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

The Woke Wet Dream of Marvel's New Series 'What If...?'

The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities

The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.

‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.

If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’

The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.

Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!

In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.

Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.

The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.

Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.

Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.

Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…”  And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture. 

Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.

Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”

Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.

As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.

The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.

He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.

He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.

It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.

As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

In the Heights is a box office bust...so let's ban the box office!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Whenever the woke diversity and inclusion agenda fails a test, it’s always the test’s fault – never the test-taker’s.

It started in 2020, when the Academy Awards put new rules into place that required future films to be diverse and inclusive in order to qualify for nomination. Now, to bolster that diversity and inclusion agenda, the woke enemies of merit in art and entertainment have set their sights on eliminating box office receipts as a measure of cinematic success.

In the Heights, a musical with an Asian director, Latino writer and all-minority cast, made a measly $11 million at the box office in its opening weekend, instead of the $25 to $50 million some delusional fools were projecting. It’s looking as if it will make considerably less in week two (it ultimately came in 6th on its second weekend with a paltry $4.3 million), but, apparently, we need to ignore its failure to sell tickets and laud its inclusivity aims.

In an LA Times article titled ‘How Hollywood’s box-office parlor game hurts movies like “In the Heights”, writer Ashley Lee declares that the film industry “will have to learn to define the ‘success’ of a film more broadly than in dollars and cents” if it wants to fix its “intractable diversity problems”.

This idea is reminiscent of colleges dropping the SAT and elite high schools dropping difficult entrance exams to boost diversity, or when the military or fire department weakens its physical entrance test to accommodate women.

This ‘equity’ approach, which is meant to result in equality of outcome, as opposed to equality of opportunity, beautifully sums up our narcissistic, petulant and coddled era, in which, if anyone fails a test, then it’s the test’s fault and not the test-taker’s.

As for Lee’s idea of dismissing the box office, it makes perfect sense, according to woke illogic, as once diversity and inclusion become the most important things about a movie – which the Academy Awards now claim they are – then, of course, box office receipts as a metric for success become obsolete.

To the woke, if a movie checks the right identity boxes, it’s already a smash, regardless of whether it makes money, is a highly crafted work of art or is entertaining.

Of course, this is all just more hypocritical woke preening, pandering and virtue signaling, as Lee and her ilk use the box office as a bludgeon as much as anybody when it suits them. For example, in a glaring case of ‘physician heal thyself’, the article bemoans the “parlor game” of box-office projections and expectations that, when not met, set a negative narrative around a minority-led film, but plays the same parlor game, linking to another piece that claims ‘“In the Heights” is the rare Latino blockbuster. Three Times writers on what that means’. That headline ran the day the movie opened and made presumptions about how it would be received that ultimately failed to materialise.

The box-office success of Black Panther, which made over a billion dollars, and female-led movies such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are often used as evidence by those who say diversity is the ticket to prosperity. Hell, In the Heights only exists in its current form because director Jon Chu had a blockbuster with Crazy Rich Asians, with its all-Asian cast, and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, with its majority-minority cast, raked in wads of cash.

Not surprisingly, considering its fatally flawed philosophical foundation, the rest of Lee’s vapid article is peppered with vacuous declarations about diversity and inclusion problems in Hollywood – most notably, “the vanishingly rare major studio movies with nonwhite leads”. I wonder if she actually watches movies, given, over the past 30 years, Denzel Washington and Will Smith were two of the biggest movie stars working in Hollywood, and, in the past decade, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Michael B. Jordan and the late Chadwick Boseman have dominated major studio films.

In addition, in 2020 alone, Tenet, Sound of Metal, Soul, Minari, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah all had “nonwhite leads” and were nominated for Oscars. And Will Smith’s Bad Boys for Life and Jumanji: The Next Level, starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, ranked first and fourth, respectively, at the US box office for the entire year. This proves that, contrary to Lee’s inane claims, Hollywood’s use of “nonwhite leads” is neither “vanishing” nor “rare”.

I’m a cinephile who prefers the arthouse to the cineplex, so box office is not exactly something I hold up as a symbol of cinematic virtue. But, in the case of In the Heights and other examples of mainstream Hollywood entertainment that are designed to rake in money, using box office receipts to measure their success or otherwise is the only viable and logical metric. In La La Land, the only color that truly matters is green, so the notion of eliminating that particular measure of a film’s success would go down like a lead zeppelin…and definitely not like Led Zeppelin.

The reality is that the woke can rig the system to honour their trite version of ‘diversity and inclusion’ with Academy Awards, but if they want lasting power in money-hungry Hollywood, their movies had better make bundles of cash or their whole house of politically correct cards will come tumbling down right on their empty little heads.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Oscar Train Wreck

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 20 seconds

My biggest question regarding last night’s egregiously bungled and boring Oscar telecast is…if an awards show collapses but no one is watching, does it make a sound?

Interest in the Oscars has been in steep decline for years now, and after suffering through the entire three hour and twenty-minute show last night I can dutifully report that the 93rd Academy Awards came in with a whimper and left with a whimper too.

The night’s climactic moment was a dud as the show ran long, as usual, and then rushed to announce Best Actor, which everyone thought would be an emotional moment as it was expected to go to the late Chadwick Boseman. The award instead went to went to Anthony Hopkins. Uh-oh.

Hopkins is most deserving of the award, but his victory will no doubt spur more cries of “racism” from the usual woke suspects. Adding to the discomfort was the fact that Hopkins wasn’t present at the show, and so the telecast ended basically with everybody standing around looking at one another like they were waiting for a train.

Speaking of which, the show was held at Los Angeles’ Union Station – which is a train station, which is apropos since the show was an absolute train-wreck.

Union Station is known as a hub for hordes of homeless in Los Angeles, and I’m sure that as much as homeless people have defecated in that public space over the years they’ve never made a stink as odious as Oscar’s producer Steven Soderbergh did last night.

Soderbergh put his stamp on the show as he shot it like a movie, with more handheld cameras than static shots, and by mixing up the order of awards. For instance, contrary to previous Oscar ceremonies Best Director came early in the proceedings and Best Picture wasn’t the last award.

Of course, the Oscars are going to be the Oscars, so the show was filled with the usual rambling speeches, self-righteous political pandering, and the airing of racial grievances, but what it didn’t have was any clips of the nominated work. Want to see the nominated cinematography, acting, costumes, hair and makeup or production designs? Not on Soderbergh’s watch!

Instead Soderbergh had presenters share inane “fun factoids” about each nominee like a kindergarten teacher handing out Valentine’s Day cards in class. This was accompanied by a roving camera desperately whirling around searching the room for these unfamous nominees like a toddler lost in a train station frantically looking for its parents.

The lowlight in the evening of lowlights was a “music game” where nominees guessed if a song played by DJ Questlove (who replaced the traditional orchestra) was an Oscar winning song. This hapless and ham-handed bit deteriorated into Glenn Close pretending she knew the song “Da Butt” and then humiliating herself by getting up and doing “Da Butt” dance. If Glenn Close ever had a relationship with dignity, it ended in a ferocious divorce last night.

The entire endless evening felt like one long extended version of Glenn Close doing “Da Butt”, and conjured all the gravitas of a junior high school drama club awards night.

The Oscars did make history though regarding diversity with “artists of color” winning two of the four acting categories and Chloe Zhao being the first woman of color ever to win Best Director and Best Picture.

So maybe #OscarsSoWhite has transformed into #OscarsSoWhat*? Unfortunately, I’m sure the Academy would prefer even the righteous anger of racial resentment to the overwhelming apathy that hangs over the festivities like a toxic cloud of poisonous gas.

Even the stars who came out to aid Soderbergh in his time of need, like Halle Berry and Harrison Ford, looked disinterested. The usually luminous Berry looked like she had slept at Union Station or was suffering a hellacious flu when she presented an award, while Ford just seemed like he was baked off his ass as he mumbled through a presentation.

Soderbergh did not limit the award winners in the length of their speeches, which led to some unnecessary verbosity, but also to some moments of profundity. Director Thomas Vinterberg’s speech after winning Best International Feature Film for Another Round, was painfully poignant as he spoke about the tragic death of his daughter Ida during filming.

In contrast, Frances McDormand’s grating short speeches managed to remind everyone she’s the most annoying person in all of Hollywood, which is an achievement even greater than her three Best Actress Oscars.

As shrill and grating as she is, McDormand’s movie Nomadland was the biggest winner of the night as it won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress.

The biggest losers of the night though were any poor bastards like me who stayed up to watch, and of course, the Academy Awards themselves.

If last night’s abysmal Oscar ceremony proves anything it is that the Academy Awards are on the fast track to irrelevancy, and even though the show ran late, that train left Union Station right on time.  

*Joke courtesy of Leo - Da Irish Poet!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Father: A Review

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An astounding performance from Anthony Hopkins and skilled storytelling make this movie an arthouse gem.

The Father, written and directed by Florian Zeller (based on his stage play Le Pere), tells the story of Anthony, an aging man suffering from dementia. The film stars Anthony Hopkins with supporting turns from Olivia Colman, Imogen Poots and Rufus Sewell.

Anthony Hopkins has long been one of the very best actors on the planet. Ever the consummate craftsman, Hopkins has throughout his career managed to conjure remarkable performances in roles as dramatically diverse as Hannibal Lecter, Richard Nixon, John Quincy Adams and Pope Benedict, not to mention his measured and constrained brilliance in The Remains of the Day, Howards End and Shadowlands.

Now at age 83, Hopkins surpasses all of his previous brilliance in The Father.

Hopkins is not going to win the Best Actor Oscar this year solely because the late Chadwick Boseman is such an overwhelming sentimental favorite, but that doesn’t mean Hopkins’ loss will not be a travesty.

As the dementia-addled Anthony, Hopkins brings all his astounding talents, skill and craftsmanship to bear for what might be his final piece of artistic genius. Hopkins’ performance is utterly astounding and is an exquisite masterclass in precision, detail and specificity.

Hopkins’ Anthony is a modern day King Lear filled with a ferocity and fear that gives him a sharp edge and a pulsating fragility that is never flamboyant or showy, just devastating.

Hopkins has always been a master of placing emotional circles within physical straight lines, this is how his Hannibal Lecter is so frightening and his Nixon so compelling. It is the vibrant inner life within the controlled and contained outer facade that gives Hopkins his power as an actor, and in The Father, that power goes supernova.

Aiding Hopkins is Olivia Colman who is stellar as Anthony’s daughter and caregiver Anne. Colman too gives Anne a pulsating inner wound and emotional vibrancy that makes her a complicated, compelling and captivating In some ways screen presence.

Imogen Poots and Rufus Sewell bring their considerable talents to bear on smaller roles, but elevate them and the film considerably.

In some waysThe Father feels like a horror movie because it so viscerally immerses the audience into the terror of life with dementia. The disorientation Anthony and the audience experience is unnerving and leaves you praying that this movie is the closest you will ever come to that level of dreaded disorientation.

The credit for that experience is first time feature film writer/director Florian Zeller. Zeller is a playwright of some renown and The Father is his major first step/leap into the art of filmmaking. Zeller’s wonderfully constructed script and deft direction magnificently flesh out the intricacies and insanities of Anthony’s dementia-addled mind. His storytelling is confident and seamless, and his ability to never rush, push or over-explain, turn The Father from a potential movie-of-the-week afterthought into an arthouse masterwork.

With The Father Florian Zeller is declaring himself as a filmmaker to watch going forward, while Anthony Hopkins is simply proving he is one of the greatest actors of his generation. We should appreciate him while he is still with us.

If you have ever known or cared for someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s, The Father will be a difficult but worthwhile watch, as art of this caliber can be greatly cathartic. For lovers of great acting and storytelling, The Father is definitely for you, and I highly recommend you seek it out.

The Father is currently in theatres and on VOD.

©2021

The Asinine and the Absurd 78th Annual Golden Globes Awards

Hollywood once again proved itself to be the moral authority of our time when a bevy of stars took to the stage Sunday night at the 78th annual Golden Globes Awards to rail against President Joe Biden’s unconstitutional, murderous air strikes in Syria, his caging of illegal immigrant kids, and his failure to fight for a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All and a $2,000 stimulus check during this calamitous coronavirus lockdown.

Just kidding.

With the bad orange man gone from the White House it was back to Hollywood business as usual at the painfully lackluster, socially-distanced Golden Globes where there was a lot of performative virtue signaling regarding diversity but no actual political courage on display.

The Golden Globes have long been a running joke as the Hollywood Foreign Press (HFPA), a collection of 89 “foreign entertainment journalists” who vote on the awards, notoriously care less about artistic quality than lining their pockets, corporate swag and basking in star power.

The L.A. Times recently did a searing investigation of the organization and, shock of shocks, found them to be corrupt…I think Captain Obvious was the reporter who broke the story. 

Hollywood’s big takeaway from the L.A. Times story though was that the HFPA is racist because it has no black members.

This was highlighted throughout last night’s show as flaccid comedy duo Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as numerous presenters, made snide comments about the racial “scandal”. This led to one of the more riotously funny moments when an Indian woman and Turkish man who are members of the HFPA had to grovel on live tv about how bad they were for not having black people in their group. Diversity!

Ironically, after all the bemoaning of HFPA racism the three of the first four awards given out went to black actors, Daniel Kaluuya for Judas and the Black Messiah and John Boyega for Small Axe, and to the first black led Pixar film Soul.

Later in the night the Best Actor and Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama awards also went to black artists, the late Chadwick Boseman for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Andra Day for The United States vs. Billie Holiday.

Stupid Golden Globes can’t even stay on brand when it comes to their own racism.

One of the few bright spots in previous Golden Globes has been comedian Ricky Gervais serving as ornery host. Gervais’ scathing opening monologues at the Globes are some of the best comedy of recent years. Never one to pander or genuflect to his star-studded and empty-headed live audience, Gervais instead consistently eviscerated the cavalcade of self-satisfied and self-righteous stars luxuriously partying before him.

Unfortunately, this year Gervais wasn’t hosting so instead of his uncomfortably honest and gloriously cutting comedy we were stuck with the insipid nice girl comedy of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.

Another redeeming quality of the past Golden Globes awards has been watching celebrities get drunk at the dinner party style affair. Sadly, this year’s show was “socially distanced” so random shots of sloppy drunk celebs were replaced with awkward moments on zoom. .

Sans Gervais and drunk celebs the Golden Globes were reduced to being nothing but a handing out of awards no one, even the people winning them actually care about.

Besides the endless babbling about diversity and inclusion, the political talk was pretty minimal. Sure, Borat made some stale Trump and Giuliani jokes, and Mark Ruffalo bemoaned the “hideous dark storm” of Trump “we’ve been living through” and Aaron Sorkin mentioned democracy being under siege, but that was about it.

What is so striking is there were ample opportunities for Hollywood heavyweights to speak up about current issues, but they refused.

Sean Penn, one of my favorite actors and activists, was there, and besides looking like Moe from the Three Stooges, he didn’t do much of anything except display a shocking lack of testicular fortitude. He could’ve spoken up about Biden’s illegal attack on Syria, like he had done about the Iraq War…but he didn’t.

Jodie Foster won best Supporting Actress for her work in the film The Mauritanian, a movie about the injustice of a prisoner held in Guantanamo Bay for fourteen years without charge. But Foster never mentioned Guantanamo Bay, injustice or the immorality of the War on Terror in her acceptance speech.

Famed anti-war activist Jane Fonda, who once went to North Vietnam while the U.S. was at war with them, was awarded a lifetime achievement award but never mentioned Biden’s illegal airstrikes in Syria, or his support of murderous tyrant Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, or the continuation of the “kids in cages” immigration policy. She instead just regurgitated the usual woke pablum of diversity and inclusion.

Chloe Zhao won best director and best drama for her film Nomadland, which examines those crushed under the boot of American capitalism. Yet she never once mentioned Biden’s failure to push for the $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-All or a coronavirus stimulus check which he promised, three things which would immeasurably help the suffering people featured in her film.

With Trump gone and the corpse of Joe Biden being the one obliterating Syrians and caging kids at the border, Hollywood elites are now all too happy to lose their stridently socially conscious rhetoric in favor of status quo cheerleading and social justice ass-kissing.

In 2017 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election Meryl Streep “bravely” spoke out in defense of immigrants at the Globes, which was curious since she had been completely silent during the previous 8 years when Obama set deportation records and put “kids in cages”.

It seems Hollywood is following in Queen Meryl’s faux-noble footsteps by deciding to stay quiet now when speaking up would take courage.

Everyone knows Hollywood is not exactly filled with the bravest souls that are driven purely by integrity and their commitment to principle. But the amount of self-righteousness mixed with craven cowardice on display at the Golden Globes last night was remarkable even by Hollywood’s depraved standards.

In conclusion, if the Golden Globes are any indication, awards season is going to be filled with the most venal, vacuous and vapid posing and preening imaginable, but it won’t feature any principled protests against Biden administration policies, no matter how abhorrent they may be.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

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

Da 5 Bloods: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terribly disappointing movie not worthy of anyone’s time.

Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee and written by Lee, Kevin Wilmott, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to that country as old men to search for the remains of their fallen comrade and to search for buried treasure. The ensemble cast includes Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors and Chadwick Boseman.

It is difficult to remember now, but at one point in time, Spike Lee was arguably the most important filmmaker in the world, and certainly one of the most interesting. Blessed with a Scorsese-esque cinematic confidence and an artistic defiance reminiscent of Oliver Stone, Spike Lee was a director who demanded attention back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Lee’s Do the Right Thing had exploded onto screens in 1989 and revealed its director to be an innovative artist and daring provocateur.

Lee’s follow-ups to Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991), weren’t as combustible as his noteworthy first hit, but they were solid films that showcased Lee’s deft craftsmanship.

All of these films led up to Lee’s crowning achievement, Malcolm X, which hit theatres in 1992. Malcolm X is an extraordinary cinematic achievement and is an absolute masterpiece that capped Lee’s remarkable artistic run from ‘89 to ‘92.

After that though, the wheels started to come off the Spike Lee wagon, as his movies became less and less relevant as his mastery of craft diminished rapidly. From this point on Lee became famous for being famous and was more identifiable as a Knicks fan than as a filmmaker.

For all intents and purposes, Spike Lee’s movie making had been on a very precipitous decline from 1994 until 2018…then BlackKklansman came out.

BlackKklansman was not a perfect movie, but it did crackle with a vibrancy and vitality which had been notably absent from Lee’s films in the preceding two and half decades following Malcolm X.

It was due to the return of Lee’s trademark cinematic dynamism in BlackKklansman that the sense that maybe, just maybe, we were going to be treated to a late stage artistic renaissance from Spike Lee, gathered momentum.

It was with all of this in mind that I watched Lee’s newest film, Da 5 Bloods when it premiered on Netflix last Friday.

To say I was disappointed would be a dramatic understatement. Whatever artistic momentum Lee garnered post BlackKklansman has quickly bogged itself down in a foolish quagmire north of Ho Chi Minh City in the dramatic mistake that is Da 5 Bloods.

Lee indulges his very worst instincts on Da 5 Bloods, and produces a bloated, boring, derivative, meandering mess of a movie that pulsates with an amateurism that is shocking to behold coming from someone with Lee’s past success.

There are so many things wrong with Da 5 Bloods it is difficult to narrow it down to just a few…but I will try.

The script is absolute garbage, as the narrative and the dialogue all feel like they were stolen from a high school freshman’s drama diary. There are so many narrative threads wandering aimlessly through this movie it seems like a dramatic daycare center…and absolutely none of them work…none of them!

The dialogue is only remarkable because it is so disingenuous, inhuman, pretentious and mannered.

Matching the on-the-nose, cringe-worthy dialogue, are the over-the-top performances.

I think Delroy Lindo is a terrific actor, as is Jonathan Majors, but even their talent cannot overcome Lee’s preference for posturing over acting, and theatricality over subtlety.

The entire cast gives performances that feel out of rhythm and forced. Lindo is given the heaviest load to bear, and he definitely strains under it, as his work feels contrived and empty.

As for the filmmaking, Da 5 Bloods contains action sequences, which is something Lee has never really delved into in his previous films…and it shows. The battle scenes in this movie are not just bad, but an embarrassment, like something out of an old tv show.

Lee also made the decision to use his 60 year old actors to play themselves as young men, and while I understand what he was trying to do with that, it ended up reducing the action scenes to pure farce.

The battles are also devoid of all realism and cinematic ingenuity. I watched the movie wondering how the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese won the war but were so damn easy to shoot, especially when they would continuously just run straight at their adversaries.

The technical aspects of the movie are equally amateurish, as it is visually dull and stale, lacking all vibrancy and vitality.

There is one scene, which contains a pivotal plot point, that occurs at the hour and a half mark, that is so poorly executed and so ham-handed in its telegraphing that I was left groaning in disgust. What the hell happened to the director who made the masterpiece Malcolm X? Where is the Do the Right Thing Spike Lee who was an absolute master of his craft? Sadly, that Spike Lee is long gone, and we are left with a director and writer who simply does not remember how to make a worthwhile movie.

Added to those woes is Terence Blanchard’s relentlessly bombastic score, that is so distractingly awful it boggled my mind. Blanchard’s swelling music intrudes anywhere and everywhere it can, suffocating the movie with a monstrosity of musical plushness.

The film does have some bright spots in the form of documentary montages that are sprinkled throughout the film and crackle with insight and intensity, but they are so few and far between they are an afterthought.

In conclusion, the promise and the prowess Spike Lee showed decades ago and ever so briefly in BlackKklansman, seem a very distant memory when watching the abysmal Da 5 Bloods. I simply cannot recommend this movie for any reason, but would encourage you to revisit Spike Lee’s earlier works, most notably Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, as well as Blackkklansman, in order to see what used to be, and what might have been.

©2020

Black Panther: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars                

Popcorn Curve* Rating: 2.5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Unless you are a superhero fanatic, there is no reason to see this movie. If you really want to see it, don't feed the Disney beast, wait and watch it on Netflix or cable for free. 

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler and written by Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, is the story of T'Challa, a prince of the technologically superior African nation of Wakanda - who is also the superhero Black Panther, as he rises to the throne of his native land and struggles to keep his nation safe. The film stars Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa with supporting turns from Michael B. Jordan, Daniel Kaluuya, Lupita Nyong'o and Angela Bassett.

Black Panther is the eighteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe which includes but is not limited to Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and all of the Avengers film. What makes Black Panther noteworthy among the rest of the myriad of Marvel properties is that Black Panther is the first of the Marvel films to have a Black lead actor and a Black director. 

As a White man, a member of the demographically dominant culture here in America, I am afforded the luxury of not caring about the race of a film's director or lead actor. The only thing I care about in regards to a film is its quality, not its diversity. I am mildly self-aware enough to understand that not everyone thinks like me or has the same perspective on the importance of quality in cinema. 

With all of that said, I understand that my experience as a cinephile watching Black Panther is going to be very different from, say, a young African-American boy's experience of watching Black Panther. An example of which was told to me recently by a friend (who is White) who recounted taking his 8 year-old African-American son to see the film and as they left the theatre his son said to him, "I didn't think superheroes could be Black!"

That anecdote highlights the fact that Black Panther is undoubtedly culturally important and is a remarkable achievement for African-Americans in film, but sadly, that doesn't make Black Panther even remotely close to being a decent film. And while social/political importance and relevance might trump cinematic quality for other viewers, it does not for me. 

Black Panther is bursting at the seams with all sorts of dramatic and cinematic potential, but like most of the Marvel superhero films, it never lives up to its robust source material. Stan Lee created the character Black Panther back in 1966, and it is a fascinating myth. The idea of Wakanda, an African nation that was never touched by colonialism or slavery, is so brilliant as to be ingenious. And naming a Black superhero Black Panther, after the revolutionary and iconic civil rights activists The Black Panthers (Members of the Black Panther Party), was another stroke of genius. Black Panther is not a terrible film, but it definitely is a disappointing one mostly because it only briefly skims the surface of the rich archetypal material percolating beneath its feet. 

The biggest problem with Black Panther is also the reason that it is getting so much attention…namely that it is a Marvel/Disney movie. Marvel/Disney movies all make billions of dollars at the box office but they are also all pretty bland and derivative ventures in shameless self-promotion, and sadly, so is Black Panther.

Ryan Coogler is considered by some to be a great director, his Fruitvale Station is fantastic, but like every other director of a Marvel movie, he is handcuffed by the process and the system which churns out these movies from the money-hungry Disney assembly line. The bottom line is this, Black Panther is a pretty shoddy movie that fails because it is so suffocatingly claustrophobic and looks unconscionably cheap. To be fair to Black Panther, all Marvel movies are just as visually flat, dull and devoid of cinematic vibrancy as Black Panther. I don't know if the plethora of failings of Black Panther are entirely Ryan Coogler's fault or not, but I do know that if Ryan Coogler is a such a great filmmaker and artist, then why isn't he making movies that matter artistically and not swimming in the retread pool of Rocky films and Marvel movies.

The rich themes at the core of Black Panther, nationalism vs. neo-liberalism, the generational scars of colonialism and slavery, the psychological plight of African-Americans who live with a psychological/historical void, are only touched upon briefly and never with very much genuine insight. The debate over whether to fight for Black people across the globe, or to preserve the sanctity of Wakanda is the most fascinating and relevant discussion in the film in my opinion, but like all the other potentialities in the movie, it too gets short shrift. 

The character that carries all the weight of these heavy issues is Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. Killmonger is a potentially phenomenal character that is so ripe with archetypal and mythic meaning I was hoping we'd see much more of him in the film. The problem with Killmonger though, and why we probably see less of him than we should, is that Michael B. Jordan, for all of his acting capacity, is a huge disappointment because he is unable to harness the character's immense power. I remember the first time that I saw Michael B. Jordan, it was in an episode of Friday Night Lights, and I sat up and said, "who is that?" He reminded me of a young Denzel Washington back in the day when he was on the tv show St. Elsewhere. Jordan, like Denzel, oozed charisma and had an innate star quality about him that was undeniable. As the years have passed though, Jordan's growth as an actor seems to have been stunted and he has not evolved past being that charismatic but one-dimensional teenager. 

The problem with Jordan's performance in Black Panther is that his voice scuttles the work his ridiculously sculpted body is meant to be doing. Jordan's voice is that of a child in a man's body, which results in Killmonger's menace and gravitas, which are vital to the narrative, being undermined. Jordan should be a palpably charismatic screen presence, but he ends up being rather wispy and inconsequential because his voice is too high pitched and not grounded in his belly, where he could connect with the character's (and his) rage. Killmonger should speak in a guttural, nearly primal growl that reflects the torment and suffering of those stolen from and locked out of the Garden of Eden (Africa/Wakanda), not in the high pitched whine of a petulant teenager preening and posing for effect. 

Besides Jordan's voice being not grounded or connected, he also suffers mush mouth, which might be a result of the fake gold teeth he has to wear, that further disconnects Killmogner from his primal fury. Unlike most of the rest of the cast, Jordan is not confined by an African accent which can be emotionally limiting or stifling due to its vocal formality, but he is still unable to use this freedom to viscerally connect with the existential animosity that fuels Killmogner.

Jordan also fails to imbue his character with a specific and detailed intentionality that would fill his silence and stillness, and focus his intensity. The result of Jordan's failure to create a vivid inner life for Killmonger is a dissipation of the character's volatile energy because it has nothing to contain it, which means it has nothing to enhance and increase it. 

It was also odd to me that Killmonger is such a highly educated man, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and got graduate degrees from M.I.T., and yet Jordan has him speak in a watered down, ghettoized and not just casual, but intentionally improper, American English that feels forced, posed and phony. At the end of the day, Killmonger is a character I wish could have been explored much more deeply and honestly, but due to Jordan's frivolous performance, it would need a different actor to play him, and a different movie in which to do it.

Chadwick Boseman stars in the film as T'Challa/Black Panther, and he suffers from an egregious charisma deficit. Boseman is a decent actor, but in a Marvel movie you need more than a decent actor, you need somebody to carry a movie for two hours, or in this case two hours and twenty minutes. Boseman is no Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man, and that is no crime as few actors are as skilled and charismatic as Downey…but Boseman isn't even as magnetic as that dead-eyed dope Chris Evans who plays Captain America…and that is a major problem.

I found Boseman to be intensely dull and devoid of any magnetism whosoever. In the story T'Challa and Lupita Nyong'o's character Nakia, are supposed to have a history and chemistry between them, but the scenes between them are so wooden and lifeless as to be comically stultifying. Boseman has a pleasant energy about him, of that there is no doubt, but he certainly doesn't have a compelling one. 

The rest of the cast are all fine but none of them stand out. Nyong'o's Nakia feels under developed to me, as does Danai Gurirra as Okoyo, T'Challa's bodyguard. Angela Basset is always a compelling screen presence, as is Forest Whitaker, but both of them are not exactly doing much heavy lifting in the film. 

Martin Freeman plays CIA officer Ross and feels entirely out of place. Were there no American actors available to play the American Ross? Because Freeman's butchered American accent is abysmal and is totally distracting. Not to mention the obvious, which is that a CIA officer being a "good guy" to any African peoples at anytime is such a fairy tale as to be absurd. 

The audience clapped at the end of the screening I attended, but it feels to me like this was an entirely manufactured cultural moment where people think they are supposed to love this movie, so they choke on their disappointment and, like with Black Panther's super suit, they use the kinetic energy of that disappointment and turn it into vocal support for the film.

As these philistines clapped I wondered, did they watch the same movie I did? Did they see the shoddy and lethargic fight choreography? Did they notice the poor cinematography, especially in the night shots which lacked any coherent contrast or texture? Or how in the day shots there was not any use of shadow or light to propel the story or tell deeper dramatic truths? Did they not notice how thin and cinematically tinny the climactic battle scenes were and how subpar the special effects? 

Reading headlines even before the film was released it was easy to see that the marketing machine at Marvel was already into hyper drive as Black Panther was declared not just a great super hero movie but one of the best movies of all time. Good grief…it reminded me of Wonder Woman last summer, which was held up as being akin to Citizen Kane because a woman directed it. I liked Wonder Woman but Citizen Kane it is not…that said, Wonder Woman is so vastly superior to Black Panther that in comparison it IS Citizen Kane. Neither Wonder Woman nor Black Panther are even in the same ballpark as Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, which is a masterpiece, but they pale in comparison to last year's Logan, which is a terrific movie. 

I was reminded of the most recent Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, when I was finished watching Black Panther. The Last Jedi received the same sort of critical hype that Black Panther received before its release, all due to the fact that the film was a bastion of diversity. I attended a Christmas party this year and at the dinner table The Last Jedi came up and a woman asked me if I liked it and I said no, I thought it was junk. The woman was very distraught at my opinion which I voiced in front of many children, and so as to not make a scene in front of these impressionable youngsters she leaned in and sternly whispered to me in retort "yeah, but it had a really positive message". I bit my tongue, for what I wanted to say to her but didn't out of social delicacy was that I don't give a flying fuck if a movie has a "positive message". What I care about is cinema…that is it. I don't care who stars in a movie, or who wrote it or who directed it, I only care that it is at least good, if not great. 

If you like a movie, like Black Panther, simply because it conforms to your preconceived social or political views, that is fine, but don't confuse that with the film's quality and don't confuse it with film criticism. It would be nice if film critics were professional enough to be able to discern between those things as well. 

The woman who was horrified at my honest opinion of The Last Jedi, would no doubt be even more horrified by people who loved American Sniper because it had a "positive message" in their view. Me…I am going to tell you the truth about a movie…and the truth about The Last Jedi, and Black Panther and American Sniper for that matter, is that those movies are not good. You may "like" those movies because they conform to your belief system, but that STILL DOESN'T MAKE THEM GOOD! 

The problem with film criticism today is that social/political views are overwhelming critic's judgment of cinema. This results in the "ground breaking" Black Panther benefiting from what I call the "leg up" program where cinematic standards are reduced in order to fulfill some sort of social/political requirement. This reduction in standards is how we end up with a mind-numbingly average popcorn movie like Get Out being considered an "Oscar worthy film" simply because it is written and directed by a Black man, Jordan Peele. If Get Out were written and directed by a White man, and were titled, oh…I don't know…Scream...would it be Oscar worthy? No, not in a millions years, because it simply is not that good…which is why it isn't an Oscar worthy film! 

Look, again, let me reiterate this...I do not care about an actor's, writer's or director's race, gender, color, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation…I only care that they make a good movie. I am not sure, as I haven't spoken to anyone about the movie, but I think I may not be alone in my opinion of Black Panther, or The Last Jedi for that matter. I say that because I looked and saw that both films received incredibly high Rotten Tomato critical scores and a plethora of positive press, but when push came to shove, audiences seemed not to believe the hype and had much lower opinions of the movies than critics, which is odd as it is usually the other way around. For instance, Black Panther is currently at a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, but has a 77% audience score, which is an anomaly compared to any other film in the Marvel Universe. Other Marvel films all have critical scores and audience scores that are within just a few points of one another.

The Last Jedi is an even more telling example, as that film currently has a 91% critical rating but a dismal 48% audience score. It might be that people, unlike film critics, are judging these films critically for what they really are REGARDLESS of whether it conforms to their social/political beliefs, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score reflects their disappointment at what is actually on the screen. 

Film critics may think they are helping African-American artists with their paternalistic benevolence when it comes to judging Black film, but they aren't. What they are doing is lowering the standard for quality for Black film which will only hasten to alienate audiences who are only interested in seeing something good, not seeing something "important" and then pretending it is good. 

The reality is that Marvel movies in general are usually pretty awful, and Black Panther in particular is entirely underwhelming. Not only does Black Panther not live up to its enormous hype, it doesn't even live up to the low bar of Marvel movie standards, as I would place it in the bottom half of the films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the general vicinity of a film like Dr. Strange.

For me, the truth is I would rather watch a movie about the actual Black Panthers and how the FBI, which liberals have now grown to love, adore and trust, systematically infiltrated, decimated and assassinated the group and its revolutionary message into extinction. Unlike the actual Black Panthers, which were revolutionary in both thought and deed, Black Panther the movie may somewhere deep down be revolutionary in aspiration, but in deed is so mundane and banal as to be little more than a piece of distractionary establishment propaganda.

There were three White, sixty-something year-old women sitting near me at Black Panther who clapped once the movie ended and then, and I am not shitting you here, they literally clapped through the end credits for any and all of the Black actors and actresses as their image and name appeared on the screen, but only the Black ones. The silence for the White actors like Andy Serkis and Martin Freeman was deafening and frankly, hysterically funny to me. These women, who no doubt have never seen a Marvel movie in their lives, were partaking in a form of cheap "woke" grace with their ovation for Black Panther, and honestly, I find it utterly appalling. (These same woman were probably among the throng of dopes who cheered at the end of the truly abysmal The Post because it pushed all the proper Establishment Democrat Party buttons.)

If these White women want to "do" something "woke", they shouldn't cheer at a shitty superhero movie because it has a Black cast and director…instead they should sift through the bullshit they are being continuously fed on a daily basis by the mainstream media and understand how they are being manipulated into seeing oppressive entities, like the FBI for example, as American heroes. Instead of virtue signaling their "wokeness" to strangers in a theatre, why not go educate themselves about genuine American heroes like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton, or the Black Panther Party free breakfast program that J. Edgar Hoover once described as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the nation". Or go read about the charismatic young Black Panther Fred Hampton who was assassinated in Chicago by the Chicago police, the assault led by Sgt. Daniel Groth, who admitted under oath that his team of heavily armed cops executed their attack on Hampton at the behest of the FBI. (and as an aside go read about Groth's connection with the curious case of Thomas Arthur Vallee, a heavily armed, disgruntled former Marine who had previously been stationed at a U2 base in Japan - just like another three named disgruntled former Marine, Lee Harvey Oswald - who was living in Chicago and who worked at a factory that overlooked the motorcade route that JFK was supposed to take in Chicago just weeks before he was killed in Dallas…it is a fascinating tale that James W. Douglass touches upon in his great book JFK and the Unspeakable) 

Regardless of whether you look into the real Black Panthers or not, what you shouldn't do is waste your money going to see Disney's Black Panther, and then post on Facebook about how #woke you are. The Mickey Mouse corporate monster ain't "woke", and he ain't going hungry and he sure as shit doesn't doesn't need your hard earned money, so trust me when I tell you that this movie is definitely not worth your time and effort. But if you do go and see it, all I ask of you is that you try to honestly judge the film for what it actually is, and not for the movie that you desperately want and hope it to be. 

*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.

©2017