Barbie: A Review - Pink Bubblegum Bullshit

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Underwhelming and disappointing. If you’re desperate to see it I’d say save your money and wait until it hits a streaming service.

I had no intention of seeing Barbie, the new blockbuster about the iconic Mattel doll starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, because I didn’t HAVE to see Barbie. You see, when I worked as a cultural critic for RT I had to watch and write about a lot of stuff I wasn’t that interested in simply because other people were interested in it which meant that it was culturally relevant. Well, I no longer work for RT so I no longer have to do that.

So, when Barbie came along, I just thought, due to the film’s obvious cultural politics and the fact that the film’s writer/director is Greta Gerwig – someone whose work I’ve never thought much of, it wasn’t for me so I’d skip this new battle in the endless and tiresome culture war.

But then Barbie, due to its relentless and highly effective marketing campaign, became an undeniable phenomenon, hauling in over a billion dollars at the box office and igniting a fan frenzy not seen at cineplexes in years, so I thought maybe I should see it. And then my wife said she wanted to see it…and whatever Lola wants…Lola gets! My thinking was, if people are going so nuts for this film - then maybe it’s worth seeing.

I went to a 10:30 AM screening on a Tuesday morning. Barbie had been in theaters for over two weeks at this point and still my screening here in mundane Middle America was totally sold out. Barbie is, like the recent Taylor Swift tour, satiating a primal need among our collective feminine culture for a massive communal “event”. An example of this eventizing impulse was that the theater I attended, which admittedly is not particularly big, looked like a sea of Pepto Bismol as it was overwhelmingly packed with pink wearing middle aged women (including one wearing just a big pink t-shirt…which didn’t cover nearly enough of her nether regions as it should have!) as well as teenage and pre-pubescent girls donning a ton of pink…along with some rather unfortunate looking pink-clad teen boys imprisoned in the friend zone desperate to win favor with their girl crushes with whom they were attending the screening.

My hope in seeing Barbie was that it was good and that I’d like it – I wasn’t the least bit interested in hate watching it. I fully expected to dislike the de rigueur girl power politics – something which I find to be pitiful and pathetic, but I hoped to like the film despite its predictable politics…something which I often do (for example my review of Promising Young Woman) if for no other reason than my own personal politics are so unorthodox.

The opening scene was a perfect example of what I was hoping for…as the film opens with a glorious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Gerwig replaces Kubrick’s monkeys with little girls playing with baby dolls and the mysterious monolith is replaced with a towering Margot Robbie as Barbie. While I was off-put by the visual of little girls smashing babies (even if they are dolls) in reaction to their newfound Barbie evolution, I still nodded in approval at this brilliant bit of moviemaking and it filled me with great anticipation for what followed.

And then I watched the rest of the movie. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there as the film meandered aimlessly through a convoluted yet corporate cookie-cutter plot, allergic to profundity or purpose, and never even remotely approaching the genius of its opening.

In totality Barbie is an underwhelming, disappointing, cheap, shoddy, shitty, bland, boring, corporate money-grab wrapped in a vacant, vapid and vacuous feminist manifesto. In other words, Barbie is a poorly made version of exactly the thing it often pretends to belittle and/or satirize.

The film begins in Barbieland, a matriarchal utopia devoid of not only male power but babies or children….even the lone pregnant Barbie is exiled to the outskirts of girl boss heaven. The bit of the film initially set in Barbieland is ever-so-slightly amusing at first and then it gets old very, very fast. There’s a dance number in this Barbieland sequence that is supposed to be fun and funny but that is so anemic and tiresome as to be astounding. The low point is when Gerwig uses a ridiculously cliched record scratch to inject reality into the phony festivities. Yawn.

The final two-thirds of the film feature Barbie venturing to the “real world” – which is nothing like the actual real world, and the “real world” venturing in to Barbieland. All of it is sloppy but the scenes in the “real world”, in particular, are a total storytelling and cinematic shit show devoid of any redeeming cinematic qualities. The Barbie in the real-world, fish-out-of-water stuff shockingly doesn’t even muster a minimal amount of comedy.

To be fair, I did laugh out loud a few times during Barbie, all thanks to the aggressively amusing Ryan Gosling who absolutely crushes it as the desperate and dim-witted Ken. Gosling is destined to be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his unbreakable and unshakeable performance as Barbie’s platonic boy toy.

Speaking of the Oscars, it’s 100% guaranteed that there will be a Barbie-themed musical number at this year’s Oscar ceremony. You can absolutely bet your life on that. You can also count on Mattel to turn the success of the Barbie movie into a Broadway musical…which is an eerily similar concept to the hysterically funny Marvel musical featured in the Disney Plus series Hawkeye…except Mattel won’t be making the Barbie musical ironically.

Margot Robbie is ridiculously gorgeous and perfect as Barbie but there isn’t much there, there. Robbie’s physical perfection is all she needs to play this part and when she’s asked to do more than that her acting is undercut by a really abysmal script that is chock full of cringe, freshman level women’s studies diatribes that ring hollow and feel forced making Barbie feel less human than she already is.

Besides the glorious Gosling, the other supporting performances in Barbie are shockingly devoid of life.

Who knew that both Kate McKinnon and Will Ferrell could not only be so unfunny, but so bland and so forgettable? You’d be hard pressed to find two more energized comedic actors but on Barbie they seem constrained to the point of comatose.

Somewhat surprising is that for a movie full of Barbies, there’s only one attractive one in the bunch – Margot Robbie…and she is certainly very attractive despite the sneaky and obtuse internet marketing campaign prior to the film’s release arguing that she isn’t. I have no problem with a Barbie movie featuring the vast diversity of the Barbie doll collection…which means we get a black Barbie, a fat Barbie, a wheelchair Barbie, a trans-Barbie and so on…but what befuddles me is why do all these Barbies have to be so “beauty-impaired” and visually unappealing?

The rest of the supporting cast are all interchangeable, dull and completely forgettable. Issa Rae and Simu Liu are like two sides of the same charisma-deficient coin. Neither one is remotely interesting or likeable.

Michael Cera as Allan feels like he’s in an entirely different movie…maybe because the script he has to work with is so incoherent and idiotic.

America Ferrera plays Gloria, a mom and Mattel employee, and she is utterly abysmal. She does get to have the big monologue in the movie which begins with “it’s literally impossible to be a woman…” and goes downhill from there. This monologue has middle-aged women across the nation pumping their fists in the air like gold chain and muscle shirt wearing Guidos at a Rocky movie when the Italian Stallion gets off the canvas and beats the shit out of the villain du jour. But here’s the thing…I understand the perspective behind the “it’s literally impossible to be a woman” monologue, but the fact is it isn’t “literally” impossible to be a woman…billions of women do it every minute of every day. Yes, it is no doubt difficult to be a woman due to the constant contradictions one must navigate…but you know what else is equally difficult…being a man. The obstacles and difficulties one must face and overcome as a woman are no harder than the ones men must overcome, they’re just different.

Life is hard for human beings, and for modern day feminists to claim empowerment by perpetually play the victim all while demonizing men, is pretty repugnant and frankly counterproductive.

Barbie also does what our awful culture has normalized which is to conflate masculinity with toxic masculinity, a perilous proposition since it is unquestionably masculine men that carved out a safe space in a dangerous world where women are free to make insipid and insidious films about how awful men are.

My wife, a very, very independent, powerful and, dare I say it, feminist woman, turned to me after the film and the first thing she said was that she found it to be “damaging”. As the mother of a young son, she felt the film sent a negative message to girls and woman not just about the nature of men and boys but about what it means to be a girl/woman, so much so that it depressed her and made her fear for the future. And I must say, I completely concur with her astute observations.

I’ve heard it said that Barbie is Black Panther for white women, and that is very true as Black Panther was an overhyped, shitty movie too that became super successful because seeing it was an act of cultural-political virtue signaling.

Other movies have somewhat captured the cultural political zeitgeist in the same way that Barbie has but from a different angle. For example, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper was a terrible movie but flag waving numbskulls flocked to see and support it because it reinforced their patriotic – or rather anti-liberal, bona fides. That American Sniper was a God-awful movie regardless of its politics was irrelevant as all the flag-wavers loved it even before it started – they loved it simply because it existed…just like the pink clad buffoons are enamored by Barbie regardless of how obviously bad it is.

Sound of Freedom is another movie that is a virtue signal movie currently in theatres. Sound of Freedom is about the scourge of child trafficking and has become a cause celebre for anti-libtard right wingers and as a result has done exceedingly well at the box office – raking in over a hundred million dollars. No doubt the crossover of American Sniper fans with Sound of Freedom fans is enormous. I’ve not seen Sound of Freedom…mostly because I just assume it is poorly made…but I can plainly see that it’s a virtue signal movie just like Barbie.

Another film I thought of when watching Barbie was, ironically enough, The Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s 2004 film smashed box office records for an independent film and made him something like half a billion dollars since he financed it himself. Gibson wisely marketed the film directly to churches and church groups and it became a cultural signifier among Bush loving right wingers.

The marketing of The Passion of the Christ was remarkable, as, just like Barbie, everyone was talking about it even if they hadn’t seen it. Barbie’s marketing was brilliant because it removed the film’s politics from the campaign, made it seem as if it were for adults AND kids (it’s not for kids!) and it was absolutely everywhere. You couldn’t escape the Barbie marketing machine, and frankly still can’t. That the marketing campaign has succeeded in making Barbie a cultural phenomenon doesn’t diminish the fact that the movie is garbage.

Truth be told I’ve never understood the critical love for Greta Gerwig’s films. Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird was so overrated as to be astonishing. Critics adored the film yet I found it to be painfully thin and embarrassingly amateurish. It seemed to me that Gerwig, much like Jordan Peele who came out with Get Out in the same year (2017), was cashing in on the angry liberal political hysteria of the post-Trump election and were being elevated due to their race and gender, not their talent. Having seen both of Gerwig’s and Peele’s films since 2017 has only reinforced my belief regarding their lack of talent and skill and the absurd critical love they’ve received.

As for Barbie, I’ve had a rather interesting perspective on the film as I’ve watched from a distance as the usual suspects on both the left and right instinctively and reflexively loved or hated the film. Having finally seen the movie I can say that people who love it, who when pressed on its numerous shortcomings all say the same thing in defense of it, namely that “it’s fun!”, are delusional dupes and dopes. On the flip side, many of the critics reflexively hating it are so stuck on its politics that they don’t even care to examine the filmmaking….which feels less delusional than just plain disingenuous.

As for me, I didn’t like Barbie for the sole reason that Barbie isn’t a good movie.  Barbie isn’t funny and it isn’t interesting. That the film pretends to be rebellious, if not revolutionary, in its messaging, but then spews out the most corporate-friendly and approved, pedantic neo-feminist pablum, wrapped in a cavalcade of visually listless, dramatically lifeless, comedically flaccid scenes, makes it feel like watching a pink-hued Human Resources film for corporate employees to learn the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office rules.

The bottom line is that the masses being so enamored of Barbie says considerably less about the quality of the movie than it does about the easily manipulated morons populating our world and their astonishing level of group-think and gullibility, as well as the sorry state of our society and cinema.

Unfortunately, so few people nowadays are self-aware or introspective enough to resist massive marketing campaigns like the one around Barbie, which brainwashed otherwise intelligent people into not only mindlessly devouring this odious, rancid corporate pink taco but declaring they love it. I too succumbed and took a bite of the gigantic, rancid corporate pink taco that is Barbie, but to my minimal credit I at least am not foolish enough to don an oversized pink t-shirt sans pants and shriek “yummy…how fun!”

In conclusion, it is literally impossible for me to recommend Barbie.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

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

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCO

©2023

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

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

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

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Marvel Misses Again

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bloated and bland mess of a movie that is firmly in the bottom tier of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the sequel to the billion-dollar blockbuster Marvel movie Black Panther (2018), premiered in theatres back on November 11th, and is now available on Disney Plus, and I just watched it and have some thoughts.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in steep decline since the glory days of late last decade when Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) both made over two billion dollars in back-to-back years.

Since that creative and financial high point Marvel has stumbled and bumbled by churning out a plethora of abysmal movies, like Black Widow, Eternals and Shang-Chi, that featured second and third-rate characters, all of which underperformed at the box office.

Even the most financially successful movie of this era (I’m not counting the Spider-Man movies which are Sony/Marvel movies and not Disney/Marvel movies), Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which made over $900 million at the box office, was a pretty awful affair.

In reading the tea leaves it seemed to me that the key film in judging the overall creative and financial health of the MCU going forward would be Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder which hit theatres this past Summer. Thor: Love and Thunder was the sequel to Waititi’s glorious Thor: Ragnarok, one of the very best Marvel movies ever made. If any movie was going to stop the bleeding at Marvel it would be Love and Thunder. And then I saw Love and Thunder.

Love and Thunder did not stop the bleeding. It was just as awful as the rest of the post-Endgame Disney/Marvel movies, and it massively underperformed at the box office, bringing in just $761 million on a bloated $250 million budget. Not good.

After Love and Thunder failed, the next big Marvel bellwether, if not its backstop, was the highly anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Unfortunately for Marvel, I can report that Wakanda Forever didn’t stop the bleeding either.

Wakanda Forever, directed and co-written by the same man who made the original, Ryan Coogler, did do better than Love and Thunder, but it didn’t do much better as it made $842 million on a $250 million budget. Compared to the original Black Panther, which made $1.38 billion and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Wakanda Forever massively under-performed financially, to the tune of nearly half a billion less than the original.

An easy explanation for that precipitous box office drop-off is that Black Panther starred Chadwick Boseman – who tragically died of cancer in 2020. The great hurdle for Wakanda Forever to overcome was the loss of Boseman who was slated to star in the film. After his death Ryan Coogler and Disney shifted gears and, instead of recasting another actor as Black Panther, came up with a story not just in Boseman’s absence but which is centered around his absence.

Chadwick Boseman certainly seemed like a very nice guy but I never found him to be very charismatic or compelling on-screen, even in the original Black Panther, my review of which I think stands up quite well five years later. While Black Panther with Boseman felt charisma-challenged to me, Wakanda Forever without Boseman is like a black hole of anti-charisma that sucks all light and life into its darkness leaving behind a dull, dismal and distinctly lifeless-void.

The convoluted plot of Wakanda Forever revolves around the death of King T’Challa (Boseman) and how it effects his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and the people of Wakanda.

On top of King T’Challa’s death, Wakanda and its royal family are confronted by the superhero/supervillain Namor, a flying Aquaman type guy who is king of the Talokan people, who live deep in the sea as a result of European colonialism in Latin America. Sigh.

Through an incoherent course of events Namor looks to ally with Wakanda to create an alliance of anti-oppressors, but in turn he demands that a brilliant, young, African-American girl from Chicago who is studying at MIT, Riri Williams, be killed first because she developed a special machine, the only one of its kind, that can detect vibranium – the stuff that makes Wakanda superior and which was just discovered deep in the ocean near Talokan. Shuri and Queen Ramonda balk at Namor’s Riri killing proposal and try to protect her, which puts Wakanda at war with Talokan.

The result of all of this is foolishness is that Wakanda Forever is a bloated, bland and boring two-hours and forty minutes long. It’s action and fight sequences are uncomfortably amateurish. It’s CGI is second, if not third-rate. Its cinematography is stilted and flat. And its script and narrative are embarrassing and incorrigibly trite. Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

In keeping with the tedious and relentless Disney/Marvel agenda, race and gender swapping is rampant in Wakanda Forever. Namor in the Marvel comics is a white/Atlantean/Asian guy, but in the movie, he has been remade – or race-swapped, into an indigenous Central American god who loathes the European colonizers who killed his culture and family. Yawn.

Then there’s Riri Williams, who is basically a black girl Iron Man with her own Iron Man suit to boot. And to no one’s surprise, the new Black Panther is a black woman too, as Shuri dons the new Black Panther outfit. You go girls!!

The recent spate of Marvel films and tv shows have all centered women and women of color, and all the white male characters have been replaced with either women, minorities or women minorities…and frankly, they have all suffered for it.

Thankfully there is a white guy in Wakanda Forever, he’s the flaccid, cuckold CIA agent (Martin Freeman) who gets duped by his much smarter and more powerful ex-wife (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Down with the patriarchy!!

All of this agenda driven nonsense wouldn’t concern me in the least, it really wouldn’t, if the movie was at least well-made and/or mildly entertaining. It is neither. It is, at best, a middling, lower-level Marvel movie. It’s better than Eternals, but that’s not exactly a high bar.

As for the performances, they are for the most part underwhelming.

Angela Bassett has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her work as grief-stricken mother Queen Ramonda. Bassett is…fine. She’s always a very compelling screen presence and I’m sure she’ll win the Oscar and I’ll be happy for her because she seems like a good person, but I’m not so sure she deserves it for this role.

Letitia Wright as Shuri on the other hand is an absolute mystery to me. I thought she was terrible in Black Panther and I find her equally terrible in this. First off, she’s playing a teenager/young woman and yet she looks like she’s in her mid-fifties. Secondly, she is so devoid of magnetism she might as well be invisible.

Dominique Thorne is another mystery. Her work as Riri Williams is so shallow and predictable as to be caricature. Her acting is of the tired style that has become so common nowadays – where preening and posing passes for artistry. Hopefully Thorne will grow out of pretending and mugging for the camera and actually start acting.

Tenoch Huerta Mejia plays Namor and is completely lifeless. For a guy fueled by revenge he’s got nothing going on behind his eyes. It would also be a good idea if you’re going to play a superhero/villain to maybe hit the gym for a bit, especially if you’re going to be shirtless for the entirety of the movie. Tough to suspend disbelief when some doughy son of a bitch is trying to pass himself off as some super strong being. Hell, if doughy dudes could be superheroes…I’d be the fucking Hulk, Wolverine and Thor combined. Meija is so doughy they would’ve been better off casting the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in the role of Namor, but that would never have been allowed because that fat sack of shit is too white.

On the bright side in regards to Wakanda Forever, I thought showing only Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther in the Marvel Title Sequence – which usually features all the superheroes, was a classy tribute. On the other hand, the film’s use of Boseman’s death to promote itself and generate ticket sales feels exploitative to me. I understand that it’s a tough tightrope to walk…I’m just uncomfortable with that type of thing.  

Another issue that Wakanda Forever brings up for me is in regards to writer/director Ryan Coogler. It seems pretty obvious at this point that Coogler, despite his promising start with Fruitvale Station, is simply not a good filmmaker. I’ll be interested to see what he does now and if he moves away from these franchise films – something he’d be wise to do. But I wonder if the protective bubble of franchise films is protecting him and deflecting criticism of his ability. Regardless, he’s not done anything good since Fruitvale Station.

The bottom line regarding Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is that it is just another in the long line of recent Marvel movies to be utterly and entirely forgettable. There really is no need whatsoever for you waste your time and see this movie, even for “free” on Disney Plus.

At this point, after the failures of Love and Thunder and Wakanda Forever, the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels mortally wounded and I’m having a difficult time imaging a scenario where it rebounds from the dual plagues of audience Marvel fatigue and Disney/Marvel’s creative bankruptcy.

In terms of the future, Marvel seems to be going all in on the woke agenda stuff, which, love it or loathe it, has proven over and over again to be toxic to large swaths of the viewing public, most notably the most rabid and die-hard of Marvel fans.

The biggest problem though is that regardless of any political and cultural messages ingrained into Marvel movies, if the movies themselves and the characters they feature are not high quality and compelling, then they will quickly become entirely irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is stark proof of that.

 Follow me on Twitter @MPMActingCo

©2023

She-Hulk Season One: Final Thoughts

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

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. DO. NOT. WATCH. This is easily the worst Marvel show (no small feat) and one of the worst shows I’ve seen in quite some time.

In Rob Reiner’s brilliant 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap, Reiner’s Marty Di Bergi delicately brings up to the band Spinal Tap a critical review of their dismally received previous album, “Shark Sandwich”. The concise and precise review he references has only two words, “shit sandwich”.

After enduring the odious slog that was the nine-episode first season of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law on Disney Plus, the two words that kept popping into my head were, “shit-hulk”.

In keeping with the fecal theme, I would declare two things. First, that She-Hulk truly is one of the most abhorrent shit sandwiches of a show I’ve ever seen, and second, the finale was the diarrhea icing on the repellent poop cake.

The fourth-wall busting finale was a desperate attempt to salvage a flaming garbage barge floating on a sea of sewage and it failed miserably.

The show decided to get all meta in the finale in a brazen attempt to disguise the fact that it had literally lost the plot. The result is it’s too clever by half and not half as clever as it thinks it is.

Believe it or not, it turns out the true villain in She-Hulk is not Abomination or Titiana, but rather people on the internet who criticize the show. I’m not joking. The insecure and self-absorbed makers of She-Hulk decided to make their online critics out to be the ultimate villains, and labeled these alleged internet trolls as misogynist incels in the process. How clever. How brave.

I guess in some ways She-Hulk’s finale is meta-textually interesting since it takes the decidedly feminist route of discarding reason and accountability in favor of embracing mealy-mouthed victimhood, a common approach in this narcissistically addled, masculinity-deprived day and age.

In this vein, people being held accountable is something that is of the utmost import to She-Hulk, and she makes sure in the finale that all the dubious men she comes across are all held to account for their failings. But in true girl-boss, neo-feminist fashion She-Hulk is herself allergic to self-reflection and blames others instead of taking responsibility for her own misdeeds and missteps. Big green physician, heal thyself.

She-Hulk is one of the most terrible, awful, no-good shows of all time for a variety of reasons, bad writing, bad acting and bad CGI not the least among them, but what bothered me most about it was that it defecated upon poor Daredevil while it shat upon itself, and I don’t know if the character will be able to escape the stench.

Daredevil the series was a stellar Netflix production (2015-2018) that ran for three season and Disney has now gotten back control of it and is saying it will reboot or restart the series.

The Netflix Daredevil was the best Marvel series ever made and it isn’t even close. Netflix gave Daredevil a gritty, grounded, R-rated feel…which is exactly what the character and story demanded and needed.

Rumors are that Disney is going to give its Daredevil its patented G-rating treatment and totally neuter the character and the series in the process. Watching Daredevil’s impotent appearance on She-Hulk was like witnessing a castration, and forbodes the once great Daredevil being turned into just another flaccid Disney Plus piece of trash series. Mark Ruffalo’s eunuch of a Hulk was bad enough, but now Daredevil? Can’t Disney just leave these big, bad conflicted men alone and let them kick ass and crack skulls?

The bottom line in regards to She-Hulk is that it’s instantly forgettable and entirely atrocious. It’s a cornucopia of everything that is wrong with our current culture and popular entertainment. I hated this show. I truly hated it. The only thing that would’ve made me hate it more was if Lena Dunham was in it.

On the bright side, at least the makers of She-Hulk succeeded in proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that women are entirely, absolutely, unequivocally incapable of being funny. Good to know.

As for the bigger MCU picture, She-Hulk’s egregious failure is a warning sign for Disney that the Marvel machine is in dire straits. The last three Marvel TV series, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel and now She-Hulk, have been absolute disasters. The last three Disney/Marvel movies, Thor: Love and Thunder, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Eternals, have been equally abysmal.

Marvel is such a money maker that the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ rule does not apply, but it also doesn’t mean that Marvel is invincible. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever comes out in November and a lot is riding on it. The original Black Panther made a billion dollars, but this is a different time and different movie with Chadwick Boseman’s unfortunate death. If the advertising is to be believed, the new Black Panther is a woman, and the movie has the familiar stench of Disney once again pushing a socio-political agenda on to viewers. Will audiences flock to Wakanda Forever? Maybe. Or will audiences be less inclined to go out and see it because they’re tired of the relentless cultural propaganda? A distinct possibility. My guess is the film will do well…but not too well, and not well enough to cast concerns over Marvel’s future into the abyss.

As for the tv side of things, the slate of upcoming Marvel TV series does not look very promising. And if the shitty She-Hulk is any indication, Marvel TV has gone deep into the toilet and it’s going to take a Herculean effort to remove it from its dark and dank depths. Consider me not optimistic.

©2022

Chadwick Boseman Saves His Best for Last in the Middling 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.

The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.

I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.

I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.

After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.

In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.

Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.

In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.

The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.

Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.

It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.

The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther.  So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.

The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.

Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.

Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Spike Lee's 'Da 5 Bloods' is a Dreadful Disappointment, but Virtue-Signaling Establishment Critics Lack the Courage to Tell the Truth About It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

There’s only one good thing about this film: it exposes mainstream film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their pandering to fellow woke elites.

Spike Lee’s new movie, Da 5 Bloods, starring Delroy Lindo, Chadwick Boseman and Jonathan Majors, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam as old men in order to retrieve the body of their long lost comrade and search for buried treasure, premiered this past Friday on Netflix to much fanfare.

Lee has long been an artistic provocateur on issues of race, so as the U.S. once again struggles with civil unrest and social upheaval over racial injustice, you would think now would be a perfect time for a new movie from the Academy Award winner who brought us Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman.

You would be wrong.

While Da 5 Bloods does have some intriguing moments, particularly the documentary montages interspersed throughout the film, the majority of the movie is a sloppy, bloated, decadent, incoherent, endlessly meandering, melodramatic mess.

Sadly, the movie, which features a trite and derivative script, a relentlessly bombastic score and painfully amateurish action sequences, is too cinematically inept to be of any socially conscious value.

Ironically, the film’s lone insight into race relations in America is entirely unintentional as it exposes liberal film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their complete lack of professional integrity.

It is inconceivable to me that any cinematically literate person could conclude Da 5 Bloods is anything but a pronounced disappointment but, remarkably, critics have been falling all over themselves to praise the film, some even claim it is an Oscar favorite.

On the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, critics have given it a staggering 92% score.

What was striking to me about the critical fawning over the movie was that in contrast, audiences at Rotten Tomatoes scored the film a much more reasonable 62%.

A look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of other prominent films directed by black artists in recent years reveals a similarly suspicious divide between critics and audiences.

For example, in 2015 another Spike Lee film, the abysmal Chi-Raq, garnered an 82% critical score and a 50% audience score.

In 2015, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ compelling but flawed Best Picture winner received a blistering 98% critical score compared to a more rational audience score of 79%.

In 2018, the middling Black Panther somehow overcame its notable faults to become a box office smash and a Best Picture nominee while receiving an extraordinary 97% critical score compared to its more accurate audience score of 79%. The 97% critical score makes it the highest rated superhero movie of all time.

Black Panther’s negative18-point disparity between critical score and audience score is three times larger than any other superhero movie in history. 

In 2019 critics adored Barry Jenkins’ film If Beale Street Could Talk at a rate of 95% while audiences gave it a discerningly tepid 70%.

Also in 2019, critics slobbered over Jordan Peele’s confounding horror hit, Us, with a 93% score while audiences recoiled from it with a 59% rating.

The social justice warrior contingent will no doubt deduce from these numbers that the significantly lower audience scores are a result of hordes of incorrigible racists intentionally under rating a movie purely out of racial animus.

The facts betray that argument though, as other unquestionably brilliant black films, such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (92 critical/90 audience) and Malcolm X (88 critical/91 audience) as well as John Singleton’s iconic Boyz n the Hood (96 critical/93 audience), have received universal praise and are devoid of such large differences in rating.

It seems obvious to me that mainstream critics are judging current black films not on their merits but on a politically correct curve.

Maybe this biased perspective is born out of fear of being labeled a racist or a heretic in the church of wokeness if they criticize a black film, or maybe it is some sort of pandering paternalism, which in and of itself is its own pernicious form of racism.

Sadly, these critics, just like those public health officials who recently went against their own expert opinions and declared that people needed to get out and protest racism despite the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, are frighteningly quick to trade their professional and personal integrity in order to satiate the woke mob and be seen as politically correct “allies”.

Critics that judge films on a racial curve in order to signal their virtue and moral superiority are doing a great disservice to both cinema and artists of color, as neither is well served by their blatant disregard of their professionalism and their pathetic woke posturing and pandering.

In conclusion, Da 5 Bloods is an awful film but it has done a service by exposing the untrustworthy critics in the establishment media for only caring about their social status among woke elites and not giving a damn about the art of cinema.

Now, if you want to watch a worthy Spike Lee film pertinent to this tumultuous time, go watch his unadulterated masterpiece Malcolm X, or the dynamically brilliant Do the Right Thing or the uneven but insightful BlacKkKlansman…but definitely avoid the dismal Da 5 Bloods.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Golden Globe-Winning 'Feminist' Fleabag is Adored by Woke Critics - Does That Mean It's Actually Terrible?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

We’ve become wary of watching something just because it’s been hyped by critics with an agenda. But does that mean we are missing out on great shows? I tried to watch Fleabag without all the baggage…

Sunday night at the Golden Globes, Fleabag, the British comedy about a serially self-destructive and sexually voracious woman, which is created by, written and starring Phoebe Waller Bridge, was a big winner as it snagged trophies for Comedy Series and Actress in a Comedy.

Fleabag’s Golden Globe success comes on the heels of its domination at the Emmys this past September, where it won awards for Best Comedy, Lead Actress, Writing and Directing.

Fleabag started as a one-woman stage show back in 2013, and after being adapted for tv and premiering on Amazon’s streaming service in 2016, it has over two seasons gradually built an audience through positive word of mouth and critical acclaim.

Fleabag had successfully eluded my attention up until 2019 when its second, and allegedly final, season arrived with much fanfare. I found myself immediately resistant to watching the show as I was very dubious of the relentless critical praise for it.

My reticence regarding Fleabag was fueled by the assumption that critics loved it not because it was good but simply because it was created by a woman. In other words, I assumed the critical adoration was because it was a “feminist” show that checked all the right cultural and political boxes.

My skepticism regarding critical opinion has been hard earned, as it seems all criticism of entertainment nowadays is rife with political agendas that far outweigh quality in a critic’s professional criteria.

A prime example of this biased critical approach is the 2017 film Lady Bird. Lady Bird, which was directed by Greta Gerwig, was met with unabashed critical swooning upon its release. Amidst all of this vocfierous praise I was excited to go see Lady Bird…and then I saw it. To call Lady Bird a raging mediocrity would be an insult to raging mediocrities.

It was readily apparent to me that Lady Bird, which boasts a 99% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, was being graded on a woke political curve simply because it had a female writer/director at the helm. By pointing this fact out I became the turd in the punchbowl at Greta Gerwig’s coronation as the new Queen of Cinema and was quickly labeled a misogynist for my treason and cast out of the Kingdom of Right Thinking People.

Contrary to woke opinion, I didn’t find Lady Bird to be overrated due to misogyny but rather because I am a devout cinephile whose assessment of a film is based first and foremost on its quality, not its diversity and inclusion. By that measurement, I found Lady Bird to be amateurish and trite, more akin to a collection of bad Saturday Night Live skits than to a serious piece of cinema.

Transparent, the 2014 Amazon comedy/drama about a father who becomes a trans-woman, is another example of critical judgment skewed for symbolic political purposes. The show, which was created by Jill Soloway and starred Jeffrey Tambor as Mort - who becomes Maura, won eight Emmys over its four seasons. Critics gushed over Transparent, as it received critical scores on Rotten Tomatoes of 98, 98 and 100 over its first three seasons.

I watched the show because I had heard that Tambor, an actor I deeply respect, did amazing work in it…and he did…but the show itself was so God-awful it made my stomach hurt. I have never seen a collection of more repulsive characters and vapid caricatures on one show in my entire life. My loathing of Transparent was met with predictable accusations of transphobia, which is ironic since the characters I found so repellent weren’t the trans-gendered ones, but the cis-gendered ones.

The critics who love Lady Bird, Transparent and even Black Panther, which is a painfully middling and unimpressive Marvel movie, do so because those movies represent a sort of utopian dream of diversity and inclusion, not because they are creative and artistic masterpieces. Having the “correct” politics now trumps great artistic achievement in the eyes of critics, which is why I am so suspicious of their opinion.

Which brings me back to Fleabag. By the time I had become aware of Fleabag I was already thoroughly jaded by my experience of Lady Bird, Transparent and Black Panther among others. Unfortunately, in response to critics pushing their political bias I had reflexively formed my own bias against the shows they endorsed. I realized that assuming Fleabag was just another vacuous “girl power” show solely based on critic’s love for it was just as vapid an approach to criticism as the woke critics I abhor. So I took the plunge and watched Fleabag.

Contrary to my contrarian instincts, Fleabag is absolutely, insanely and infectiously fantastic. The show is not some recipient of a woke-inspired critical leg up, but rather is an off beat, gutter dwelling, low-brow, sort of masterpiece of the half hour comedy genre.

The writing is gloriously crisp and comedically precise while the cast, most notably Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Olivia Colman, Bill Patterson and Andrew Scott, are spectacular.

Fleabag is a feminist show, but not in the sense of how that term is misused in our popular culture at the moment. Fleabag does not embrace victimhood or blame men, instead the lead character, brilliantly played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a fully formed, multi-dimensional person who has agency in her life and is solely responsible for the hysterical mess she’s made of it.

If, like me, you have a plethora of pop culture scar tissue and stayed far away from Fleabag out of fear that it is just another piece of politically correct garbage, I promise you that it isn’t. The show may not be for everybody, it is pretty raunchy for instance, but it is as good a comedy as you will find anywhere on television and is deserving of its praise and worthy of your attention.

 A version fo this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Post Oscar Musings

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 47 seconds

The Oscars are over and it was a bit of a surprising night. Yes, Green Book won in an upset and Olivia Colman shocked the world by beating out Glenn Close for Best Actress, but the biggest shock of the night was that my Oscar picks were so dreadful (15 out of 24). But in a striking sign that this years award’s were so incoherent was that even with my awful picks I still won my Oscar pool…again…which in the big picture is really all that matters.

In terms of the Oscar show, I have to say the lack of a host was perfectly fine with me. Not having to suffer through some hackneyed bit or contrived comedy made the evening much more bearable. Some of the presenters were mildly amusing, some were not. Some of the winners had decent speeches, some of them not. Melissa McCarthy was funny, Awkwafina was not. Mahershala Ali’s speech was good, Spike Lee’s was not.

The trio who won Best Hair and Makeup and tried to choreograph their shared speech were an embarrassment to humanity. This speech made me want to have a new rule at Oscars going forward…whoever gives the worst speech of the night is executed live on stage at the end of the show. This would accomplish two things, first it would make people really prepare a speech and practice it so they don’t mess it up, and secondly the ratings for the show would go through the roof because America likes nothing more than competition and violence.

I dvr’d the show and watched it later sans commercials and it still felt oppressively long. My solution to the Oscar show problem is to declare that there is no problem. The show is once a year and if it runs long who cares? Also, the Academy is concerned about dropping ratings, well, tough luck, ratings across the board are down. People simply don’t watch anything for more than 30 minute intervals at the most anymore.

That said, if you want to cut time off the show you could drop the short film categories and put them at the technical Oscar awards that are held at another time. I think the show should focus more on the craft of filmmaking and less on celebrity, which puts me in a very miniscule minority, so I don’t want the show to jettison the technical and behind the camera awards like editing or cinematography or even hair and makeup. But not televising the short film awards seems alright even to a cinephile like me.

Another thing would be to cut the musical numbers…or at least some of them. I know some dopes loved the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper song last night, but good lord I thought it was just awful. And I did not need to see Jennifer Hudson and Bette Midler of all people sing totally forgettable songs. If you cut the song performances down to two you cut approximately 15 minutes off the show. Non-problem problem solved.

As for the actual awards, the thing that sticks out to me is that Green Book winning Best Picture is a perfect encapsulation of the shit show that is our culture. Green Book is a good movie, it isn’t a great movie, but that said there was only one great movie nominated this year and that was Roma. Green Book is better than Bohemian Rhapsody, Vice and Black Panther but it definitely wasn’t better than Roma (or The Favourite). Green Book is a finely crafted, well acted and well-made film, it just isn’t an artistically made film. Roma is both an exceedingly well made film and an artistic vision made manifest.

Roma is a complicated potential Best Picture winner though because it is a Foreign Film, which have never won Best Picture, it is a black and white film, and it is a Netflix film, which makes it controversial in the movie industry that hasn’t quite come to grips with Netflix. For these reasons, Roma losing is at least understandable according to industry logic. I loved Roma with a passion, but I don’t think that the voters who chose Green Book over Roma did so because they hate Mexicans…I think they have their reasons that makes sense even if I disagree with them.

Unlike me, the elite pundit class is less nuanced in their feelings about Green Book’s win. The LA Times declared in its headline this morning that Green Book is the worst Best Picture winner of the last decade…and equal in its awfulness to Crash, which is the meanest thing you can say to a Best Picture winner.

The other and more insidious talking point making the rounds is that Green Book won because older White male voters in the Academy are racist. The reasoning behind this is that Green Book, because it is a story about racism told from a White man’s perspective and allegedly propagates the “White savior complex”, is “regressive” on race issues and anyone who likes it is racist. Therefore, Green Book winning Best Picture means that the Academy is racist.

Of course, what this talking point fails to take into account is that the same allegedly racist Academy nominated BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther for Best Picture (and gave Best Picture to Moonlight 3 years ago), gave awards to people of color in 3 of the 4 acting awards, and gave awards to minorities in Adapted Screenplay, Director and Cinematography. The “Oscars Are Racist” people seem to think that these “good” outcomes only happened because of the non-old White Male voters and that the “bad” outcome of Green Book winning happened only because of the old White male voters.

This sort of twisted illogic, which is simply a short cut to thinking, is similar to the politics of declaring America a racist cesspool after electing a Black man as president in two straight elections. After Obama’s eight years in office, the cries of racism following Trump’s win were still deafening, with many saying bluntly that anyone who voted for Trump was a deplorable racist, even those who had voted for Obama in the previous two elections. This goalpost moving by the super woke in our culture does little more than lead people to throw up their hands and tune out any discussion related to race in America.

The New York Times ran an op-ed by philosopher Crispin Sartwell on Monday titled, “The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation” that made similar arguments to what I have been writing for the last few years, and that is using awards shows as a referendum on racial equality is a fool’s errand that actually undermines the genuine struggle for racial equality in America.

Mr. Sartwell makes the case that the issue of “representation” in films is a band-aid on a bullet wound that is little more than a distraction.

“Whatever the Grammys or Oscars looks like in the long run will have little actual impact on social justice. Perhaps, over all, the emphasis on what sort of person is on television has been a distraction from much more urgent matters. Imagine an America that gets the awards shows exactly right but in which, for example, mass incarceration or the internment of asylum seekers just ticks right along, or in which income inequality grows or residential segregation remains unchanged. It’s easy if you try: That’s liable to be the reality of 2020. And 2030, and beyond.”

As I have written in the past, my addition to Mr. Sartwell’s criticism is that not only are the award show representation battles a distraction but they actively undermine legitimate issues because award show “under-representation” is a myth that is provably false. When liberals decide to die on the hill of awards show representation they are not only striking a blow against their cause elsewhere but also fighting for an observable lie, thus decimating their credibility on other more important issues.

I find these race based awards arguments to be so frivolous as to be absurd but I readily admit this sort of nonsense is going to get much much worse before it ever gets better, if it ever gets better. Major awards shows like the Grammys and Oscars have already been reduced to mostly affirmative action/quota competitions that have very little at all to do with merit and everything to do with virtue signaling.

As for as Green Book being a racist film, this carries with it a very uncomfortable side effect, namely that those calling Green Book racist are in essence calling the Black people associated with the film, like its star, Mahershela Ali (who won his second Supporting Actor Oscar last night), its producer, Octavia Spencer, and Congressman and Civil Rights icon John Lewis, who passionately introduced and advocated for the film, Uncle Toms.

This is the problem that arises in woke culture, no one is ever pure enough, and the White people who are calling Green Book racist are actually calling the Black people associated with the film self-loathing racists as well.

Green Book is considered racist mostly because it is a story about racism told from the perspective of a White man. I also find this argument specious at best, for as Hall of Fame basketball player and extremely insightful cultural critic Kareem Abdul-Jabbar so astutely noted in his defense of the film in the Hollywood Reporter,

“The film is much more effective from Tony’s point of view because the audience that might be most changed by watching it is the White audience.”

To Green Book’s credit, it at the very least attempts to try and grapple with racism, and yet just by taking on that issue from a White perspective is declared “not woke enough” by the woke gatekeepers who then quickly label anyone who likes it irredeemably racist. What woke culture tends to forget is the obvious, that America is a majority White country, and if you want to reach as large an audience as possible, connecting to that White majority through perspective is a rational maneuver for a film maker.

There is some talk that Green Book’s win is a result of a backlash against the backlash to the film. This makes total sense to me. Green Book was singled out as this “unwoke” abomination and I think voters who liked it simply kept their feelings to themselves and may have ended up voting for it out of spite just as a way to tell the politically correct brigade to fuck off. I understand the sentiments.

As I am fond of saying, “wokeness kills art”, and eventually it will kill commerce too, which is when Hollywood will really see a backlash to the backlash. In our current “woke” moment no one is ever woke enough, and so minorities winning 3 of the 4 acting awards and a plethora of the other prestigious awards is not enough, and Green Book winning is an apostasy because it doesn’t fit entirely into current rigid racial orthodoxy and sensitivities.

In my review for Green Book I said that if it came out twenty years ago it was a shoe in for Best Picture, but that it stood no chance nowadays. Obviously I was wrong, and in my defense the reason I was wrong is that I constantly under estimate my fellow man and woman. In the case of Green Book winning over Roma, I was wrong in thinking that Green Book had no chance, but right in underestimating the people in the Academy, who failed to give Roma Best Picture, not because they are racists, but because they have simple tastes.

©2019

91st Academy Awards: The 2019 Oscars Prediction Post

Estimated Reading Time: Just Like the Oscar Ceremony this article will last 4 hours and 38 minutes

As every sentient being on the earth, in the solar system, in the galaxy and in the universe knows, this Sunday night is the biggest night in the history of history. Yes, Oscar night is upon us. Ever since a loathsome but determined little creature crawled out of the primordial ooze, that creature has been making its way to this Sunday night, which will be, after billions of years of evolution, symbolic of the apex in human development. When most impossibly beautiful people gather to congratulate one another for their superiority, be it artistic, moral or both, mankind will officially have made the Kubrickian leap from fighting monkeys to star children.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is my church, movies are my religion and the Oscars my high holy days. I have been fasting and meditating for months to prepare for this most sacred of nights…and to hopefully fit into my gown by Karl Lagerfeld (RIP)!!

This has been an awful year for Hollywood movies and I have to admit that this years Oscars are particularly difficult to predict. Since the “New Academy”, formed in the wake of the ridiculous #OscarsSoWhite controversy three years ago, I have yet to figure out with any confidence or certainty how these new members and the old guard come together to form some sort of consensus. Obviously identity politics, diversity and inclusion are important issues to the new members…but how important? And how much has the old guard either embraced these issues out of solidarity or rejected them out of resistance? The answer of course is…I have no idea.

But will my ignorance stop me from making not just humble predictions but bold and assertive declarations of my Oscar picks? No. No it won’t. As long time readers can attest, not having a clue on a subject has never, ever stopped me from loudly pontificating my less than useful opinion…and that is most definitely true when it comes to the Oscars.

So with that in mind…light some incense, spike the holy water and buckle up because the most holy and most sacred Oscars are here. Like the Israelites in Moses’ absence, we must worship the golden calf of the Oscar statuette, for it may bring us salvation!! But please keep in mind that since the Oscars are a religious holiday…please no wagering.

So here are my picks for the 91st Academy Awards…

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Amy Adams - Vice : Amy Adams has had a great career garnering 6 Oscar nominations. Adams’ portrayal of Lynne Cheney is the best performance of her stellar career, which is saying a lot.

Marina de Tavira - Roma : I loved Roma…but I have no idea why Marina de Tavira is nominated. Her role is so small and unremarkable that I am entirely baffled as to why she is here.

Regina King - If Beale Street Could Talk : Regina King is a fine actress but If Beale Street Could Talk is not a fine film and her work in it is just as underwhelming as the movie.

Emma Stone - The Favourite : The Favourite is proof that Emma Stone keeps getting better and better with each year. Stone’s manipulative social climber is a finely-tuned, sexy and charismatic performance that is a testament to her skill and talent.

Rachel Weisz - The Favourite : Weisz’s immovable object meeting Stone’s irressistable force makes The Favourite one of my favorites. Weisz’s masterful use of physicality in this role is something that actors should study closely.

Who Should Win - Amy Adams : Amy Adams first scene in Vice is so good as to be delicious and sets the stage for her powerhouse performance. Adams deftly turns Lynne Cheney into a formidable Lady MacBeth that is the straw that stirs the drink of Darth Cheney’s career. A truly great performance from one of the best actresses working in film today.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY : The Academy’s push for diversity clearly gives the edge here to Regina King over Marina de Tavira because for some reason diversity, at least in the eyes of the New Academy, only relates to Black people.

WHO WILL WIN - Regina King : King’s work is strikingly inferior when compared to Adams, Stone and Weisz, but she will walk away with the Oscar due to the Academy’s yearning to be “inclusive” and to quell any charges similar to the #OscarsSoWhite nonsense from a few years back.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Mahershala Ali - Green Book : Ali does strong work as Dr. Don Shirley, the Black, gay, effete (and upper class) pianist struggling to survive in a decidedly hostile 1960’s world. Ali makes Shirley a genuine human being and uses his formidable skill to masterfully avoid falling into the easy trap of caricature.

Adam Driver - BlackKklansman : Adam Driver is…fine…in Spike Lee’s racial drama set in 1970’s Colorado. I didn’t think the performance was Oscar worthy…but what the hell do I know. It isn’t awful…but it isn’t great either. To be fair, I am entirely baffled as to why Adam Driver is a thing…I just don’t get it.

Sam Elliott - A Star is Born : I think you have to love Sam Elliot to love A Star is Born or love A Star is Born to love Sam Elliot. I love neither.

Richard E. Grant - Can You Ever Forgive Me: This is not a great movie…but Richard E. Grant is great in it. Grant turns what could have been a stereotype into a fascinating, frustrating and engaging character that captivates every second of his screen time.

Sam Rockwell - Vice : Rockwell gives his dim bulb character George W. Bush a desperate yearning for acceptance and respect that is genuine and compelling and shows an exquisite command of craft in avoiding the pitfall of imitation.

WHO SHOULD WIN - Mahershala Ali/Richard E. Grant - Both men give stand out performances that highlight their mastery of craft and undeniable talent. A win for either will not garner complaints from me.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY - The New Academy will want to reward Ali, who won the award just two years ago for his work in Moonlight, for no other reason than he is African-American in order to satiate the knee-jerk #OscarsSoWhite criticisms. That said, Ali’s award for Moonlight could actually hurt him this year as the Academy may feel they don’t NEED to award him since he already has one.

WHO WILL WIN - Richard E. Grant : Mahershala Ali has won all the preceding awards and is the favorite, but I am sensing that this will be the first upset/surprise of the evening. Grant has been on a charm offensive recently and with my ear to the ground I am picking up a great deal of support for him. Another factor helping Grant is that Mahershala Ali won the award two years ago and the actor’s actor, Grant, has never won it.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

The Favourite - Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara : A tight and smart script that plumbs the depths of palace intrigue to create a darkly funny and insightful story. The dialogue is exceedingly smart, funny and crisp.

First Reformed - Paul Schrader : Paul Schrader is one of the great screenwriters in Hollywood history, having written both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. First Reformed is a better script than it is a movie, which is both an indictment of Schrader’s directing and an endorsement of his writing.

Green Book - Nick Vallelonga and Peter Farrelly: This average script was elevated by Farrelly’s skilled direction, and with the addition of the controversy surrounding the writers, I don’t think it will win. If it does…this is going to be a very interesting Oscars indeed…and a very controversial one too.

Roma - Alfonso Cuaron : A phenomenal script in terms of the themes it tackles and the scope of its narrative. Cuaron’s singular vision starts with his script and this one is chock full of magical realism mixed with working class reality. A truly terrific piece of screenwriting.

Vice - Adam McKay : I felt this script bit off more than it could chew, lacked focus and was structurally flawed. Definitely could have used a few more re-writes and edits to fine tune the whole thing.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Roma/The Favourite - Two high quality scripts that were exceedingly well written. An Oscar for either and you’ll hear no complaints from me. If Alfonso Cuaron wins this award…expect Roma to have a very, very, very big night.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: With no “diverse/inclusive” candidates to choose from (the New Academy doesn’t count Mexican men as diverse/inclusive for some reason), the New Academy will only work in the negative here by cutting Green Book off at the knees. Vallelonga and Farrelly have made enemies among the New Academy for their less than politically correct behavior and will be punished accordingly.

WHO WILL WIN: The Favourite : While I’d like to see Roma sweep the entire awards ceremony, I think voters hold a grudge against the film because it is a Netflix movie and it is foreign, the former of which will particularly hurt it in this category since the dialogue is in Spanish and Mextec. The Favourite is certainly deserving of an Oscar though as it is a beautifully written movie.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - The Coen Brothers - I have seen Buster Scruggs but have not reviewed it. I enjoyed it. I don’t think this script deserves a nomination though.

BlacKkKlansman - Spike Lee and friends - This was a good movie, but I do not think it deserves a nomination for its script. Spike Lee has written some masterworks in the past, Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, but this is not his strongest work.

Can You Ever Forgive Me - Nicole Holofcener - I thought this script and this film was pretty shitty as it never figured out what it wanted to be and ended up being not much.

If Beale Street Could Talk - Barry Jenkins - Again…a bad script and an at-best average movie. The story and characters did not translate well at all from James Baldwin’s book.

A Star is Born - Bradley Cooper and friends - This script was a piece of junk too. God what an awful category. How is modernizing a movie that has been made three times before considered Oscar worthy?

WHO SHOULD WIN: BlackKklansman : As I said, I don’t think this is an Oscar worthy script…but this category is pretty terrible so this movie wins the tallest dwarf award.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: Well, obviously the New Academy want to reward either Spike Lee or Barry Jenkins due to their race. Nicole Holfcener is another sleeper pick because she is a woman. The fact that Jenkins won this award two years ago, and Lee has never won and has never been properly awarded in his entire career, and his film was so politically charged for this moment in time, I think the New Academy goes with Lee.

WHO WILL WIN: BlackKklansman : Spike Lee finally gets the Oscar he deserves but only for a script that is undeserving.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Cold War - Lukasz Zal: Zal’s use of black and white and his framing in Cold War is impeccable and stunning. A beautifully photographed film whose cinematography was integral to the storytelling.

The Favourite - Robbie Ryan: Ryan’s use of candles, shadow and light is exquisite in The Favourite and is a wonderful cinematic device that reveals much of the sub-text.

Never Look Away - Caleb Deschanel: I found Deschanel’s work on this film to be less than Oscar worthy. Not terrible at all, but just not noteworthy.

Roma - Alfonso Cuaron : Cuaron puts on a virtuoso performance with Roma, and his cinematography is the icing on this cinematic cake. A stunning film to behold, Cuaron’s use of black and white and his extremely effective and complex camera movements and beautifully rendered framing is simply magnificent.

A Star is Born - Matthew Libatique : I found Libatique’s cinematography, with its excessive use of flares and close-ups, to be as underwhelming as the film.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Roma - Roma is a cinematic masterpiece and Cuaron’s cinematography is absolute artistic and technical perfection.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: Since the New Academy doesn’t recognize Mexican men as qualifying for their diversity/inclusion games, then this category offers no chance to virtue signal.

WHO WINS: Roma - Alfonso Cuaron: This is a tough category where virtually anyone can win. The knock against Cuaron is that the Academy, for a variety of reasons, do not want him to win all the awards. In this category cinematographers and other behind the camera technical people will resent Cuaron a bit for being a director AND a cinematographer…this stuff can be very territorial. A sign of that was when Lukasz Zal won this award at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards. Anyone can win this thing…and as much as I think the Academy has a bug up its ass over Cuaron and Netflix…I still think he sneaks out of here with this win. But if he loses it will be to Zal…who to be fair is a very deserving candidate as well.

BEST FOREIGN FILM

Capernaum - Due to time constraints, this is one of the few noteworthy films I haven’t seen this year…which bums me out. I hope to see it soon though.

Cold War - One of the best films of the year that boasts two outstanding performances and luscious black and white cinematography.

Never Look Away : An enigmatic movie that never quite lives up to its grandiose ambitions although it does raise something interesting thematic questions.

Roma - An absolute masterpiece that is as heartbreaking as it is gripping.

Shoplifters - An absolutely mesmerizing film that stayed with me for weeks on end after seeing it. Deftly directed and wonderfully acted, Shoplifters is an understated yet exquisite gem.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Roma - It is easily the best film of the year and should easily win this award.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: Roma hits all the right notes for New Academy voters but because it is a Netflix movie there is resistance to it.

WHO WILL WIN: Roma - There is an outside chance that the Netflix/Cuaron related backlash against Roma elevates Cold War to the victory. If that is the case, then this Oscar night will be turned upside down. I adored Cold War and it is one of the very best films of the year, but Roma is the best film, foreign or domestic, of the year, and if it doesn’t win here it will be a major upset.

BEST DIRECTOR

Alfonso Cuaron - Roma : Cuaron’s directing on Roma is a auteur’s virtuoso performance, a stunning tour-de-force that masterfully brings to life his vision with singular cinematic genius and reminds us of the power and artistry of cinema.

Yorgos Lanthimos - The Favourite : Lanthimos is one of the best directors in cinema and his masterful work on The Favourite has catapulted him to the heights he deserves.

Spike Lee - BlackKklansman : Spike Lee was once one of the most important figures in cinema, but that was over 25 years ago. Lee’s direction on BlackKklansman is not perfect and is at times jarringly shoddy, but in a down year for movies this one is a good enough comeback vehicle for him.

Adam McKay - Vice : I wanted to love Vice…I didn’t love Vice. McKay’s direction is scattered and uneven…a lot like this movie.

Pawel Pawlikowski - Cold War : Pawlikowski direction on Cold War is superb as he crafts a compelling and beautifully profound film that is packaged in a tight 88 minute running time.

WHO SHOULD WIN : Alfonso Cuaron - Not to sound like a broken record, but damn Cuaron showed himself to be at the very top of his game and at the top of his profession with his work on Roma.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: The New Academy want to reward Spike Lee for his career and his making an overtly political film this year that is a favorite of social justice warriors, and because he is Black which would feed their need to virtue signal. Once again, Alfonso Cuaron, a Mexican man, doesn’t qualify for the diversity vote…a fact which helps those arguing that the Oscars aren’t “inclusive” since Mexican men have won this award 5 of the last 6 years.

WHO WILL WIN: Alfonso Cuaron - Roma : There is a chance…and it is actually a pretty good chance…that the New Academy and its “diversity” initiatives rear their ugly head and Spike Lee wins this award. If Roma and Cuaron are getting beat in other categories like screenplay and cinematography, then watch out for Spike Lee sneaking in for the upset which would be a travesty. That said, I think Cuaron’s work, regardless of the fact that it was for Netflix, is so overwhelmingly spectacular that voters will find it nearly impossible to deny him this Oscar…but stranger things have happened.

BEST ACTRESS

Glenn Close -The Wife: The Wife is a truly dreadful film, just awful, and to be frank, Glenn Close is pretty terrible in it. That said, she has been nominated a bunch over her long career and never won. The consensus seems to be that it is her time.

Yalitza Aparicio - Roma : A first time actress nominated for an Oscar is a pretty great story. Aparicio is terrific in Roma, totally present, genuine, grounded and alive on screen. A pleasantly surprising but very well deserved nomination.

Olivia Colman - The Favourite: Olivia Colman’s scenery chewing performance as the emotionally incontinent Queen Anne, who has the attention-span and temperament of a toddler, is a joy to behold. Colman is deliriously and deliciously delightful in The Favourite and is most-deserving of her nomination and if it happens, the award.

Lady Gaga - A Star is Born: I don;t get it. I don’t get Gaga being nominated, I don’t get all the love this film gets. This movie is kind of a hot mess, and Gaga’s performance is most definitely not Oscar worthy.

Melissa McCarthy - Can You Ever Forgive Me : This movie stinks but Melissa McCarthy is a revelation as the curmudgeonly Lee Israel. McCarthy uses he natural comedic ability to great effect in this role but never allows it to overwhelm the dramatic honesty of her character.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Olivia Colman : Colman is so good in The Favourite it made me giddy. Just a ridiculously great performance that is compelling, energetic and devastatingly honest. I can’t wait to see Colman as Queen Elizabeth II on The Crown.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: Glenn Close made a smart move at the Golden Globes by giving a speech that spoke to the Girl Power/Pussy Hat contingent in the media and the New Academy. This speech positioned Close to be the recipient of the New Academy’s diversity/inclusivity vote even though she is a White woman. Well played Ms. Close.

WHO WILL WIN: Glenn Close - The Wife: As much as I want Olivia Colman to win this award, and as much as I think she deserves it, I think Glenn Close wins it because she is a symbol of the #ImWithHer/Hillary brigade due to her always being the bridesmaid and never the bride come Oscar night. The Academy will reward Close despite the shitty work she does in that shitty movie. Such is life. That said, I put the chances of Colman sneaking in and winning this thing pretty high…so don’t be too shocked if Close is left holding the bag once again…and try not to laugh too hard at her expense.

BEST ACTOR

Christian Bale - Vice: Bale’s work in Vice is absolutely stunning. His physical transformation into Dick Cheney never falls into the trap of imitation and that is a testament to Bale’s remarkable talent and skill.

Bradley Cooper - A Star is Born: Cooper’s work is the best thing about A Star is Born and I think he is deserving of an Oscar nomination even though i think the movie is not. Cooper is establishing himself as one of the top movie star/actors in the business. The next few years of his work will be interesting to see.

Willem Dafoe - At Eternity’s Gate : Dafoe’s acting in At Eternity’s Gate is very impressive, but the film never lives up to the stellar work he does in it.

Rami Malek - Bohemian Rhapsody : I like Rami Malek. Everybody likes Rami Malek…he’s a good guy. That said, I was not as impressed by his performance as everybody else was. To me the script was so thin that Malek was never really able to get much depth to his performance. That said, he does the very best he can with the little he is given.

Viggo Mortenson - Green Book : Green Book has gotten a lot of heat for its racial politics, but Mortenson’s solid performance is beyond reproach. Mortenson uses skill and craft to give great depth and nuance to a character that easily could have fallen into caricature.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Christian Bale - Bale is head and shoulders above everyone else in this category. A remarkable performance that elevates Bale into the stratosphere of best working actors on the planet.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: This category has no Black actors in it so it is open to moronic charges of #OscarsSoWhite. But rest assured, Rami Malek is of Egyptian descent so the New Academy will rally behind him and be able to virtue signal their moral superiority due to their embrace of “diversity”.

WHO WILL WIN: Rami Malek - Everybody loves Rami Malek. While his performance isn’t Oscar worthy to me, my vote doesn’t matter. Malek is winning and there is nothing we can do about it. Since he is such a good guy, I won’t get mad about it. I do hope he wears the Freddie teeth to the ceremony though…or at least thanks them in his speech.

BEST PICTURE

Green Book - Green Book is a well crafted and fine film. Is it Oscar worthy? No. If this were 1985 then Green Book would win this award with ease…but this isn’t 1985. This sort of simple film is a lightning rod for those who hate it AND for those that hate the people who hate it. To be frank, I find all this shit exhausting.

Black Panther - It is a total joke that Black Panther, an at best middling super hero movie that isn’t even the best super hero movie of the year (which is easily Infinity War), is nominated for an Oscar. Black Panther is the recipient of the “leg up” program, and its nomination is a blatant piece of pandering and paternalism and is frankly a disgrace.

BlackKklansman - I liked this movie but it is deeply flawed and because of that do not think it is Oscar worthy. That said, due to Spike Lee directing, it is a sentimental and political choice for some.

Roma - The greatest film of the year. A masterpiece.

Bohemian Rhapsody - This movie is an absolute mess, a total shitshow. Yes, it is entertaining and fun to get see Queen rocking Wembley once again…but Oscar worthy? Good Lord no!

A Star is Born - I don’t get it…I just don’t get it. Thought this movie was not great…not great at all. Why people are so invested in it is beyond me.

Vice - An ambitious (and noble) misfire that boasts fantastic performances but never coalesces into a coherent piece of cinema enough to be considered an Oscar worthy movie.

WHO SHOULD WIN: Roma - This is as clear as day. Roma is easily the greatest film of the year and it isn’t even close.

HANDICAPPING THE NEW ACADEMY: I think Black Panther is going to get an awful lot of love for its diversity and inclusivity.

WHO WILL WIN: Buckle up. Roma should win…but in the shock of the night…BLACK PANTHER is going to steal this award. Roma has a lot of hurdles in the voting, the most obvious is that it is a black and white, foreign language film, and a foreign language film has never won Best Picture…and on top of that it is a Netflix film and the movie industry is very uncomfortable with Netflix. The Academy doesn’t want Roma to win Best Picture (or sweep all the awards) and is actively trying to find a substitute…and what I have picked up out here in Hollywood is that Black Panther is that choice. Listening to and talking with Oscar voters over the last month and Black Panther is the film that keeps getting mentioned…and never because people think it is great but because to a person they say they will vote for it because of the message it will send about “representation”, “diversity” and “inclusion”. Sadly, this is the world in which we now live, and Black Panther, that ridiculously shitty super hero movie, is going to beat out one one of the greatest films in recent history, Roma, because of a wave of self-righteous, identity politics driven virtue signalling.

Hopefully I am wrong (Please God let me be wrong!!). Hopefully Roma is justly rewarded, not just in the Best Picture category but in Screenplay, Cinematography, Directing and Foreign Picture…but I don’t have my hopes up.

As for the rest of the categories…I have even less of an idea about these than I do about the previous picks…so take them with a grain of salt as they are my best guesses.

VISUAL EFFECTS - FIRST MAN : If Infinity War wins this award it could signal the Academy’s acceptance of Marvel films and point to a big night for Black Panther.

MAKEUP AND HAIRSTYLING - VICE

ANIMATED SHORT - BAO

LIVE ACTION SHORT - SKIN

DOCUMENTARY SHORT - PERIOD. END OF SENTENCE.

SOUND MIXING - FIRST MAN - Bohemian Rhapsody has a shot here, but the one to watch is Black Panther, which if it wins this award could point to a big night for the Marvel film.

SOUND EDITING - FIRST MAN - Same comment as the Sound Mixing award.

COSTUME DESIGN - BLACK PANTHER - If BP loses these next two awards to The Favourite…then it is done and won’t win Best Picture. (I have my fingers crossed this is what happens!!)

PRODUCTION DESGIN - BLACK PANTHER

FILM EDITING - VICE - Bohemian Rhapsody has a shot here.

ORIGINAL SCORE - BLACKKKLANSMAN - Black Panther is the favorite…but I think the Academy rewards Terence Blanchard…which will make me happy. But if BP wins this…and the Design awards and Sound Awards…look out…Best Picture is coming.

ORIGINAL SONG - “SHALLOW”, A STAR IS BORN - Outside chance BP and Kendrick Lamar wins this award.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE - RBG - This is neck and neck with Free Solo, but I went with RBG because of the politics.

ANIMATED FEATURE - SPIDER-MAN : INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

Ok gang…I think I covered all the categories. A few other things to touch upon before I go. Keep an eye out for certain narratives taking shape in the early awards.

The narratives that are in play…

1. Roma dominates - Roma has a chance to absolutely destroy these Oscars as the film has a legitimate chance to win Best Picture, Best Foreign Film, Best Director and Best Cinematography and has an outside chance to win Best Screenplay and Best Editing as well…and if the longest of longshots happens and Yalitza Aparicio wins Best Actress…that will signal Roma has had a totally and gloriously dominant night…and I will be the happiest man on earth….except for Alfonso Cuaron.

2. Roma destroyed - There is also a chance that Roma, due to its affiliation with Netflix and its artistic pedigree, could get snubbed across the board. There is a scenario where voters don’t vote for it for Best Picture because they assume it will win Best Foreign Film, and then other voters don’t vote for it for best Foreign Film because they assume it will win Best Picture…and it ends up winning neither. This scenario is much much more likely than I would like to imagine…and that along with all of the cocaine I’ve been doing is keeping me awake nights. In addition, it is very possible that Spike Lee is chosen over Alfonso Cuaron for Best Director out of a sense of wanting to finally reward Lee for his career’s work. Then throw in a Best Cinematography win for Cold War (which won the Guild award) and there is a chance that Roma leaves empty handed. YIKES.

3. Black Panther goes on a run. As noted above, I have Black Panther winning Costume and Production Design…and if that happens it will look very good for my prediction of a Best Picture win. If the movie wins Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and either Original Score or best Song in addition to the production awards…it will definitely win Best Picture. There is a shot that we are looking at an Oscars where Black Panther wins 7 awards…let that sink in for a minute.

4. Black Panther gets shut out. Things could go this way if Black Panther loses to The Favourite in costume and production design. If Black Panther loses those awards it is done in the Best Picture race and we Roma fans can breath a sigh of relief. If BP loses in the production awards it will not win Song, Score or either Sound award and will leave empty handed. The fact that this is a Marvel/Disney film could be a hurdle that even its identity politics cannot overcome. We will see.

5. Bohemian Rhapsody goes on a run. Bohemian Rhapsody is an awful movie but it did win the Editing Guild award and has a legit chance to win Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing awards as well as the Best Editing award which would be a terrific night for the film. Add in Rami Malek’s guaranteed win for Best Actor and we are looking at 4 Oscars for this fun piece of crap.

6. Chaos - A totally incoherent Oscars. In this scenario a non-Roma film wins Best Picture, Olivia Colman wins Best Actress, there are upsets in both Supporting actor categories as well as in Best Director and the Screenplay awards. Green Book ends up being a big winner.

7. Non-chaos. All of the favorites win. Roma does well and everything goes according to plan with the other categories.

If you pay attention to the early awards you might be able to discern how the rest of the night is going to go…or not…who knows. This Oscars has me baffled and it shouldn’t because Roma is so clearly the best of this sad bunch in a very down year for Hollywood Cinema (foreign films excluded).

And thus ends my rambling and ragged Oscar predictions post. I have zero confidence in my picks and am genuinely concerned I will lose for Oscar pool for the first time in my life this year. That said, i do reserve the right to change my mind between now and the awards show. In a fit of cinema idealism I may discard my Oscar cynicism (Black Panther) and embrace my optimism and pick Roma to win because my heart tells me to…I’m just not sure my head will let me.

©2019

Avengers: Infinity War - A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars                  

Popcorn Curve* Rating: 3.9 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. If you love or are even lukewarm for super hero movies, then definitely see Infinity War in the theatre. 

Avengers: Infinity War, written by Christopher Markus and Stephen Feely and directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, is the story of the famed superhero cooperative The Avengers, as they try and stop super-villian Thanos from taking control of the universe. The film stars…well...just about everybody, including, Chris Evans, Chris Pratt, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Don Cheadle, Chris Hemsworth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chadwick Boseman, Tom Holland, Paul Bettany, Josh Brolin and Zoe Saldana, just to name a few. 

Like all red-blooded Americans, over the years I have paid my fare share of Disney taxes to our Mouse-eared overlords presiding over us from their lair at the Happiest Place on Earth®. Just in the last year alone I have already paid hard earned cash to Mickey Mouse to see The Last Jedi, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Black Panther and now Infinity War and will no doubt see Solo: A Star Wars Story when it comes out at the end of the month. I have usually been underwhelmed by Mickey's moviemaking prowess and at the end of the day have felt cheated by the Disney tax man. That trend was reversed with my journey to the theatre to see Infinity War.

Infinity War is the nineteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the third of the Avenger films, and is the first of the bunch to not feel like a complete commercial for itself. Having sat through the majority, but not all, of the previous Marvel movies, I have to say that Infinity War is easily head and shoulders above all the rest, and is worlds better than the previous two Avenger films. 

What I appreciated about Infinity War was that unlike all the other Marvel movies it had a villain, Thanos, who is a complex character that is not only worthy of The Avengers as an adversary, but of my attention. Thanos embodies an existential struggle that is much more complicated than just wanting the world to bend the knee to him, which is a refreshing change from previous Marvel ventures.

To the film's credit, Thanos may appear at first glance to be the embodiment of all evil, but upon closer inspection through the lens of Josh Brolin's CGI enhanced performance and the character's motivations, he is revealed to be less a villain of epic proportions than a misunderstood hero who has taken an unbearable burden upon his muscular shoulders out of noble if misguided intentions. 

Unlike Iron Man, Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange and the rest who reside in a Manichean world of black and white, Thanos must make hard decisions from the moral and ethical grey area in which our reality truly exists. Unlike his alleged "good" adversaries, Thanos does not get to cut corners or have happy endings, he is only left with the burden of his calling and the consequences of his choice which make him a multidimensional and pretty fascinating character. 

Infinity War also succeeds because it challenges our conditioning and embraces the notion that there are no easy Hollywood answers to be found, and I found that extremely refreshing after having sat through over a dozen predictable, world destroying, sense assaulting Marvel movies over the years. 

To be clear, I don't think Avengers: Infinity War is a great movie, but I do think it is a very good super hero movie. It, like all other super hero films, pales in comparison to Christopher Nolan's masterful Dark Knight Trilogy, but that is so high a bar I doubt anyone will ever reach it, never mind exceed it. 

The problems with Infinity War are less specific to this film than they are systemic to the genre, and they include too much cringe-worthy dialogue, too much snark, too much mindless destruction and in general…well…just too much.

And yes, I know I am nitpicking here, but some of the performances in Infinity War are so bad as to be distracting. Mark Ruffalo may very well be the best actor in The Avenger movies but his performance in Infinity War is so abysmally wooden and out of sync as to be startling. I was actually embarrassed for Ruffalo watching him half ass his way through the movie, spewing out his dialogue with such vacuity he seemed more like an extra in a community theater production than an multiple Oscar nominee. 

Another issue I had with the film is an issue I have with all Marvel movies and that is that I find the cinematography to be pretty lackluster. These Marvel films all appear so flat and visually dull to me, and their failure to use color or shadow to further propel the narrative or reinforce the sub-text is a cinema sin. Infinity War, like almost all big budget studio films, relies heavily upon CGI, which I feel is not quite where it needs to be in terms of visual quality and dramatic realism.

But besides Ruffalo, the hackneyed dialogue and my cinematography snobbery, Infinity War kept me captivated for the entire two hours and thirty minutes, which is no small accomplishment. It did so because the fight scenes were, for the most part, interesting, original and well-choreographed and the storyline was dramatically compelling due to a sense of the good guys being in genuine peril. 

I also must say that even though the preceding Marvel movies were entirely underwhelming, you could not have made Infinity War without them. The rather boring, paint by numbers, eighteen pieces of manufactured Marvel cinematic junk preceding Infinity War did effectively introduce all of the relevant characters to the audience, and so since we know them, we have at least a minimal investment in them heading into Infinity War, which excels at dramatically exploiting our connection to its characters. 

It is no small achievement what Disney has pulled off with their Marvel money making machine. Infinity War has pulled in nearly a billion dollars in just its first week in theaters, which will add to the incredible $15 billion haul (on a $4 billion investment) thus far for the Marvel franchise films. For Disney to keep the franchise coherent, interwoven and so fantastically financially successful is an incredible Hollywood achievement (even if it may be killing the movie industry and cinema in the process…but that is a discussion for another day), especially when you compare it to the more mundane results of the DC Comics/Warner Brothers collaboration.

In conclusion, I was genuinely surprised how much I liked Infinity War, especially considering how much I disliked most of the previous Marvel movies. If you are even a lukewarm fan of super hero films, I recommend you definitely go see Infinity War in the theatre. If you despise super hero movies then it stands to reason that you'll despise Infinity War because it packs more super heroes per capita than any other movie of which I can think. 

One word of warning though for parents, I do not think Infinity War is suitable for kids. I would put the cutoff at maybe 12, but your mileage may vary. The reason being is that there are some pretty heavy themes presented and also there is some surprising cursing. As for adults who like acting like kids, go see Infinity War in the theatre, it is well worth the time and energy of super hero fans. 

*The Popcorn Curve judges a film based on its entertainment merits as a franchise/blockbuster movie, as opposed to my regular rating which judges a film solely on its cinematic merits.

FILM COMMENTARY

****WARNING: THIS SECTION CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS!!****

****THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING…MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!****

In 2016 Captain America: Civil War came out and its themes and color palette made my take notice. The reason I was so intrigued by Civil War, was not because it was a good movie, I didn't really think it was, but because it was a remarkable piece of evidence in support of my Isaiah/McCaffrey Historical Wave Theory. 

Civil War's poster was a vibrant battle of red versus blue, Iron Man versus Captain America. The theme of the film was that The Avengers were torn apart (due to an overseas misadventure) and divided into separate factions, globalists versus nationalists, and they went to war with one another. The film was obviously conceived, written and shot well before the 2016 election, but it was the perfect film to represent the struggle going on in America's, and the world's, collective consciousness. 

Added to Civil War, was the fact that another big blockbuster superhero movie had similar themes and color palette…Batman V Superman. The posters for BvS were also a striking blue versus red, Batman (blue) versus Superman (red). While the words civil war were not in the title, civil war was the best way to describe the theme and sub-text of BvS. 

The third film of 2016 which resonated with the McCaffrey Wave Theory was X-Men: Apocalypse. That film also highlighted a civil war-esque level of infighting between different faction of mutants aka X-Men, although its poster and its box office made it much less relevant. 

When all three of these films came out in the same year as our very contentious presidential election, it was proof positive that the Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory was an accurate way to measure the turmoil bubbling just beneath the conscious surface of the masses. (The Isaiah/McCaffrey Wave Theory accurately predicted in the face of much scorn Trump's and Brexit's victories in 2016). 

The reason for this quick look back at super hero movies as they relate to my Wave Theory, is that watching Infinity War through the prism of my Wave Theory, was very unsettling. The themes present in the film are pretty obvious to any cinephile with the will to look, namely globalists, in the form of Iron Man and his crew, are able to convince the nationalists, Captain America and his crew, to fight an external enemy that is an existential threat to the status quo and the world order…Thanos. 

To see it another way is to see it as globalist capitalism (Avengers) versus a sort of nationalist post-capitalism (Thanos). Thanos wants to wipe out half the population of the universe because of dwindling resources, so that the other half can live and prosper in peace and harmony. Thanos is not choosing who lives or dies based on their race, creed, class, power or religion, it is totally random who is to be eliminated and who is to live. 

Iron Man and the rest of The Avengers see that as immoral, unethical and evil, and they fight with all they have to make sure that the status quo, where questions of resources, class and social power are never addressed, reign supreme. The sub-text of Infinity War is a sort of Sophie's Choice, with Thanos choosing and The Avengers refusing to choose, which ultimately is a moral and ethical conundrum due to the fact that, like iconic Canadian arena rockers Rush tell us, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice". 

Late stage globalist capitalism is equivalent to a cancer upon the planet, devastating and exploiting natural resources and human populations as it spreads across our world. Like cancer, this form of capitalism can only survive if it is expanding, therefore stasis is death, and it must devour everything in its path, which eventually will include the planet we all live on. 

Iron Man is the face of multi-national corporate power (Stark Industries), and he must keep American capitalism alive at all costs, because if it dies, he dies. Captain America's nationalist impulses are very quickly co-opted and overridden in the face of a threat to the globalist capitalist order. Although it is never articulated that Iron Man and the globalists have defeated Captain America and the nationalists, it is very clear this is the case when Captain America and company come out of hiding to fight side by side with the globalists to defeat the establishment destroying power of Thanos. 

The fact that the "good guys" in a Disney film are fighting to save American "free market" capitalism is not the least bit shocking…especially when Disney is on the verge of acquiring 20th Century Fox which will give them an astounding 40% market share of the domestic film market. Disney undoubtedly is the height of globalist corporate power in media, and in Infinity War they have recruited The Avengers to fight their ideological battle to the death. 

Thanos on the other hand, may have a very bad solution indeed, mass exterminations, to the resource scarcity issue, but at least he is addressing it, which none of the The Avengers dare do. The Avengers only solution is for them to fight tooth and nail for the right to close their eyes and whistle past the graveyard, in other words to make sure that things stay the same, which is untenable and will eventually result in the death and destruction of the entire human race and the planet earth. When comparing those two solutions, Thanos versus The Avengers, as cruel as Thanos' solution is…the chilling reality is that it is the only one that is viable long term. And the even more complicated and unsettling thought is that as unconscionable as Thanos' solution is, it may be the most moral and ethical if the choices are do nothing and do something awful. 

Thanos is symbolic of the uncomfortable questions that America, and the world, desperately ignore, and they do so at their own peril. If Thanos were a presidential candidate, he certainly would not be a centrist Democrat or Republican (or in Euro terms, a Merkel or Macron) like Iron Man and Captain America, no, Thanos would not be part of the centrist establishment at all. Thanos would be a sort of "independent" (meaning he defines himself in opposition to the old establishment) authoritarian (for example- a sort of amalgam of Xi, Mao, Putin and Stalin), who would have harsh, cold-hearted and brutal answers to the questions of immigration, income inequality, global warming and empire that would come at a very high cost to humanity…but he would also bring a solution to the problem of terrorism, environmental degradation, resource scarcity and resource-fueled wars. 

In regards to the Wave Theory, Infinity War is what I consider a level 6 force on the Wave Scale because it is not as dynamic and distinctive visually in terms of color palette (for example, its poster is rather visually mundane without any dominant colors never mind something as obvious as red versus blue) as say Civil War or BvS (both level 9) and also because it not only has no other big budget film buttressing its theme as Civil War did with BvS, but DC's Justice League and Marvel's Black Panther have optimistic narratives that counter it a bit. That said, the reason Infinity War is intriguing is because it portends an ultimate end/destruction to the status quo, and that in and of itself is a staggering statement in a mainstream blockbuster, never mind the fact that so many iconic, archetypal characters vanish before our eyes in the film's final scenes.

Much like The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the Star Wars films, hit theaters in 1980 and was a sign post for the rising American empire of the coming Reagan years whose laissez-faire, trickle down, Wall Street friendly economics has dominated the globe for the past 38 years, Infinity War is hinting at the end of that system, and the coming of a new one. What that system is, be it a Chinese style-authoritarian controlled capitalism, a neo-Marxism, an authoritarian nationalist socialism, or something else, I have no idea, but if history is any guide, it will be a fierce backlash to the greed fueled corporate globalism of the Reagan era (1981 to now). And if Infinity War, which is quickly eclipsing at the box office and in the cultural consciousness the thematic optimism of Black Panther (not to mention that Black Panther himself, and all he represents, is obliterated in Infinity War), is any guide, the transition to this new system will be tumultuous to say the least. 

Another similarity between Infinity War and The Empire Strikes Back is that main characters symbolizing "good" are "killed". In Infinity War there are a plethora of super heroes turned to dust, and in Empire, Han Solo is frozen. But just like Solo was unfrozen in the Return of the Jedi, I have no doubt that all of the now vaporized superheroes will return in the next Avengers movie (Disney ain't turning off the Marvel money machine just to maintain narrative integrity!). But just because the actions in Infinity War, just like those in Empire Strikes Back, are cinematically reversed, does not mean that they do not hold the secret to what lies ahead for our collective consciousness. The turning point of the collapse of the establishment genie is out of the bottle (collective consciousness), and reviving a coterie of evaporated superheroes will not change that fact in the wider consciousness. 

Think of it this way…if, for example, there is another 2008 level meltdown in our economy, then the political and financial establishment are toast. Apres the unbridled corruption of Reagan (Bush/Trump/Clinton etc.) era American Capitalism, le deluge. The deluge is Thanos. Prepare accordingly while you can. 

©2018

A Wrinkle in Time, Film Criticism and White Liberal Paternalism

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 58 seconds

The Disney film, A Wrinkle in Time, opened two weeks ago amid much media fawning because it is the first film with a budget of over $100 million to be directed by an African-American woman (Ava DuVernay). The film also stars a who's who of big time stars like Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Chris Pine along with a diverse group of fresh-faced young newcomers.

The film is based upon the classic children's book, A Wrinkle in Time written by Madeleine L'Engle. In the lead up to the release of the film, Disney put on a full court publicity blitz by Oprah and director DuVernay, touting how the film was a beacon of diversity in casting. The book A Wrinkle in Time is about a young White girl and is populated by White people, but Oprah and Duvernay's version stars a young African-American girl and actors of color are throughout the cast. Because of the diversity/inclusion casting and the symbolic politics of the movie, the media generated a lot of positive buzz leading up to A Wrinkle in Time's opening. 

Of the plethora of pre-release pieces of marketing, the one that stood out to me most was a softball interview/fluff info-adver-tainment piece by the New York Times with Ms. DuVernay. When I read the article, which was meant to be a completely and totally supportive bit of kiss-ass journalism by the esteemed paper of record, I was shocked at how unlikable Ms. DuVernay came across and how completely oblivious to it she and the Times both were. 

After reading that article and Ms. DuVernay's accompanying tone-deafness and seeing the God-awful trailer, I was not surprised in the least that upon release A Wrinkle in Time absolutely bombed. Reviewers were gently negative but audiences disliked the film with a vigor. Watching the Rotten Tomato "Tomato Meter" of the movie over opening weekend, which started at a "really want to see it" 99, drop so precipitously, was like watching the stock market in late October of 1929. After the first weekend in theaters, A Wrinkle in Time had landed at 40 on the critic side and 34 on the audience side of the Tomato Meter, which gave the film a solidly "Rotten" rating, but all things considered, I was actually surprised it wasn't worse.

THE BIGOTRY OF LOW EXPECTATIONS

Since I never had any interest in seeing A Wrinkle in Time, I decided to read some reviews of the film so I went back to Rotten Tomatoes because it lists and links reviews from professional film critics. I went through and read a bunch of reviews from critics that gave the movie a "fresh" rating and what struck me is that they all gushed about everything surrounding the film, like its wonderful diversity and how "important" it was culturally that it was directed by an African-American woman, but once you got past that stuff the written reviews were actually very negative in regards to the storytelling and skill and craft on display in the movie. And yet, despite this, when it came time to rate the film with a letter grade or number of stars, the reviewers all elevated the film to a positive grade/stars which seemed at odds with what they had written about the actual movie in the body of their review. 

For example, Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post wrote, " “A Wrinkle in Time” is plagued by the same convoluted leaps and hurried lack of logic...in L’Engle’s original book. At a time when movies are almost uniformly too long, this is one film that could have benefited from a few more scenes to pump up Meg’s backstory, solidify the emotional stakes and smooth out transitions that are jagged at best, nonsensical at worst." Despite this rather clear-cut criticism Ms. Hornaday rated the film 3 out of 4 stars. 

Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "The sheer exuberance of this movie can provoke more than a few seemingly discordant reactions, sometimes in the same instance...I found myself wishing that this "Wrinkle" were more focused, more disciplined — that its ceaseless flow of fantastical images cohered into a revelatory new application of L'Engle's themes and insights, rather than an earnest, sometimes awkward reiteration of them." Mr. Chang gave the film a "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

David Fear's Rolling Stone review stated, "This Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly flawed, wildly uneven, and apt to tie itself in narrative knots in a quest to wow you with sheer technicolor weirdness." In spite of Fear's obvious misgivings about the movie, he gave it 3 out of 4 stars anyway. He also tips his hand as to why he and other critics do so later in his review when he writes, "It's worth seeing just to bask in a film that does ask for inclusion on such a grand scale…"

The question then becomes, why would reviewers bump up their grade for a film they thought wasn't very well made? I believe the reason they did it is that they want the film to succeed because it touts diversity/inclusion and for what it symbolizes politically and culturally in regards to race and gender. These reviewers increased their ratings for the film because they did not want A Wrinkle in Time to end up with a "Rotten" score on Rotten Tomatoes. They also did it because it was a cheap way to virtue signal and they were afraid they might be labelled a racist if they were critical of a pro-diversity/inclusion film directed by a Black woman. 

BLACK PANTHER AND RUNNING UP THE SCORE

This sort of critical liberal paternalism and its accompanying grading curve that reviewers used to give A Wrinkle in Time a boost, also seems to be in effect for another film directed by an African-American and starring African-American actors, Black Panther. Black Panther is by all accounts a significantly better film than A Wrinkle in Time, and yet it seems to have also benefited from the same politically/racially motivated grading curve.

Black Panther has been absolutely adored by critics, proof of this is that the film currently has an impressive 97 critical score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, people can have different opinions of a film, so I don't chalk up critics liking Black Panther to solely a political agenda, but if you look at the Rotten Tomato statistics, it certainly seems that HOW MUCH critics liked Black Panther is a result of a political/racial agenda and the aforementioned grading curve. 

Evidence of this is that according to the Rotten Tomato critical score, Black Panther isn't just the highest rated film in the Marvel Cinematic canon, it is the highest rated superhero movie of all time. According to the critical score, Black Panther is even better than The Dark Knight (94 critical rating), which most cinematically literate people consider to be a super hero masterpiece, proof of which is that it is the film whose exclusion from the Oscar Best Picture nominations in 2008, led to the Academy Awards actually changing the nominating process and doubling the amount of films in the Best Picture category. 

Where things get interesting in this discussion about Black Panther is when you look at the audience score. While critics have it rated as the greatest superhero film of all time at 97, audiences scored the film at a much more tepid, and frankly rational, 79. That 79 audience score places Black Panther in the bottom half of the films in the Marvel cinematic canon according to audiences, with only Iron Man 2 (72), Iron Man 3 (78), Incredible Hulk (71), Thor (76) and Thor: Dark World (77) rating lower. Of the 19 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, 12 are ranked higher by audiences than Black Panther, and that is just Marvel. Wonder Woman (88), Logan (90), Deadpool (90), X-Men (83), X-Men 2: X-Men United (85), X-Men: First Class (87), X-Men: Days of Future Past (91) along with the entire Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy (94,94,90 respectively) all have a higher audience score than Black Panther. Those Rotten Tomato statistics show that something is obviously askew when it comes to critics opinion of Black Panther versus audiences opinion in the context of the other Marvel  and other superhero films.

Another Rotten Tomato data point that is intriguing is that Black Panther has the widest margin between its critical score and its audience score of all the Marvel films and super hero films of recent years that were rated "Fresh".

Black Panther's critical score of 97, and audience score of 79, makes for a spread of -18. The next super hero film with the closest negative critical/audience score spread is Captain America: First Avenger with a -6. It is pretty striking that Black Panther's negative critical/audience spread is 3 x higher than the next superhero film with a negative spread. The average negative critical/audience score spread of the ten Marvel films eligible is -4.3.

Another intriguing tidbit is that among the eight Marvel films with a positive critic/audience spread (audience score is higher than the critical score), the average spread is +4.5, with the highest spreads being Thor: Dark World at +11 and Avengers: Age of Ultron at +8. 

In analyzing all of this data the thing that really sticks out is that Black Panther is a total outlier in terms of the spread between its critical and audience scores. Why is that?

My thesis regarding the Black Panther Rotten Tomato anomalies is the same as my thesis regarding A Wrinkle in Time's odd dichotomy between written reviews and the grade given…namely that critics scored these two films on a curve in order to elevate their Rotten Tomato scores due to the racial and/or gender politics associated with both films. In other words, critics graded these films not on their cinematic and artistic merits, but on their racial and gender politics.

Another factor may be that professional film critics are grading a film publicly, while amateur Rotten Tomato "reviewers" can share their opinion in relative obscurity and anonymity. When people can hide behind relative anonymity they are much freer to give more honest views in regards to a movie and have no need to virtue signal out of fear of being ostracized over racism charges.

It is difficult to come to any clear cut mathematical answer without diving into Rotten Tomatoes specific formula, but my best guess is that Black Panther received a rating boost equivalent to half a grade/star higher due to this racially motivated grading curve. I also believe that A Wrinkle in Time received a grading curve boost of at least a full star higher than it merited due to the same reasons.

If Black Panther had not gotten the extra half a grade/star boost, it would fall from a 97 critical score to a critical score of about 83, which would leave it within the margin of an average spread between critical score and audience score for a typical Marvel film (-4.3). It is much more difficult to mathematically figure what A Wrinkle in Time's critical score would be without this grading curve because there are no films with which to compare it, but it seems likely that minus the full grade/star boost, A Wrinkle in Time would have received a much lower score, most likely in the range of 20 or even lower.

FAILING UPWARDS IN THE AGE OF IDENTITY POLITICS

A remarkable note about the failure of A Wrinkle in Time is that as the film has flopped, its director Ava DuVernay has been given the keys to another big-budget project, the Warner Brothers/DC film New Gods. What makes this all the more striking is that A Wrinkle in Time hasn't just flopped with critics (regardless of inflated ratings) or audiences, but financially. A Wrinkle in Time had a budget of over $100 million and when you add in marketing costs and account for theater's share of the cut, the film needs to break the $250 million barrier JUST TO BREAK EVEN. That goal seems like a very long shot at this point in time, which is why it is so bizarre that WB/DC would jump at the chance to work with Ms. DuVernay at this moment of her epic blockbuster failure. 

Emblematic of the "leg up" program and the accompanying climate of political correctness swirling around A Wrinkle in Time and Ms. DuVernay like a cloud of protective, truth repelling dust, The Atlantic had an article by David Sims about New Gods and DuVernay's hiring that revealed an even greater amount of disingenuous spin than the inflated critical Rotten Tomato scores do. In the piece, Sims distorts reality and brazenly and shamelessly lies in order to make the signing of DuVernay to direct New Gods seem like a masterful coup for the brain trust of WB/DC. 

In the opening line of the piece Sims writes, "Last year, the critical and financial calamity of Justice League served as a bit of a wake up call...". Later in the piece Sims writes of DuVernay's A Wrinkle in Time, "That film debuted this month to mixed reviews and solid, but unspectacular box office; though hardly a catastrophe". 

Let's unravel Mr. Sims shameless spin shall we. He deems Justice League a "critical and financial calamity", but A Wrinkle in Time "hardly a catastrophe". The facts are that Justice League has a Rotten Tomato critical score of…40, the exact same critical score of the alleged "mixed reviews" of A Wrinkle in Time. In addition, A Wrinkle in Time has a Rotten Tomato audience score of only 34, while Justice League has a Rotten Tomato audience score of…76. So Justice League nearly doubles A Wrinkle in Time's audience score while sharing the same critical score and Sims deems it a "calamity" while dubbing A Wrinkle in Time's reviews "mixed" and the film overall as "not a catastrophe".

Adding to the damning case proving Mr. Sims' sycophancy is his claim that Justice League was a "financial calamity" while A Wrinkle in Time was "not catastrophic" with a "solid, but unspectacular box office".  On Justice League's opening weekend in November 2017, it was the top grossing film, raking in $94 million domestically. By contrast, A Wrinkle in Time did not even win its opening weekend, coming in second place to Black Panther in its fourth week of release, and only took in a meager $33 million. After two weeks in theaters Justice League's box office take was $135 million domestically, while after A Wrinkle in Time's fourth place finish in week two, its box office now sits at an anemic $49 million. Justice League's final box office tally was $658 million worldwide, a number which A Wrinkle in Time won't even come close to sniffing. And yet, in Mr. Sims eyes, A Wrinkle in Time is not a "catastrophe" but Justice League is a "calamity". Is it me or does Mr. Sims have an agenda, and do the facts prove him to be torturing the truth and the English language in order to celebrate Ava DuVernay getting a job even in the midst of her big-budget film proving itself to be an absolute disaster. Mr. Sims is guilty of being full of shit, and his diminishing of Justice League and elevating A Wrinkle in Time, is proof of that.

Now, is Justice League a great film? No, it isn't. It was the least financially successful of all the current DC films and was poorly reviewed, but by every possible metric, including Rotten Tomato audience ratings and at the box office, it is far superior to A Wrinkle in Time. Mr. Sims is committing the same sin in his article that critics did in scoring A Wrinkle in Time, they are playing identity politics and embracing diversity and inclusion at the expense of talent, skill and integrity, and that should be to their great shame. 

DC hiring Ms. DuVernay to direct New Gods flies in the face of all rational business and artistic sense. Ms. DuVernay is a not an unknown, she is a known quality now and THE BIG BUDGET FILM SHE JUST DIRECTED IS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER. 

Unlike DuVernay, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler has proven twice that he can direct financially successful franchise films, first with Creed and secondly with Black Panther, so handing him the keys to a big budget film is an absolute no brainer (as was the decision to let him direct Black Panther due to his success with Creed). Ms. DuVernay getting another shot at a big budget when she has so egregiously screwed up a potential big money maker, is absurd and portends Hollywood's irrational swing towards a more diverse but less talented and less deserving crop of filmmakers. 

Think of it this way, Hollywood should be a bottom line business similar to the NBA, where it doesn't matter the race, religion or ethnicity of the people involved, only that they are the very best at what they do. Would we tolerate some NBA team adding less skilled or less talented players to their roster just to quench some thirst for diversity and inclusion? Of course not, so why are film critics pushing for it and why is Hollywood doing it? The end result will ultimately be a watering down of the quality of cinema and a thinning of box office receipts. Exhibit A - see A Wrinkle in Time.

BLACK WASHING AND CULTURAL APPROPRIATION

One final thought regarding A Wrinkle in Time, as previously stated the film makes changes to the the book by diversifying the cast and also removing the Christianity in favor of a New Age self-help viewpoint. What struck me regarding the inclusive casting was the silence from the media over the film not being true to the original source material. Over the last few years there has been a great deal of controversy when White actors were cast in roles that were minorities in the original source material or roles where White actors played minorities. This is called Whitewashing and the more infamous recent examples of it have been committed by Emma Stone in Aloha, Scarlett Johannsen in Ghost in the Machine, Ed Skrien In Hellboy and Tilda Swinton in Dr. Strange. Why wasn't there a similar outrage over A Wrinkle in Time "Blackwashing" roles that were originally White in the book? The hypocrisy over this issue is staggering but not the least bit surprising. 

Another bit of hypocrisy is that there has been a lot of talk about "cultural appropriation" in recent years. It usually revolves around some dopey White guy with dreadlocks, but it also dives into wider and more substantial matters as well, but it is always a charge leveled against White people. But the fact is that Ms. DuVernay just "culturally appropriated" a book written by a White woman and populated by White characters and replaced the White people with people of color. Why is there not an outrage over that? Look, I understand that Ms. Duvernay wanted to make an inclusive film with a diverse cast and she has every right to do that and good for her, but if you want to make an uplifting, New Age, spiritual sci-fi film with a multi-cultural cast…THEN WRITE AN ORIGINAL STORY, don't alter a classic book just to satiate your diversity desires. 

The source material for Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time were both written in the same time frame, the 1960's. Would it be acceptable if a White director decided to make a version of Black Panther with a mostly White cast? No…people would freak out about that, and rightfully so. So why does that same standard not apply to A Wrinkle in Time and Ava DuVernay? Not only was that film not held to account for its Blackwashing, the media orgasmically celebrated it for doing so. 

I understand the counter argument that White people have dominated this culture since it began, and so they need to be held to account when they Whitewash or culturally appropriate…but those arguments hold no water when the rules do not apply to everyone across the board. If you try and demand a separate set of rules for different types of people, you will only end up scuttling your own argument upon the jagged rocks of hypocrisy. 

In conclusion, I think it is fairly obvious that film critics are soft pedaling their negative views of A Wrinkle in Time because it is directed by a Black woman and has an "important" message of diversity and inclusion. I also think it is obvious, and statistically provable, that positive reviews of Black Panther were padded because it was directed by an African-American man and had an overwhelmingly Black cast. Some people may think that this sort of behavior by critics, motivated by the dogma of identity politics, is acceptable or even noble, but I find it to be condescending and repugnant. I believe it is, in its own way, a form of insidiously paternalistic racism that will ultimately have negative consequences not only for the art of cinema, but for all filmmakers of color. 

UPDATE 3/24/18: An interesting article from Romesh Ranganathan in The Guardian that in a round about way, and probably unintentionally, buttresses my point about how when a film becomes about "diversity" (as opposed to being about its story) it clouds critical judgement and ultimately undermines the movie.

©2018