are glaring for those with eyes to see them, for instance there is the brothers grooming of each other like apostles or the men anointing themselves with oil in a pseudo-baptismal ritual before they wade into the river. There is also the connection between Mr. Warm and Eli’s horse…who are both, in their own way, beasts of burden, and the viewer should keep a keen eye out for the similarity in the eyes of Warm and the horse at pivotal moments in the film.

The Sisters Brothers is a film with a multitude of layers, each one more interesting, revealing and insightful than the last. If you are planning to see the film, put aside your cultural conditioning and your expectations for a western, and instead watch the film as if it were a dream. Keep a vigilant eye out for spiders, bears, raccoons and the plethora of other signs and symbols that show the way to the film’s profound message.

The Sisters Brothers opens with a shout in the silent darkness of the Oregon night, but then there are flashes of light that splinter that darkness ever so quickly. That opening scene is the story of The Sisters Brothers, for it is a film about alchemy, where finding the gold in the darkness is an act of transformation which leads down the road to redemption. I never expected to be, but I was deeply, deeply moved by The Sisters Brothers, and found it be a profoundly satisfying cinematic experience. I wholly recommend you suspend your expectations and go see this film in the theatre, it is well worth the time, money and effort.

©2018

The Existential Catholic Crisis

Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes 66 seconds

I was born and raised a Catholic. I am of that particular guilt-ridden strain of Catholicism known as Irish Catholicism. I wouldn't say I am a devout Catholic or even a good one, in fact, I am a pretty terrible Catholic...but I am still a Catholic. I have had a tumultuous and often-times tenuous relationship with the church throughout my adult life, an example of which is that I would often, in a futile attempt to be witty, tell people I was raised Catholic but that it was in remission.

In 2002, the revelations of priests buggering boys in Boston (my home parish at one point in time - I even met Cardinal Law once...he was a pompous ass and his breath smelled demonic...I am not kidding) erupted as a cataclysmic scandal, but having grown up in the church I knew for a long time something was seriously amiss, and thus that sex abuse scandal came not as a shock to me but as confirmation of my hunches.

SYMPTOMS

Why did I suspect that something was deeply wrong in the Catholic church? Well, for starters, nearly every priest I ever met was a horrible human being. I don't mean they were bad priests, which they were, but bad people.

An example, in my Catholic high school the lone priest there among the nuns was Father Hughes. Father Hughes was a flamboyantly gay man who obviously joined the priesthood in order to escape the perceived demon of his sexuality. How do I know Father Hughes was gay? Well...there were some dead giveaways...for one he was a walking stereotype to the point of caricature of a gay man most signified by his pronounced and audacious lisp and mannered style of speech. Another sign was that he often wore a satin black cape with a pink interior and described this signature fashion choice as being "understated elegance". Another solid clue was that he had a schoolboy crush on the star of the basketball team...so much so that he bought the young man, who was a very devout Catholic and a genuinely good guy, a car for graduation. Yes...you read that right...Father Hughes, who wasn't exactly rolling in dough as a priest at a Catholic high school, bought a male student a car for his graduation. Part of how I knew something was terribly amiss in the Catholic church is that no one, not a single person, said anything about this oddity at all. There were quizzical glances exchanged, but no one dare say aloud what they were really thinking if they even let themselves think it.

The thing that really struck me most about Father Hughes was that he was a vicious and mean spirited man. As stated, it was obvious Hughes was gay, but he would go out of his way to torment and torture the boys in school who seemed effeminate. This was the late 80's, so no one was "out" as gay at my school, but there were plenty of kids who "seemed" gay and sure enough in later years came out as gay, but in high school they were just struggling to survive being different. Father Hughes would constantly and brutally belittle them and mock their masculinity. It was a glaring case of the pot calling the kettle black...but no one said or did anything...most especially the coterie of nuns, many of whom had their own glaring issues...like the principle of the school who took a vow of poverty but bought a new Cadillac, earning her the well-earned and accurate nickname of Sister Anna Cadillac.

After Father Hughes left my school he went to another parish and proceeded to either overspend or steal, depending on who you believe, to the tune of nearly a million dollars....like I said, a good guy. After Hughes was abruptly replaced, the Church claimed that there were no criminal acts committed in this financial debacle, but as we know the Church never likes to admit scandal when it can be swept under the rug.

Father Hughes wasn't alone though, as the vast majority of priests I have known have been total sons of bitches and not even remotely resembling good ambassadors of Christ here on earth. They were all petty, vindictive and arrogant bastards who were the antithesis of Christ's teachings. The exceptions are the ones who have stood out, men like Father Ken, Father LeRoy and Father Felipe, all kindhearted and genuinely decent men...the rest of the priests I have known have all carved out a special place in hell for themselves.

Besides being terrible people, the majority of priests I have met are also more than likely gay...now that doesn't mean they are terrible because they are gay, just that they are simultaneously terrible and gay. Which brings us back to the scandals. The thing that is often muddied in regards to the Catholic church sex abuse scandals is that the majority of the incidents are not pedophilia where priests are abusing little children. The majority of sex abuse has been perpetrated upon males (81%) and the overwhelming majority of those abused boys have been older (adolescent/pre-teen) boys. The fact that most victims of abuse are adolescent boys is a terribly uncomfortable one for more liberal Catholics (and liberal people in general) who are disposed to view any question of a priest's homosexuality as a homophobic attack and who reflexively defend gay people for instinctual identity/tribal reasons.

DISEASE

I consider myself a Thomas Merton/Dorothy Day/Anthony DeMello Catholic, and so for years I have been lumped in as a "liberal Catholic". But after years and years of these scandals from Boston to Baltimore to Ireland, Australia and Mexico and everywhere in between, I think that the labels liberal and conservative Catholic no longer apply...there are only Catholics who are brave enough to see the truth and do something about it, or there are Catholics who prefer the warm embrace of their own self-satisfying and often self-righteous echo chamber.

I greatly disliked Pope John Paul II and found his canonization to be a repugnant public relations move because he was, in fact, an accomplice to sex abuse when he turned a blind eye to it, just as he did with the sins of American capitalism. John Paul II's vehement anti-communism forced him to be blind to the spiritual cancer of American capitalism and also caused him to accept the atrocities committed at the behest of America (El Salvador/Nicaragua etc.) even against his own priests and nuns, in order to be stalwart against the Soviet Union.

I also disliked Pope Benedict, as I found him to be little more than a garish hypocrite as he, like Father Hughes, was obviously as gay as Liberace but was vehemently opposed to homosexuality in the world.

I like Pope Francis, at least in theory. When Pope Francis came to the U.S. in 2015 and spoke at the Capitol building, he mentioned four people, two of which were Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day (the others were Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.), two people that some American Catholics consider at best unworthy and at worst heretics, but that I greatly admire. Pope Francis seemed to bring a new energy and light into the Vatican upon his arrival and I welcomed that breath of fresh air.

But now more revelations of sex abuse and scandal are coming into the light and Pope Francis's reaction to them and complicity in them is genuinely disheartening and demoralizing.

The first story to break was the rampant, career long sexual abuse by Cardinal "Uncle Teddy" McCarrick, who sexually abused both adolescent boys and seminarians. McCarrick was eventually forced to resign, but since the Vatican has known about his shenanigans for decades, this was little salve for the wound. It has also come to light that Pope Francis went above and beyond to protect McCarrick even though he was well aware of his depravity.

The other story was the grand jury report in Pittsburgh which revealed rampant and systematic sexual abuse and cover-up by the Diocese for decades. Sadly, Pittsburgh, like Boston and Ireland and Australia and countless other places, was rife with sexual predators and Bishops who aided and abetted their predation. I am willing to bet that if you look hard enough at any Diocese in the world, you will find the same level of depravity as has been proven to exist in Boston and Pittsburgh.

The most disheartening part about the Pittsburgh revelations was that the Church in response basically said..."oh well". The Bishop who was integral to the Pittsburgh scandal is now Cardinal Wuertz, and sure enough he is still a Cardinal and will face no recriminations. Pope Francis has paid lip service by asking for forgiveness...but not demanding accountability or making genuine change.

Pope Francis seemed as though he may very well be the man to turn the church around and root out the abusers and enablers but with the McCarrick and Pittsburgh scandals has proven himself to be a feckless charlatan...which pains my heart to say. 

This current crop of scandals has hit me where I live as just this past spring, after much strenuous soul searching, I decided, in no small part because of my optimism regarding Pope Francis, to have my son baptized in the Catholic church. I realize that most readers will find this decision at best misguided and at worst insane, I understand the sentiment, but for me at this time, after going through the greatest battle of my life in which I found great solace, guidance and strength in prayer and was on the receiving end of some outright miracles (a word I don't use hyperbolically), I felt a great spiritual and religious renaissance in my spirit. I wanted to share with my son the same connection to the God who, through his infinite mercy, had given us the glorious life we now share.

As more and more of the cancer on the soul of the Church and on St. Peter's throne in the Vatican has been revealed in the last few weeks, I have grown to regret ever more deeply my decision to have my son baptized a Catholic. Even after all the scandals that is a difficult thing for me to admit to myself. As an Irish Catholic, my Catholicism isn't just religious but cultural. In my lifetime fellow Irishmen and women were murdered simply for being Catholic and breaking my solidarity with those Irish martyrs is gut-wrenching.

DIAGNOSIS

The reason the Church is in such decline amidst the turmoil is because it has lost touch with the masculine. Yes, I know most liberal Catholics will be angry with that statement, claiming the Church is in decline because of the Patriarchy...but I vehemently disagree. The Church has been overrun in its ranks by self-loathing gay men who are trying to hide from the truth of their sexuality. These gay men are more in touch with the feminine than the masculine, which certainly isn't a crime but it is the truth. The lack of true masculinity in the Church has led to a feminization of Catholicism that is speeding its decline. The closeted gay men who make up the vast majority of the priesthood are not able to speak to the masculine needs of the men in their flock and so men have stopped going to church.

These gay priests are also, it seems, less able to contain their sexuality than their heterosexual counterparts, or at least less able to contain them around adolescents. This is not only unfortunate in terms of the scandals it creates for the Church but also that it feeds into the stereotypes used for decades by homophobes to discriminate against and punish gay people. But with that said, as much as I dislike coming to this conclusion, the evidence certainly supports it. To be clear, I am not repeating the old homophobic trope that all gay men are predators, but what I am saying is that most of the predator priests are gay...or to be more precise...these predator priests are distorted, contorted and tortured versions of gay men. It pains me to come to this conclusion because frankly, I support gay rights and gay marriage and wish the reality of the Church sex abuse scandals isn't what it is...but it is what it is.

There has long been talk of a Lavender Mafia within the Church and as the sex abuse scandals have come to light that belief has only strengthened as Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals all sided with predatory priests over the children in the pews. One can only assume that these priests, Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals were looking out for one another because they all had a secret that they believed to be so terrible that they couldn't come clean about anyone else for fear of their secret being revealed.

The conundrum for the Church is that their own teaching on homosexuality no doubt led to the scapegoating of homosexuals which in turn led some to want to hide their sexuality in the closet to try and escape the "wickedness" of their sexuality and found a way to do that by becoming celibate priests. Sadly, many of these closeted gay men were so emotionally, sexually and psychologically stunted that they were unable to abide by their vow of celibacy and instead have used their positions as priests to prey upon young men and boys.

There are those, like Father James Martin, who claim that the Church should modernize in regards to homosexuality and he blames the scandals on the Church's archaic view of homosexuality. I think Martin is blinded by his own plight (and sexuality) and therefore refuses to the see truth that is staring him in the face.

TREATMENT

As previously stated, I consider myself a Thomas Merton/Dorothy Day type of Catholic, which most would label as being a "liberal Catholic", but my response to the sex scandals will probably alienate both liberal Catholics and conservatives alike. If the Church is to survive in any relevant form, people must put aside the politics of religion and instead look for the Truth and solutions.

Unlike my liberal Catholic cohorts, I do not think allowing women to be priests will help, as I believe that it is a lack of genuine masculinity that has caused this scandal in the first place.  I think women are vital to the Church's survival and success, but I think the role of nuns should be expanded rather than women being allowed to become priests. I can see my dearest friend Sheila cringing as she reads this...my apologies Sheila...but I think at this time the addition of female priests would end up being catastrophic to the church in the long run. I think the Church needs to do less watering down of masculinity and more bulking up.

The solution to the Catholic Church's existential crisis will not come about by liberals defeating conservatives or vice versa...both sides have legitimate grievances and insights. Here is a list of things that I think not only should happen but need to happen for the Catholic Church to have any chance to survive and maybe even be relevant again, in a post-Christian era.

1. All offending priests AND Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals who aided and abetted them, should be held accountable and jailed either by the jurisdiction where the crimes took place or by the Vatican itself (yes, the Vatican has a jail, albeit a tiny one). At the end of their prison terms they should be at a minimum defrocked and at a maximum ex-communicated, depending on the level of their contrition and penance.

2. The U.S. government and/or any local communities, should use the RICO statute to prosecute sexual offenders and those in power who cover up for them. The use of RICO (the statue used against organized crime to bring down mafia dons) will be accompanied by threat of a loss of tax exempt status for the Church if their is not cooperation from the hierarchy up to and including The Vatican. If you want to make the Vatican jump, you threaten their tax exempt status and they'll do whatever you tell them to.

3. All new priest hires must be heterosexual. These new priests are eligible to marry and in fact the best route for the Church to take is to hire men who are already married. Doing this will expand the ranks of priesthood tremendously and will in short order revitalize the priesthood and seminaries. The moratorium on hiring gay priests will not be permanent, but is a necessary ill right now in order to bring more balance back into the priesthood/church in terms of masculinity. Eventually in the future openly gay priests will be hired but again they must swear to be celibate in order to keep with Catholic doctrine. Heterosexual priests not already married must remain celibate until marriage.

4. The Church must compel any active priests who are gay to come forward and be open about their sexuality. These priests will retain their positions and will not be discriminated against in anyway. By compelling gay priests to come forward, the Church will be taking a giant step toward minimizing the stigma of being gay in a Catholic community, which is what has led to the aberrant behavior by so many gay priests. The Church will still uphold its current teaching on homosexuality, but it will be recognizing, embracing and protecting the dignity of gay people. The Church will not allow gay priests to marry and will not allow gay parishioners to marry in keeping with Church doctrine. Gay priests will also have to take and keep a vow of celibacy.

5. Any violation of sexual oaths or vows by any priest, regardless of sexual orientation, will result in a review by a board of lay people not connected to that particular parish. The same will be true for Bishops and Cardinals, who if they are accused will be vigorously investigated by an outside panel of independent lay investigators who will have the Church equivalent of subpoena power.

6. The Catholic Church must clean out clericalism thoroughly or burn the place to the ground. The Church can still be salvaged but it requires a complete overhaul...it must both simultaneously modernize and yet embrace its traditionalism. Modernize by allowing heterosexual priests to marry and homosexual priests to be openly gay but celibate in keeping with church doctrine and dogma. Also...a return to the Traditional Latin Mass in all parishes on Sundays where half the masses should be in Latin. Why a partial return to the Latin Mass? Well, because it brings a cohesiveness to the Church across the globe, where you could walk into any Church anywhere in the world on any given Sunday and hear the Mass in the same language. Again, this is not a total return, but partial...maybe the 8 AM mass in Latin and the 11 in the native language of the parish. A return to the Latin Mass will also reconnect Catholicism with mystery and sacredness.

7. And finally...a return to a vigorous embrace of education of Catholic values and history. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic high school and yet my religious education was abominable. The paucity of true Catholic religious teaching is a scandal in and of itself. The Church should embark on a rigorous campaign to educate not only children but ADULTS on the substance of Catholic teaching. Ironically the Church needs to make it harder rather than easier, which will give the Church and Catholic teaching back its value. If Catholicism asks its adherents to make a strenuous commitment to the faith, it will become a sanctuary from the world where easy choices sap the spiritual strength of more and more people everyday. The Church has become little more than another bit of soft white noise in a chaotic world. By making itself into an antidote to the world, being in it but not of it, the Church can once again find its sea legs and be a pillar upon which the suffering, the downtrodden, the frightened and the alone can find strength and community.

CONCLUSION

Sadly, it is highly unlikely that the Church will do even one never mind all of these things. The Church has grown fat and decadent, not unlike America, and just like America it too will crumble under the weight of its own hubris. Clericalism is devouring the Church as the Pharisees are alive and well and living in rectories in every parish in the world.

The Catholic Church must remove its satin cape with the pink interior, toss away its elegance, understated or otherwise, and get some men with chests among its ranks in order to save itself. If it doesn't do this the Church will fade into oblivion among the plethora of feel good capitalist, faux-Christian/New Age alternatives.

My hope is that after the purging and cleansing of the toxic elements in the church that a more Mertonesque and spiritually serious type of church can grow in its wake. A Church built on service not clericalism, humility not arrogance, for the poor and not the wealthy. The Catholic church needs to be a church of the gutter instead of being a Church with gutter values. The Catholic church at its best is a church of skid row, not wall street, in other words...a church that reflects Christ.

The Church will either drastically change or it will die. The church has alienated true masculinity, and if it doesn't change course, it will reap the whirlwind and collapse in upon itself into the void created by that lack of masculinity.

As for me, these recent scandals have me so furious I am tempted to go to all of my local parishes and pull a Jesus and toss the money changers and the asshole priests out of the temple. The truth is though that I have little hope or faith in the Catholic hierarchy to change things and do the right thing because the rot is so deep, but as I can attest, miracles do occur. You never know, maybe I will be named Pope Mickey in 2019, I've gotten some bumper stickers made up in English and Italian just in case an election takes place (fingers crossed!). But if my run for the Papacy falls through, I have found a Coptic church and an Orthodox church near where I live, and they are in very serious contention to be my new religious home.

©2018