Juror No. 2: A Review - Guilty of Moviemaking Malpractice

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Another in a long line of weak cinematic efforts from director Clint Eastwood. Shallow, vapid and lazy, this movie is a made-for-tv mistake.

In the first season of NBC’s acclaimed sitcom 30 Rock – which ran from 2007 to 2013, the character Jenna Maroney, a narcissistic, needy and aging actress, is excited to show her co-worker/friend Liz Lemon the new independent movie she is starring in, The Rural Juror, and gage Lemon’s opinion.

The title The Rural Juror elicits laughs because no one on 30 Rock can pronounce it properly…it just sounds like ruhhr-juhhr. It’s also amusing because it sounds like some generic Grisham-esque piece of courtroom garbage that Hollywood loves to churn out from time to time. Adding to the humor is the funny fact that The Rural Juror is actually based on a book written by Kevin Grisham – John Grisham’s brother.

On this episode of 30 Rock Lemon watches The Rural Juror and loathes it but spares Jenna the truth, which ultimately causes problems down the road between her and Jenna.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I am no Liz Lemon – I’m much closer to Jack Donaghey and maybe Tracy Jordan, as I am not known for pulling punches when it comes to my opinions of film…or much else.

I kept thinking of The Rural Juror as I watched 94-year-old director Clint Eastwood’s new film, Juror No. 2, which is currently available on VOD and come December 20th will be available to stream on MAX.

Juror No.2 looks and feels like someone actually decided to make The Rural Juror…and not as a joke…despite it being unintentionally very funny. This movie has all the cinematic panache and dramatic power of a Lifetime movie you stumble across late at night and decide to use as a sleep aid.

The film, which stars Nicholas Hoult, with supporting turns from Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Leslie Bibb and Kiefer Sutherland, tells the preposterous story of Justin, a gentle juror in a Savannah, Georgia murder trial that may know more about the case than he lets on.

I will avoid spoilers as a courtesy in order to keep potential viewer’s pure of mind before watching this movie, but I’ll only say this, the premise of this movie is completely devoid of dramatic tension – at least for me. The bottom line is that Juror No. 2 asks viewers to choose “the right thing to do” in a specific scenario and the answer to that question is painfully obvious to me…so much so that I was utterly devoid of any moral qualms about what I would do. Maybe that means I’m a psychopath…who knows?

Others may find the premise more intriguing and engaging than I did, but I found it to be ethically obtuse and dramatically anemic.

Eastwood is one of the more-odd directors of the 21st century. He is going strong and consistently making movies well into his nineties, which is a great credit to him. Because he is so old, and let’s be frank, so close to death, critics and Hollywood tend to treat him with kid gloves, so he gets undeserved glowing reviews and awards consideration (and even wins), but the reality is his movies are, for the most part, awful to the point of being embarrassing.

In the last twenty years Eastwood has made 17 movies…which is extraordinary…but unfortunately none of the movies are anywhere near extraordinary. I would argue that maybe two of them rise to the level of being “just ok” (Richard Jewell and Gran Torino) and even those are pretty suspect.

Juror No. 2 has all the distinct trademarks of a late Eastwood era movie. It is allergic to detail, its visuals are dull and flat, the script is trite, the dialogue atrocious, and the acting is stilted and often-times amateurish – thanks to Clint’s hands-off/minimal takes approach.

Eastwood’s ability to entice decent and even very good actors into giving abysmal performances, is front and center in Juror No. 2. For example, J.K. Simmons, someone I deeply respect, plays a juror and is unable to make his decrepit dialogue make the least bit of sense or sound remotely human.

Toni Collette is a terrific actress and here she is essentially just a caricature throwing around a bad southern accent and painting by numbers.

Nicholas Hoult is an actor I really think highly of - I thought he was brilliant in the wonderful Hulu series The Great, but here he is handcuffed by the poor script and uneven pacing and tone of the entire cinematic venture.

Bad actors, and Eastwood employs a lot of them, are painfully exposed by Eastwood’s laissez-faire directing approach.

For instance, Chris Messina, whose career is a mystery to me, gives a lifeless, uneven and thoughtless performance as an attorney in this movie. As does Kiefer Sutherland, who does his best wooden Indian imitation throughout.

As bad as Messina and Sutherland are, Adrienne C. Moore and Cedric Yarbrough, who play jurors, are so bad they make Messina and Sutherland look like Sir Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando. Yikes.

Juror No. 2 runs for two hours…and it is a long two-hours. While watching with my wife I paused the movie to go to the bathroom let out an audible groan when I saw that only 50 minutes had passed…it felt like we were on hour three of this son of a bitch.

Juror No. 2 is The Rural Juror. In other words, it is a joke but no one is allowed to laugh. That said, I literally did laugh out loud on numerous occasions while watching this thing as it got more and more inane as it unfolded.

Look, I like Clint Eastwood. He was a fantastic movie star. I also think he used to make very good and sometimes great movies. For example, Unforgiven is an absolute masterpiece, as is The Outlaw Josey Wales. High Plains Drifter and The Pale Rider are top notch. Everything else, including his Oscar-winning movies Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby, are, at best, middling movies.

The truth is that because I like the guy I’d like to think that Clint has one more Unforgiven in him even at age 94. After watching the moviemaking malpractice that is Juror No. 2, the fantasy of a Clint return to greatness isn’t just dying on the vine, it is as dead as a door nail…and there is no mystery as to who committed the murder.

©2024

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

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

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

We Need a New, Anti-Woke TV Channel To Stave Off Comedy’s Impending EXTINCTION at the Hands of Cancel Culture

With political correctness running roughshod over Hollywood, now is the perfect time for a billionaire to invest in a streaming service that prioritizes entertainment over wokeness.

We now live in an age where the Cancel Culture Clan routinely don their white robes of self-righteous totalitarianism and roam the comedy landscape of today and yesteryear searching for any heretics who have violated the ever changing rules of the Church of Wokeness.

It was either Sir Isaac Newton, Huey P. Newton or Fig Newton, I can’t remember which, who once famously said, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”…and so it is with the politically correct panic of our time. 

This is why I believe that anti-wokeness is poised to be a major growth sector in the entertainment industry in the coming years.

My idea to cash in on the current woke hysteria is to start a comedy streaming service dedicated to being resolutely anti-woke.

I call this streaming service…F.U.T.V.

Instead of the fear of offending the delicate sensibilities of the most fragile among us being our guiding principle, F.U.T.V. will make the unorthodox decision to actually treat viewers like adults and let them decide for themselves whether they choose to watch whatever “offensive” comedy has been targeted by the snowflake Savanarolas looking to fuel their bonfire of inanities.

We just need a rich bastard with enough testicular and fiscal fortitude to fund this noble venture. There has to be some billionaire entrepreneur out there who realizes that as the corporate behemoths of Hollywood cave to the incessant bitching of the p.c. mob by casting aside controversial comedians, shows and movies, a gaping void is being opened, and an anti-woke streaming service can profitably fill it.

For instance, in recent years a cavalcade of wildly popular sitcoms such as Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park have all been branded with the scarlet letter of “P” for problematic, due to various woke infractions regarding insensitivity towards race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and diversity.

“Problematic” is always and every time the first step on the journey down the very slippery slope that inevitably ends with crucifixion by the centurions of corporate cancel culture.

These tv shows are huge money-making properties but in short order they will be available for pennies on the dollar because the weak-kneed buffoons in corporate Hollywood, who are scared to death of the tiny Torquemadas of the Woke Inquisition, will gladly sacrifice their comedy golden gooses on the altar of political correctness in order to appease the angry gods of social justice.

Stand up comedy will fare no better as venues such as Netflix, which have branded themselves the home to comedy, have already begun to cower to the Robespierres of the Woke Revolution and pulled a variety of “racially offensive” comedy shows.

The thing to understand about the woke mob is this… their greatest fear isn’t that someone, somewhere is being offended, it is that someone, somewhere is actually enjoying themselves.

No matter what you do to appease these dour and depraved scolds, it will never be enough, for they are voracious and insatiable in their appetite to destroy anyone and anything that makes them feel uncomfortable.

Netflix has given an inch, and I guarantee you these totalitarian tools will take a mile, and won’t relent until Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Ricky Gervais’ heads are on a platter.

Comedy history too will be raped and pillaged by these woke barbarians as they inevitably push for greats like George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks and Billy Connolly to be purged from cultural memory for the crimes of wrong-think and political incorrectness.

The goal of comedy fans everywhere should be to extend a giant middle finger to all these repugnant woke simpletons by supporting comedians doing what comedians are supposed to do…rebelling against the small, closed minds in the culture that are trying to censure, censor and suffocate them.

In conclusion…here is a top six ranking of some of the comedians and their routines that are no doubt on the endangered species list in this toxic age of wokeness. Let’s hope F.U.T.V. can get funding and stave off the incessant waves of woke whiners and bring to a halt comedy’s impending extinction.

6. Bill Burr

Burr stomps on the toes of political correctness and jokes about sexual assault…both hanging offenses in the People’s Republic of Wokestan.

Sexual Assault

PC Culture

5. Richard Pryor

One of the greatest stand up comedians of all-time would have a woke bulls-eye squarely on his back if he were around today. This penitentiary routine would certainly have raised the ire of the social justice Bolsheviks and their demand to “abolish the police”.

Penitentiary

4. George Carlin

It is a tragedy Carlin isn’t around to obliterate the insipid vacuity of the woke brigade. There is no doubt that in 2020 the p.c. police would vastly alter his iconic routine of “words you can never say on television” by expanding it to be more “socially conscious” and applying it to every day life.

“Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”

3. Chris Rock

Speaking of words you’re not allowed to say…the electrifying Chris Rock and his blistering take on racial issues from 1996 sure as hell wouldn’t fly in 2020.

Bring the Pain

2. Louis C.K.

If Louis C.K. hadn’t already been cancelled back in 2017, he certainly would’ve been if he tried these routines in 2020.

The “N” word

Child Molesting

1. Dave Chappelle

I’ll give the last word to Chappelle, who is public enemy number one of the woke because he is so brilliant at eviscerating their vapid, emotionalist drivel. In 2019 his Sticks and Stones wowed audiences but P.C. critics deemed it “regressive”, which must be another term for “honest and funny”…I’ll let you decide.

Chinese

Women Equality

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020