Shogun (Hulu): TV Review - A Leafless Branch

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A beautiful but dramatically and emotionally empty series that features quality craftsmanship across the board yet never rises to become must-see.

Shogun, the highly-acclaimed ten-episode mini-series based on the James Clavell book of the same name, just finished its original run on the streaming service Hulu…and I have some thoughts.

The series, which began streaming on February 27th and concluded on April 23rd, was created by Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks and stars Hiroyuki Sanada, Anna Sawai and Cosmo Jarvis.

Shogun tells the fictional tale of John Blackthorne (Jarvis), an English sailor marooned in 1600s Japan, who must navigate the customs and culture of his new land and serve as an advisor/political pawn to Lord Taranaga (Sanada), the powerful lord of Kanto. A critical side story involves Blackthorne falling in love with his translator Lady Mariko (Sawai).

Shogun is a strange series in that I watched each episode as it rolled out weekly and yet never thought about the show for a single second when it wasn’t playing in front of me. I never once mused or anticipated about what would come in the following episode and very often entirely forgot what had happened in the episode I had just watched. For example, I watched the final episode five days ago and cannot remember much of anything from it.

In this way Shogun is like so much of tv in this bloated streaming era, in that it is eye-candy that comes and goes without the slightest impact one way or the other.

Another show I watched recently, Netflix’s Three Body Problem, was similar in that it generated lots of manufactured light, especially in terms of cultural discission, but exactly zero heat. The big difference between though Three Body Problem and Shogun though is that Three Body Problem was a thoroughly second-rate production that looked unconscionably cheap…whereas Shogun is undeniably a top-notch production that looks more expansive than it probably was.

Shogun is a beautiful production that is exquisitely shot, professionally acted, and boasts superb production design and costumes…and yet…as good as the show looks and all the pieces are near perfect, it still seems oddly forgettable, or better yet – irrelevant, as a whole.

To the show’s credit, it does believably transport you back to 1600’s Japan, and that can be enjoyable, but it never rouses enough interest in its characters to cross the threshold from interesting to emotionally or dramatically impactful.

The thing that struck me most about Shogun was that it was, much to its credit, shot and framed like a feature film. Rarely were objects of interest set center frame, which was a refreshing change since center-framing has become standard, particularly in television, in our wholly unfortunate era of Tik Tok. So often nowadays television cinematography has all the skill and artistry of a grandmother using a disposable instamatic on a family trip to Disney. Thankfully, Shogun never suffers from this lack of attention or visual care.

Also compelling are many of the performances.

Anna Sawai, in particular, is quite good as Lady Mariko, the tormented translator who must contain her emotions and control Blackthorne. I last saw Sawai in the Apple TV series Monarch, and thought she wasn’t quite yet ready for prime time, but here she is sharp and sexy…a luminous and alluring presence filled with a vivid and visceral inner life she masterfully fights to contain.

Hiroyuki Sanada too does solid work as the scheming Taranaga. Sanada is so unrelenting in his performance that it is actually surprising when Taranaga isn’t quite as smart as you believe he is.

Cosmo Jarvis as Blackthorne gives an intriguing performance, as he at once feels out of place yet also somewhat magnetic. Jarvis never quite earns the emotional arc his character takes, but to his credit he is game and never shies from the challenge or the camera.

The CGI used in Shogun is worth mentioning as well as the wide shots of Osaka are obviously fake but still impressive to behold. As are the fight sequences – with a few notable exceptions…like when Lady Mariko morphs into a girl power goddess and slays some samurai.

Despite all of the positive attributes present in Shogun, it just never grips you by the heart or throat and forces you to care. Ultimately, I didn’t actually care about any of the characters in Shogun…not really. And the usual cultural storytelling instincts we have become accustomed to are not satisfied in the story because it ends not with a compelling climax but with understated subtlety.

I have never read Clavell’s book, nor have I watched the 1980 mini-series starring Richard Chamberlain and the great Toshiro Mifune. Maybe if I had I would have more attachment to the characters and investment in the story. But I didn’t and I don’t.

At the end of the day Shogun is a beautiful but forgettable piece of television that I desperately wanted to love because of the subject matter, but never did. The series is simply something to watch to pass the time, and requires little emotional investment and negligible dramatic payoff.

I didn’t hate Shogun, not at all, but I didn’t love it either. It’s an impressive piece of television solely for the craft on display, but in my opinion is not compelling enough to be considered must-see.

I respect the craftsmanship on display in Shogun enough that my recommendation is to watch the first episode and see if it grabs you, and then proceed accordingly.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

On this episode, Barry and I talk about No One Will Save You, the terrific new sci-fi/horror movie on Hulu. Topics discussed include UFOs, the uncomfortable accuracy of the film's  title, the excitement of an ambitious and well-made movie, and the exquisite performance of actress Kaitlyn Devers. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 107 - No One Will Save You

Thanks for listening!

©2023

No One Will Save You: A Review and Commentary - Keep Your Eyes to the Sky for the End is Nigh

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

My Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that features a mesmerizing lead performance and top notch sci-fi and horror thrills.

In a movie year that has thus far been consistently underwhelming, No One Will Save You, the new sci-fi horror film currently streaming on Hulu that was written and directed by Brian Duffield, is an invigorating cinematic experience that far exceeds expectations.

No One Will Save You tells the story of Brynn (Kaitlyn Devers), a young woman living alone in a rural part of America in modern times (the exact year is never made clear at the film’s open). Brynn is an odd duck and an outcast in her rather unfriendly small town. She is unquestionably living a life of alienation and isolation…and then some-thing arrives in the middle of the night, and she is forced to deal with it…and with other things she’s long tried to avoid.

To be clear, No One Will Save You, which is writer/director Duffield’s second feature film, has its flaws and it isn’t perfect, for instance the last quarter of the film is tonally and stylistically not as strong as the first three quarters, but it is ambitious, inventive, very well-made, exceedingly well-acted and undeniably compelling.

Director Duffield shoots the film with an impressive amount of confidence and directs with a strong but deft touch. In order to avoid spoilers, I will not get into specifics but will only say that there are numerous scenes that are expertly choreographed and shot that leave you feeling like you’re in the hands of a master. For example, the kitchen sequence, bedroom sequence and basement sequence, are all top notch and exceed expectations and audience conditioning.

Even the last quarter of the film, which transitions from a survival story to a sort of spiritual and psychological, Jungian confrontation with the self, despite its unorthodox nature, is handled extremely well from a filmmaking perspective.

Throughout the movie Duffield pays homage, and borrows liberally, from a plethora of films, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Signs, War of the Worlds, and even The Exorcist, but he does so subtly and ultimately ends up putting an original spin on his alien encounter movie that in lesser hands could have been a trite and forgettable cinematic experience.

Duffield’s greatest tactic is that he consistently pushes back against the audience’s conditioning. We think we know what will happen next and how Brynn will behave, but Duffield almost always subtly subverts that expectation, and it is often exciting, occasionally confounding, but always compelling.

As great as the directing is on this film, the straw that stirs the drink is Kaitlyn Devers who stars as Brynn. Devers, who speaks only one line of dialogue in the entire film, is absolutely mesmerizing as she carries this entire enterprise on her shoulders and never falters.

Devers, who was terrific in the 2021 Hulu miniseries Dopesick, fills her continuous silence with a vibrant and vivid inner life that reveals itself in her expressive eyes. She wisely avoids the pitfall of over expression and simply lets her Brynn be and react in the moment, even when frozen in horrifying moments.

Devers’ skill and talent are on full display in this movie, and it is the type of performance that can catapult an actress on the road to the A list. One only hopes that Devers follows an artistic path rather than chase stardom, as she seems well-equipped to play nearly any role, but ill-equipped to do vacuous Hollywood bullshit.

Another notable thing about No One Will Save You are the visual effects. The film’s stated budget is $22 million and one can assume that a healthy portion of that went into the CGI aliens and it is money well-spent as the look and feel of the aliens elevate the film a great deal.

Most films with a smaller budget would bend over backwards to avoid showing the aliens in order to save money, but director Duffield never shies away from exploiting his superb supply of aliens.

The aliens in this film are fantastic as they are familiar enough to us from previous movies, but are still unique and original in their own right. The most impressive part about them is how organic and real they seem, and the diversity of alien types.

No One Will Save You comes at an interesting time in terms of taking the notion of aliens and UFOs seriously. In recent years the subject has been taken much more seriously by the political establishment and the mainstream media.

Just this year we’ve had congressional hearings on the issue and have had legislation passed giving whistleblower protections to people in the know who’ve been working in the shadows on the topic and may literally and metaphorically know where the bodies are buried. Exciting stuff for someone like me who’s been ravenously devouring any and all UFO related info since I was a kid.

In this context, No One Will Save You is an unnerving tale as it lays bare a likely reality regarding the UFO phenomenon…namely that aliens are not here to help us and that they are not benign. Many in the ufology field and many in the military hierarchy believe that UFOs and aliens are malignant predators and likely colonizers or destroyers. Some believe that the reason “disclosure” of all UFOs and aliens is being thwarted by the powers that be is because civilization will collapse when humans acknowledge that the reality of aliens on earth means we as humans are considerably lower on the food chain than we had hoped.

In this sense No One Will Save You is correct…if aliens are real and are coming to earth, no one will save us from them…not your community, not your government and not your church – as shown in the movie. If history teaches us anything it is that beings that have advanced technology and intelligence will enslave and slaughter those who are intellectually and technologically inferior.

The film’s title isn’t just accurate in regards to an alien invasion, as the coming collapse of not just the American Empire, but also the U.S. dollar and the economy as well as the entirety of Western Civilization (American and European), will lay bare the cold hard reality that…No One Will Save You. Your government won’t save you, the magic soil you live on won’t save you, the police won’t save you, your community won’t save you, your church won’t save you and your delusions of national grandeur won’t save you. And some benevolent alien species finally revealing themselves and solving all of our problems won’t save you either.

The Fourth Turning is upon us here in the West and that sound you faintly hear is the thin ice we’ve been living on cracking right before we plunge into the deep, dark depths of a new dark ages.

All the signs are there and they are flashing bright red. From our decadent culture to our decrepit ruling class to our malevolent media to our know-nothing citizens and our criminal underclass and criminally corrupt overclass. The house of cards is teetering and when it falls, not if it falls – but when…NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU.

Another interesting subtextual idea that you can ever so slightly perceive in the film is that tyrannical leadership, a sort of fascist or communist oppressive system, is the only thing that can keep humanity/community alive, even though the illusory life led under that despotic rule is not really living. In order to avoid spoilers, I won’t get into the specifics of how that conclusion is revealed in the film, but I think by the end it becomes clear.

Neo-Cons and war-hungry Neo-Liberals might argue that the thesis of the film is that the aliens are the Communist Chinese and they aim to wipe out human freedom and control all people…I am not reflexively anti-China but I can see that interpretation, especially considering the notion of social credit scores and incessant surveillance.

Regardless of what the film means – and it could mean even more than I’ve spelled out here, it is undeniably cinematically invigorating and definitely worth watching. Despite its flaws it features a terrific performance from Kaitlyn Devers and strong direction from Brian Duffield, as well as some fascinating CGI aliens. Overall, I highly recommend No One Will Save You to anyone even remotely interested in sci-fi movies or horror films, and even to those who don’t usually get into those genres.

 Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCO

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Recommendations for Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services - Part One

On this very special episode, Barry and I host a massive party at LCFM headquarters to celebrate our 100th episode. In part one of this historic podcasting event, we not only name drop our bevy of celebrity friends, but also give our selections for good movies and shows to watch currently available on each streaming service. Stay tuned for part two of this blockbuster celebratory event in the coming days.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 100!! Top Movies and Shows Currently Available on Streaming Services

Thanks for listening!

©2023

White Men Can't Jump (Hulu): A Review - A Flagrant and Fragrant Foul of a Basketball Movie

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

My Rating: 1.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This rotten remake has no redeeming value or reason to exist.

Back in the old, dilapidated, smoke and championship banner filled Boston Garden, the dynastic Boston Celtics of Bill Russell, John Havlicek, Dave Cowens and Larry Bird had the greatest of home court advantages because the famed parquet floor on which they played had numerous dead spots. These dead spots would greatly reduce or eliminate the bounce of the ball thus making dribbling a much less automatic action. The Celtics took great advantage of this court abnormality by funneling unsuspecting opponents to dribble into the dead spots and thus either turn the ball over or slow their attack.

The Celtics made the unwise decision to move out of the charming, rat-infested old Boston Garden in 1995 and left their dead spot parquet advantage, and their mystical, magical, luck of the Irish mojo, behind. Their new home, the corporate, cold mausoleum known as TD Garden, has no such advantageous anomalies, and in turn has only produced just one Celtic championship banner in its near thirty-year existence…a stark contrast to the 16 championship banners the team won during their 48 years playing at the old Garden.

Which brings us to the new White Men Can’t Jump movie which premiered on Friday on the streaming service Hulu. The film, a remake of the 1992 Ron Shelton basketball comedy, reminded me of the old Boston Garden not because it is worthy of championship banners, but because it is so riddled with dead spots it has no bounce to it at all.  

The film, which follows the trials and tribulations of two basketball has-beens, Kamal and Jeremy, desperate for one last touch of hoops glory, is written by Kenya Barris, directed by something called Calmatic, and stars Sinqua Walls and rapper Jack Harlow. The end result of this third-rate group of moviemaking wannabes is a vacant, vapid and hollow shadow of the 1992 version which starred Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez.

To be clear I am not one of those people who is repulsed by this new film because I adored the original. The truth is I hated the original White Men Can’t Jump. The main reason for that was that Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes were embarrassingly bad at basketball. They couldn’t even remotely fake being able to play…and as someone who did play and who was a huge fan of the sport, I found that a hurdle much too great to overcome.

The good news is that this new version features marginally better, but still not great, basketball, but that doesn’t overcome the astounding lack of chemistry and the charisma deficiency of the two lead actors, Sinqua Walls and Jack Harlow.

Snipes and Harrelson lacked basketball ability, but what they didn’t lack was chemistry and charisma. Walls and Harlow on the other hand can somewhat simulate playing the game but have all the spark of two bodies lying next to each other in refrigerated drawers at the morgue.

Harlow, who if you don’t know is a famous rapper – and yes, I still find the notion of white rappers to be just as cringey as you do, need not worry about quitting his day job and heading to Hollywood to be the next white Will Smith, as God knows the black one is already white enough.

Walls at least played basketball in college at the University of San Francisco – where Bill Russell won two NCAA championships before leading the Celtics to 11 NBA titles…but unfortunately for Walls and for us, he is no Bill Russell on the basketball court or Wesley Snipes in front of the camera. He is a rather dull, one-dimensional actor devoid of any compelling inner life and his basketball ability is not what I would describe as aesthetically pleasing.

To be fair to Walls and Harlow, the script they have to work with is a scattershot piece of garbage. Walls’ character Kamal has a dark past and an odd relationship with his father, but none of these things are adequately fleshed out and are thus rendered annoying and unsatisfying to the viewer.

Harlow’s character Jeremy struggles with serious drug addiction but that battle never takes shape or is given any narrative energy and ends up just being ignored instead of dramatically exploited.

The two men’s personal lives, which feature the love interests Imani (Kamal’s wife - played by Teyana Taylor) and Tatiana (Jeremy’s girlfriend played by Laura Harrier), also fall decidedly flat.

Kamal and Imani’s marriage has all the familiarity of two people passing each other in a bus station. Jeremy and Tatiana’s relationship could be dramatically promising due to it being inter-racial and Jeremy’s drug addiction, but none of those topics are ever explored.

The director of this dud is Calmatic, a commercial director whose only other major film credit is the 2023 remake of the 1990 movie House Party. If you were unaware that the new House Party was released this past January then that makes two of us. Calmatic has no idea how to tell a story or how to elicit coherent and compelling performances from his cast and thus has no business directing films.

The bottom line is that the new White Men Can’t Jump is an instantly forgettable, meaningless, lifeless, purposeless exercise in nothingness. I’d say the film is a brick or an airball but the reality is that this movie soiled itself in the locker room and never even made it out to the court to take a shot.

If you really want to laugh while watching some basketball drama featuring bad acting, skip White Men Can’t Jump and tune in to the NBA playoffs starring the King of the Receding Hairline LeBron James as he shamelessly flops all over the court.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Mel Brooks' History of the World Part II: A Review - Oh, How the Mighty Have Fallen...and Can't Get Up

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. If you prefer you’re comedy to be funny, then this isn’t the series for you.

Let me start by saying that I love Mel Brooks. He was, for good or for ill, a major influence on the development of my sense of humor growing up.

His movies Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (which is one of my all-time favorite movies) and History of the World Part I, were on heavy rotation during my formative years and the world has been paying the price for it ever since.

Truth be told though that as much as I love the 96-year-old Mel Brooks, he also has the unique distinction of being the only director in cinema history to have me walk out of one of his films because it sucked so bad. Back in 1993 I got free tickets to a screening of Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and after 45 gruelingly unfunny minutes I made the painful decision to get up and walk out…something I’ve never done before or since.

Which brings us to Mel Brooks’ newest creation, The History of the World Part II, which is a mini-series currently streaming on Hulu.

The most unfortunate thing about Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part II is that I couldn’t walk out of it because then I’d be left standing outside my house in the rain like some shmuck.

History of the World Part I was iconic and hysterical. History of the World Part II is its antithesis, as there’s nothing insightful, original or amusing about it. This series is so actively anti-comedy and anti-funny that I consider it to be the Adolf Hitler of comedy series since it commits a hellacious holocaust against humor.  

It should come as no surprise this series is so bad since it stars the congenitally, malignantly unfunny Wanda Sykes, who I think of as the herpes of comedy – always unwanted yet mystifyingly recurring.

The other star of the series is the turd with feet known as Nick Kroll. If Wanda Sykes is the herpes of comedy, Nick Kroll is AIDS. Kroll is not only egregiously not funny, he is aggressively anti-funny. Kroll is a black hole of comedy who sucks all humor and all possibility of humor out of every scene he inhabits. Kroll is so unfunny he seems to have been given anti-comedy enemas for years at a time to remove any semblance of funny from his system. Kroll is so allergic to being funny he should be sealed in an oil drum at the bottom of the ocean with his eyes, ears and mouth taped shut for his and our safety.

Kroll plays a cavalcade of grating characters, like Shmuck Mudman, Judas, Galileo and Henry Kissinger. Sykes’ characters include Harriet Tubman and, in the unquestionably least funny recurring part of the entire series, Shirley Chisholm.

The third “star” listed on the series is Ike Barenholtz. Ike, who plays Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Graham Bell, is a thousand times funnier than Sykes and Kroll combined and yet he wouldn’t know funny if it gang raped him in a prison shower. A comedy truism to always remember is that if the funniest person in your comedy series is Ike Barenholtz, you’ve got some major fucking problems.

History of the World Part II, which runs for 8 interminable, thirty-minute episodes, covers such topics as the Civil War, Jesus and his Apostles, The Russian Revolution, Shirley Chisholm, Kublai Khan, Typhoid Mary and Stalin among many others.

Literally the only time I laughed during the entire excruciating four hours of this series was when, in a scene set in 1865, Abraham Lincoln, played by Timothy Simons, kept complaining about being tall and how he bumps his head all the time. Lincoln then exits a room and painfully bumps his head on the door frame. After gathering himself he declares “well, that’s definitely the worst thing that’ll happen to my head this year!” That’s funny. The rest of the show is not.

What stood out like a sore thumb in this series is that Mel Brooks, the guy who wrote “Springtime for Hitler”, has been completely neutered. Throughout the series Brooks genuflects to wokeness at every turn. The most obvious of which is a series of flaccid jokes directed at whites by Sykes as her Tubman and Chisholm characters. Yawn.

That Brooks has been reduced to conforming to the vapid, politically correct guidelines du jour is one of the more disheartening developments in recent years. You would think that a genius like Brooks, who usually finds the heights of comedy by pushing back against such ridiculous constraints, would be even less inclined to conform to them now that he’s 96, but apparently not.

Brooks, who is now almost the same age as his 2,000-Year-Old Man character, is a living piece of 20th Century comedy history. His career, which spans writing with a hall-of-fame collection of comedians for Sid Caesar’s The Show of Shows to the heights of Hollywood filmdom and Broadway dominance, is a testament to his prodigious talent.

Unfortunately, Brooks long ago lost his comedy fastball, and it would be best for his glorious legacy if History of the World Part II is memory-holed and quickly forgotten.

If you want to enjoy Mel Brooks, go watch Young Frankenstein again, or Blazing Saddles or History of the World Part I. Whatever you do don’t be a putz and a shmuck and watch the absolute worst double feature in Mel Brooks’ cinema history, History of the World Part II and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.  

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Prey: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A clever twist on the Predator sci-fi action formula that results in the movie being the second best in the franchise.

Prey, the fifth film in the Predator franchise and a prequel to the previous films, made its exclusive premiere this past weekend on the streaming service Hulu.

The original Predator (1987), directed by the criminally (pun intended) under-rated, populist master craftsman John McTiernan (Hunt for Red October, Die Hard) which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger at the peak of his powers, and boasted a phenomenal supporting cast of hall-of-fame badasses, including Bill Duke, Carl Weathers and the scene-stealing future governor of Minnesota, Jesse “The Body” Ventura, with his classic line “I aint got time to bleed!”, was a supremely entertaining sci-fi spin on the ‘man is the most dangerous game’ premise.

The subsequent Predator films, Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018) were without Arnold and McTiernan, and were incoherent, cringe-worthy embarrassments.

Which brings us to Prey, which is written by Patrick Aison and directed by Dan Trachtenberg, and stars Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers.

Prey is, if nothing else, very clever. It’s premise, setting the challenge-seeking hunter Predator alien in the early 1700’s in a region where the Comanche live, is simple yet original enough to revive this moribund franchise.

The plot revolves around Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman and accomplished healer and tracker who yearns to become a hunter/warrior like her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers).

There is no doubt that Prey got greenlit because the film espouses the ‘proper’ cultural politics of the current age, and checks all the right gender and ethnic diversity boxes. For instance, Naru’s navigating of the “patriarchal” Comanche culture in which she lives and rising above the limits imposed on her gender was a storyline that must’ve sent thrills into the loins of the suits at Hulu/Disney. No doubt the movie’s majority Native American cast did as well.

And while the film does signal its cultural/political virtue much too often for my tastes, and those scenes of vapid feminist defiance are by far the worst in the movie, it still manages to be a thoroughly entertaining piece of movie-making despite all the incessant, eye-rolling, girl-power garbage.

The film also works because Amber Midthunder as Naru is a compelling and charismatic lead. The luminous Midthunder’s naturalistic style is never too much or too little as she effortlessly carries the movie from start to finish.

Dakota Beavers as Taabe is also excellent, as he brings tremendous nuance to a role that in lesser hands would’ve been caricature filled with empty posturing.

While some might feel that a flaw of the film is that Naru and Taabe are the only truly fleshed-out characters, which they are. I actually felt that minimalist approach to character development helped the film stay lean, focused and on point.

The best part of the movie though is that director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison stick to the basics (protagonist gender swapping aside - which i admit is a major caveat) and make a Predator movie that would make Joseph Campbell proud due to its proper use of myth as its narrative foundation.

For example, like many coming of age stories or myths, Naru must cross geographical barriers, in this case rivers and ridges, to seek out the dragon that she must kill in order to ascend from childhood to adulthood.

Taabe, ever the dutiful big brother, has already made his own journey, and tries to mentor Naru, but there’s only so much he can do for her, as Naru must make the perilous journey herself.

Taabe’s pivotal role in propelling Naru on her journey and towards her destiny is right out of the Campbell playbook and will make fellow Jungians/Campbell enthusiasts knowingly nod in agreement.

Trachtenberg and Aison’s commitment to Campbell’s mythic storytelling fundamentals is what makes Prey such a psychologically satisfying film. It isn’t a great film but it is an entertaining one because it’s so satisfying to the audience’s unconscious mythic yearnings.

As for the movie-making itself, director Trachtenberg does solid work by once again staying true to storytelling fundamentals. He plants small seeds throughout the story and lets them grow to be useful later on in the story, and never deceives his audience or ignores the internal logic of the film. He also does a good enough job in visually telling the story, and despite some ups and downs he gives enough cinematic flair to the film for it to be worthwhile.

I also think that Disney’s decision to release Prey on Hulu is a wise one. The Predator franchise is on life-support, and it seems difficult to imagine a star-less Prey generating a great deal of box office at the moment. By releasing straight to Hulu, the film can build an audience slowly by word of mouth without the pressure of being labelled a box office bust. This approach will help future Predator films be viable for theatrical release.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t help but think about the potential future settings of the Predator franchise now that history is its playpen. Predator in Shogun era Japan, or in Mayan era South America, or Qing Dynasty China, or Aboriginal Australia, or early Zulu Kingdom Africa, or Ancient Egypt, Sparta or Rome. The possibilities are endless, and one can only hope that the Predator franchise stays the course and keeps making clever and interesting movies like Prey.

The bottom line is that Prey is the second-best Predator movie, a distant second to the original. If you like sci-fi action movies, and can tolerate a dose of vacuous, vapid and venal virtue signaling stuffed into a cool Comanche/Predator movie, then give Prey a shot, you might like it…I was pleasantly surprised to find that I did.

©2022

The Old Man (FX/Hulu): TV Review

THE OLD MAN - FX/HULU

SEASON ONE - 7 EPISODES

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Starts great but loses momentum and reveals itself to be a mediocrity.

The seven-episode first season of The OId Man, the FX series starring Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, started out strong but came to a close last Thursday with a whimper.

The series, which originally aired on FX and is now available on Hulu, follows the exploits of Dan Chase (Bridges), a former CIA bad-ass now in retirement and hiding.

Chase’s hiding is unsuccessful though as the widower, who lives alone with his two dogs, discovers when an intruder breaks into his house, and this is no burglary, it’s a hit.

Apparently, Chase is wanted by just about everybody, from law enforcement to the intelligence community to terrorists and Afghan warlords, so he goes on the run.

Chase’s former intel handler, Harry Harper (John Lithgow), and his protégé Angela Adams (Alia Shawkat), are the ones who have to hunt down the aptly named Chase using a variety of black ops tough guys.

The first two episodes of The Old Man are, frankly, fantastic. The series sets itself up to be an action-thriller with Bridges as the aging but still brutally effective hero. There are some fight scenes in these early episodes that are brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed, and are as good as anything we’ve seen on screen, big or small, in recent years.

It seemed with the first two episodes that The Old Man was going to be a rip-roaring, grisly and grounded action series, like a tv version of those Liam Neeson Taken movies or John Wick or something. But then everything comes to a stand-still as the series shifts away from action and toward a bevy of spy thriller twists and turns that aren’t particularly thrilling.

Some of these twists and turns are surprising but some, including the big one revealed in the finale, are painfully obvious from early on and fall rather flat dramatically.

Besides the action sequences, the other thing that made The Old Man so promising early on were the performances.

Jeff Bridges is, and always has been, a phenomenal actor despite having decided for some inexplicable reason to talk like his mouth was full of Snickers bars some years back. And Bridges’ work in The Old Man is as stellar as you’d expect it to be.

Despite being on in years, Bridges is still very lithe and makes for a truly believable bad-ass. He also brings a bevy of gravitas to his role and his character’s vibrant inner life is readily apparent as his eyes glisten with the intensity of a tiger on the prowl.

Also good is John Lithgow, an actor for which I’ve never had much use. Lithgow’s Harper is a battle-hardened bureaucrat who is skilled at political knife-fighting, but he’s also a family man reeling from the death of his son and grandson. Harper’s fragility is masked by his cold, calculating exterior, and Lithgow makes him into a captivating character.

Also very good is Ali Shawkat as Angela Adams, Harper’s protégé and de facto adopted daughter. Adams has all of Harper’s instincts for political maneuvering seemingly without the soft-under belly of familial sentimentality. Shawkat imbues Angela with a steely determination and a sly sense of superiority and the result is magnetic.

The problem with The Old Man though is that it sets itself up spectacularly in those first two episodes but then it loses focus as the story unwinds. As exposition and flash-backs replace action, the series loses momentum and drama, and my interest.

Side stories involving Amy Brenneman’s Zoe, a women Chase meets on the run, and flashbacks involving a young Chase in Afghanistan during the Soviet war in the 1980’s, drain the series of any power and immediacy because they simply don’t work well.

The expanding of the story from a lone man’s struggle to survive into an expansive journey about the past and all sorts of side characters that lack worth, is like releasing all the air out of a balloon, and by the season finale, you’re left with a rather flaccid and forgettable series that wasted all it had going for it.

It was announced this week that The Old Man will be back for a second season next year. I doubt anyone much cares. Considering how precipitously it declined in its first season, it seems very likely that this series will be just another in a cavalcade of uninspired and underwhelming shows available on various streaming services.

The Old Man could have been appointment viewing and one of the more notable tv ventures available nowadays, but the wheels came off the wagon and viewers were left stranded in a storytelling sandpit that seems uncomfortably like all the other sandpits they’ve been led into over the last few years of tv viewing.

In conclusion, The Old Man could’ve been great television, but it blew its opportunity, and now it’s just another piece of forgettable storytelling detritus adrift in an endless sea of tv mediocrity.

©2022

The Dropout (Hulu): A TV 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 middling misfire of a movie of the week posing as prestige TV.

Years ago, before streaming services and even before cable tv, there was a network television phenomenon called The Movie of the Week (MOTW). MTOW was usually a second rate, ripped from the headlines hack-fest, starring some up-and-comer or down-and-outer, that produced a compelling commercial for itself but an abysmal two-hour movie.

Hulu, Disney’s backwater repository for all of its non-Disney-fied properties, seems to want to brand itself the modern-day home for the MOTW which it has stretched out into Mini-Series of the Week.

For example, a few months ago Hulu premiered Pam and Tommy, starring Lily James and Sebastian Stan, a mini-series which tells the true story of how a celebrity sex tape of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee came to be and changed the world for the worse.

Hulu also recently premiered another mini-series called The Girl from Plainville, starring Elle Fanning, which tells the true story about a high-profile case about a high school girl who was prosecuted for allegedly talking her boyfriend into killing himself.

Hulu’s The Dropout falls into this now familiar category, as it stars Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, and tells the true story of a high profile, scandalous event - Elizabeth Holmes scamming most everybody with her smoke and mirrors blood testing company Theranos.

Like the old MOTW, Hulu’s star-studded, ripped-from-the-headlines mini-series make for better commercials than they do actual series. For instance, Pam and Tommy generated a lot of light but ultimately no heat as it was an exercise is play-acting and vapid socio-political pandering.

The Dropout produces similar results but is even more vacuous and artistically banal than Pam and Tommy.

Pam and Tommy at least started off promisingly enough and then went precipitously off the rails, but The Dropout is a tortuous slog from the get-go. I almost didn’t make it through the first episode. And then was so turned off by its amateurish script, its incoherent structure and mundane production that I stayed away for weeks until I finally bit the bullet and watched the rest of the eight-episode series.

As evidenced by her work in David Fincher’s Mank, Amanda Seyfried is a fine actress, and she does her best as the peculiar Elizabeth Holmes, but Holmes is such a cartoon character that she feels impenetrable (maybe the point of why she turned herself into a cartoon character!) and Seyfried’s performance feels more like imitation than acting.

Seyfried never pierces Holmes’ armor and thus we are left with a rather shallow performance with her doing little more than mimicking Holmes’ bizarre speaking voice and not much else.

Other performances are equally underwhelming if not uncomfortably broad. William H Macy is atrocious as Richard Fuisz, a neighbor of Holmes and competitor. His prosthetics are an embarrassment to the profession.

Much like Pam and Tommy turned their story into a feminist screed about the evils of the patriarchy, The Dropout follows this familiar path. The series paints Holmes as both victimizer and, of course, since she’s a woman swimming in the shark-infested, unfathomable waters of the patriarchy, also a victim.

The show never dares confront the most obvious and most interesting truth about Holmes which is that she rose to the power solely BECAUSE SHE WAS A WOMAN.

The big wigs, and she had a plethora of big wigs, from investor Don Lucas to Rupert Murdoch to former Secretary of State George Shultz, who backed her and went to great lengths to protect her, did so because they wanted to signal their virtue and 21st century feminist bona fides. Holmes sensed their weakness and exploited her femininity to manipulate the ‘noble intentions’ of these pillars of the male power structure.

The media gets off easy too in The Dropout, as its role in her rise to power is diluted if not outright ignored. The media’s gushing, deferential coverage is what built the formidable myth of Holmes as the girl power Steve Jobs. The media wanted Holmes to be a feminist icon and did all it could to print the legend and avoid the truth.

Both the media and the powerful men she duped, were promoting the credo of the 21st century, image over merit. This credo fuels the entirety of our society, and is a reflection of a country and culture in a death spiral.

Ultimately, the problem with The Dropout, and Pam and Tommy, and Hulu’s MOTW approach, is that it too is only interested in image and not in merit, not just in their storytelling but in their hiring and production.

Yes, the stories of Elizabeth Holmes and Pam and Tommy Lee are on their surface interesting, but Hulu doesn’t bring any insight to them, just shallow recreation and exploitation. We learn nothing about Elizabeth Holmes in The Dropout, we just witness her do things we already knew she did.

The Dropout, like Pam and Tommy before it, seems to exist for no other reason than for Hulu to signal its virtue and to have viewers passively mutter, “oh yeah, I remember when that happened in real life” as they sit comatose on their couch watching famous people play-act as other famous people.

As Orwell once wrote, “to see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle”, and the makers of The Dropout are disinterested in life beyond their proboscos. The story of Elizabeth Holmes is chock full of lessons and morals for our decadent and delusional age, but The Dropout is incapable of seeing what is in front of its own nose, and instead prefers to close its eyes and imagine a different, more politically Twitter friendly, less complex, more Manichean, world instead.

The bottom line is that The Dropout, like Pam and Tommy before it, is a terribly wasted opportunity. It’s nothing more than an empty-headed movie of the week posing as prestige TV, stretched out over eight grueling weeks. There is absolutely no reason why anyone, anywhere, should ever waste their time watching this middling monstrosity.

©2022

Pam and Tommy: A TV Review

HULU’S PAM AND TOMMY STARTS STRONG BUT ENDS UP BEING A RATHER FLACCID FABLE.

Pam and Tommy, the Hulu miniseries that dramatizes the events around the creation, theft and distribution of the infamous 1990’s Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape, could have been great.

For instance, the eight-episode series boasted remarkable performances from its two leads, Lily James and Sebastian Stan, who transformed into Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee respectively, and turned those walking cartoon characters into multi-dimensional human beings.

The series also performed the miracle of making Seth Rogan (also a producer on the series), who plays Rand Gauthier – the guy who stole the sex tape from Lee’s safe, less repulsive than usual. No small feat.

In addition, Craig Gillespie, the director of the terrific 2017 film I, Tonya, directed the first three episodes of the series, which were immensely entertaining and intriguing.

Yet, despite having all of these things going for it, Pam and Tommy in its final five episodes managed to, like a drunken Tommy Lee, stumble over its giant dick and fall flat on its face.

The series opening Gillespie directed Pam and Tommy episodes were imaginative, visually interesting, taut and well-paced. But the wheels came off the wagon after Gillespie left the directing chair and the series went from a hearty jaunt to a grueling death march.

A major issue in episodes four – eight was that the series lost its deft touch and became egregiously heavy-handed in its cultural politics. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with using cultural politics as the sub-text for a story, and Gillespie does that masterfully in the first three episodes, but the other directors, most notably Lake Bell in episodes four and seven, get bogged down in the mire of heavy-handed misogyny moaning and man-hating to the point of absurdity.

For example, in episode seven, Pamela Anderson is not only portrayed as an exploited victim of a ruthless and misogynist patriarchy, but also as some undiscovered cinematic genius for how she shot the sex tape in question. The women waxing poetic about the subtle intricacies of the sex tape want you to think Pam was Kurosawa with fake tits because she had the camera aimed at Tommy’s face as opposed to his genitals while they had sex. Maybe, just maybe, that shot wasn’t an artistic or creative choice, but was just a function of Pam being unable to think straight under orgasmic duress or her not being able to get a wide enough shot to capture the infamous anaconda in Tommy’s trousers.  

Regardless, Lake Bell’s direction in episode seven, in particular, is laughable for its ham-handedness and amateurish lack of subtlety and nuance.

What makes the final five episodes so disappointing is that the first three were so good. For example, the sequences where working class Rand has to interact with detached-from-reality-rich-guy Tommy, and the ones where the emotionally walking wounded Pam and Tommy meet and fall in love, are fantastic. And the sequences where Tommy and his personality-plus pecker have a tete-a-tete are the height of director Gillespie’s absurdist glory.

But once the players and the basics of the story are established in the first three episodes, the final five fail to close the deal as the story loses momentum and wanders aimlessly and repetitively through a melo-dramatic desert.

As disappointing as the series is overall, there is no denying the extraordinary work of Lily James and Sebastian Stan. James gives an amazing performance as she perfectly captures the persona of Pamela Anderson, and imbues it with a genuine humanity that is captivating and often quite moving.

Stan too is astonishing as the aggressively adolescent Lee. Stan gives the cartoonish drummer a vivid inner life and fills all of his endless mugging and posing with a profundity and poignance that is startling to behold.

The rest of the cast though do mostly mediocre work mostly because they’re not asked to do much more. As previously stated, Seth Rogan at first is interesting as the religiously and spiritually conflicted Rand, but then as his story becomes less compelling, so does Rogan.

Taylor Shilling, Andrew Dice Clay and Nick Offerman all have supporting roles of various sizes, but none of them do any notable work at all.

The story of the sex tape of Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee, and how it came to be and saw the light of day and spread via the internet, is a truly interesting and relevant story, as it says a great deal about the decadent and decaying state of our culture and country.

Watching Pam and Tommy, who are so desperate to be famous, become victims of the celebrity culture they cultivate and the fame to which they’re addicted, should have been insightful if not profound, but unfortunately, Pam and Tommy fails to elevate this modern-day myth and fable into anything more than a tedious tabloid tantrum.

 ©2022

Dopesick: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Hulu’s new opioid epidemic drama, Dopesick, is a must-see mini-series in the age of vaccine mandates.

The series dramatizes the mendacity and corruption of big pharma and lays bare how the powerful in business and government callously and cruelly harm regular folks for ungodly profits and unchallenged power.

Dopesick, the new dramatic mini-series about the opioid crisis on Hulu, is a flawed show, but despite its shortcomings, it’s most definitely must-see television.

The eight-episode series is compulsory viewing because in this age of vaccine mandates, where anything short of unabashed adoration of big pharma and government health agencies, as well as compulsive compliance to their edicts, leaves you ostracized from society, it lays bare the corrosive corruption of capitalism on “science” and exposes egregious government complicity with a pharmaceutical company that directly led to the holocaust of the opioid epidemic.

Dopesick is based upon Beth Macy’s non-fiction book of the same name and that, as well as ‘Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic’ by Barry Meier, ‘American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts’ by Chris McGreal, and ‘Dreamland’ by Sam Quinones, should be mandatory reading for everyone in order to understand the scope and scale of the opioid epidemic as well as the sinister machinations that launched it.

The Hulu mini-series tells the story of the hell unleashed when OxyContin hit the market. Unfortunately, the performances can sometimes be a bit uneven, and the show also does falter when it unnecessarily gets distracted with woke pandering on feminist and LGBT issues, but thankfully that irritant doesn’t diminish the vital tale of big pharma mendacity and government malfeasance at the heart of the story.

Some of the interesting stories featured include Dr. Finnix (a terrific Michael Keaton), a small-town doctor who gets seduced first by the drug company and then by the drug itself, Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), a working-class girl who became a slave to Oxy and Federal Prosecutor Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and DEA agent Bridget Meyer (a dismal Rosario Dawson), both swimming against the tide as they try to hold Purdue Pharma accountable for the carnage it has unleashed.

Also dramatized are the wholly dysfunctional Sackler clan, owners of Purdue Pharma.

The Sacklers are a greedy and loathsome bunch. Arthur Sackler invented medical marketing back in the 1940’s and 50’s, and came up with Valium as “mother’s little helper”, also creating a use for the drug to treat the ever-amorphous ailment of general anxiety.

Arthur’s nephew Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) attempted much the same with OxyContin.

In the late 1980’s, Purdue Pharma was in danger of losing its patent on MS Contin, a morphine pill for cancer patients that was the company’s main source of income, and would face a financial calamity when cheaper generic versions of the drug hit the market.

It was in this desperation that OxyContin, a longer lasting version of the opioid oxycodone, was born. The drug was introduced in 1996 and was aggressively promoted.

Purdue created dummy pain organizations and media outlets as their propaganda division to push the narrative of an “epidemic of untreated pain” ravaging America. These organizations, like the American Pain Society, lobbied the medical establishment to make pain the “fifth vital sign”, and succeeded.

Remarkably, Purdue then got the FDA, despite no studies showing this claim to be true, to allow the company to put a label on OxyContin saying that danger of addiction was extremely low. In a stunning coincidence, the FDA official who granted this extraordinary label request, Curtis Wright, months later left the FDA to take a $400,000 job at…Purdue Pharma.

Purdue then unleashed its hyper-aggressive salesforce armed with the carrot of gifts, free meals and vacations, as well as the stick of lawsuits from patients if doctors didn’t prescribe Oxy, into medical offices specifically targeted by a database that focused on painkiller prescriptions, disability claims and loose regulations.  

The salesforce was also armed with a plethora of dubious marketing materials that claimed “less than 1%” of users will become addicted to Oxy.

The sales staff referenced the Porter-Jick study as proof of the ‘less than 1%” claim, and that became the cornerstone of the “pain treatment” movement and was even taught in medical schools across the country.

The stunning revelation about the Porter-Jick study is that it isn’t a study at all. It’s just the anecdotal observations of a crank doctor complaining in a five-sentence letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Purdue’s strategy only became more dubious and depraved as time wore on.

Oxy was supposed to work for 12 hours a dose, but for many people the effect didn’t last nearly that long. Purdue called this issue, “breakthrough pain”, which sounds an awful lot like “breakthrough infections” in regard to Covid.

“Breakthrough pain” was treated by doubling the dose. When the 10mg fails, you go to 20mg, then to 40mg…on up to the mother of all pills the 160mg.

When addiction quickly followed, Purdue claimed that the signs and symptoms of addiction weren’t really addiction, it was an ailment called “pseudo-addiction”, and pseudo-addiction is really just untreated pain and the only remedy for it is…you guessed it…more OxyContin.

The answer to everything was more OxyContin. And of course, with more Oxy comes more addiction, more death, more suffering, more despair, and more profits.

A similar paradigm seems to be in play regarding Covid vaccines, which when they fail results in calls for boosters, which in turn leads to more profit for big pharma. Like with the financial collapse of 2007/2008, failure can be remarkably profitable for big shots.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for or against vaccines, I’m advocating for critical thinking. The gullible and the goaded are fools to take big pharma or government’s word for gospel truth, be it about Covid, WMDs, or anything else, especially when profit and power can be gained by lying. As Dopesick teaches us, the wisest approach is skepticism regarding big pharma and government’s claims and cynicism regarding their motives.

Ultimately, Dopesick is a worthy watch because it tells the ugly truth about what the powerful are willing to do to regular folks, up to and including killing them, in order to make an ungodly profit.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Y: The Last Man - TV Series Review and Commentary

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MILD SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The show inexplicably and frustratingly trades drama and suspense for vacuous trans virtue signaling.

Y: The Last Man is a new tv show on FX/Hulu that boasts a very intriguing premise – what if all the men of earth, but one, were wiped out in a mysterious plague.

The show, based on a popular graphic novel of the same name that ran from 2002-2008, premiered in mid-September and is now through six episodes in its first season.

The dystopian drama’s basic story is that a sudden bloody illness kills every male mammal on earth except for a guy named Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand. In a mildly clever commentary on the current state of masculinity, the rather ridiculous and feckless poor Yorick, named after a dead clown in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is alas, a failed magician, oops, I mean escape artist.

Yorick’s mother, Jennifer Brown, happens to be a U.S. Congresswoman and she succeeds to the presidency after all the men running things drop dead. If you thought women running the world would make it better, then not only have you never heard of Margaret Thatcher, but you’ll also be disappointed by Y: The Last Man.

Life in a woman’s world is filled with just as much violence, crime, chaos, corruption and cruelty as the man’s world it replaced. The only real difference between men and women ruling appears to be that women seem incapable of clearing away the hordes of dead bodies littered everywhere. Maybe they just lack the upper body strength to get the job done, who knows?

While the show has some bright spots, such as the performances of the terrific Ben Schnetzer as Yorrick, as well as Diane Lane, Amber Tamblyn, and Ashley Romans, it also has some major problems, namely its relentlessly predictable political agenda.

Most of the politics are of the usual vacuous variety you’d come to expect from Hollywood. All the villains are irrational right-wing Republicans and all the heroes are allegedly logical liberal Democrats. Tamblyn’s Kimberly derisively describes the new all-female administration as “a Rachel Maddow fever dream” and she’s correct.

But the most egregious example of the show’s political pandering is that it has veered sharply away from its source material by incorporating gender fluidity and trans men into the mix and in so doing has incomprehensibly castrated its own dramatic power.

In contrast to the comic book – which some deemed “trans-phobic” because it mostly ignored the trans community, trans men are featured predominantly throughout the tv show. A major character, Sam, and his merry band of trans men are one example, as are other groups of trans men who are referenced searching for their precious elixir testosterone, which ironically enough is tough to find.  

In the most recent episode gender fluidity was at the forefront as Dr. Allison Mann, a Harvard geneticist, passionately declares in a long monologue, “not everyone with a Y chromosome is a man!” She also rants about how transgenderism and gender fluidity are much more prevalent than we realize and how it wasn’t “just men” who died from the cataclysmic “event” but “all people with a Y chromosome”.

Ok…but I don’t think the title ‘Y: The Last Mammal with a Y Chromosome’ would inspire much interest.

A major dramatic device in the story is that Yorick is in danger because he’s literally the last man on earth and is the only hope for mankind’s survival. Trans men may “believe” they’re actually men, but the premise of this story, at least the graphic novel version, obliterates that subjective assertion. This is no doubt why trans activists were so up in arms about the show being made and why the producers were so quick to kneel before the altar of gender fluidity despite how that questionable notion neuters the premise and drama of their show.

For example, being the actual last man on earth means Yorick has the utmost value, and when you add in that he’s the current president’s son, then his value skyrockets even more. This is why he continuously wears a gas mask to hide his bearded face and he skulks in the shadows to avoid being discovered. But none of this makes any sense at all since trans men are so predominantly featured on the show.

In this context, if Yorick is discovered he could just say he’s a trans man, and according to the world of the show, no one would bat an eye. In fact, in the latest episode a group of rebel/terrorist women stumble upon Yorick and just assume he’s trans and tell him where a bunch of other trans men are who have testosterone, which needlessly defused a potentially very dramatic situation.

The bottom line is that Y: The Last Man could’ve been great, but its ultimately a foolish and unforgivable waste of a good sci-fi premise. The show is nothing but another example of pandering producers who’d rather signal their woke virtue and render impotent their project’s suspense and drama than actually make something interesting, challenging and worthwhile.

If a mysterious sudden plague ever comes that wipes out just the woke in Hollywood, I’ll look into the vacant skulls of these long-lost producers and muse, “where your gibes be now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.”

Just kidding. What I’d actually say is “God bless and good riddance” and be merrily on my way.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Homeroom: Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manipulative and meandering documentary devoid of insight or originality.

New Hulu documentary ‘Homeroom’ isn’t an uplifting depiction of the next generation of activists, it’s a depressing celebration of misguided victimhood.

The film is a divisive piece of racial propaganda that will be lauded by mainstream critics for its politically correct and socially acceptable intolerance, racial resentment and prejudice.

Homeroom is the new critically-acclaimed documentary that follows a group of politically engaged, minority Oakland High School students as they navigate their tumultuous senior year as it’s interrupted by Covid and the George Floyd protests.

The documentary, which premiered on the streaming service Hulu on August 12th, is the final installment of director Peter Nicks’ “Oakland Trilogy” (The Waiting Room and The Force) and boasts Black Panther director Ryan Coogler as its executive producer.

The main protagonist of Homeroom is high school senior Denilson Garibo, an undocumented immigrant who’s an ambitious member of the All-City Council (ACC) which represents the 36,000 students of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

OUSD has its own police force and well before George Floyd’s murder Denilson and his fellow ACC member Mica, are pushing to have the school board abolish the school police in order to spare budget cuts in other student programs.

Denilson loves politics and certainly plays the part very well. Ever fluent in the emotionalist lingo of the moment, Denilson talks of students feeling “triggered” and “unsafe” around school police, of the “constant criminalization of black people”, and that he will stand up for “black and brown students”…apparently the white and Asian students are out of luck.

Denilson and his cohorts do seem like nice kids, but like most teenagers (and people) they also seem insufferably vapid as they’re constantly on their phones, even taking calls, in the middle of class. They aren’t so much concerned with education, something painfully obvious from their poor diction, vocabulary, and abysmal lack of logic, as they are with distracting themselves and reducing their attention span.

Their slavish addiction to social media isn’t harmless as it distorts their perception of reality by relentlessly inundating them with messages feeding their victimhood identities and fomenting anti-white sentiments.

For example, reports of Breonna Taylor’s slaying, videos of Ahmoud Arbery’s gruesome killing and George Floyd’s murder are passed around these kid’s social media echo chamber like confirmation bias baseball cards.

This focus on white violence against blacks is further reinforced when a black teacher gives a passionate lecture about a black female former student from the school who was stabbed to death in an Oakland park by a white man.

Director Nicks never challenges this distorted racial narrative but rather reinforces it as an objective truth.

The objective truth is that according to FBI crime statistics, the vast majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. The same is true of whites, of course, as murder tends to be an intra-racial act.

But Nicks has no interest in truth, only in propagating racial propaganda that perpetuates victimhood and resentment.

An interesting example of Nicks’ biased approach is the brief clip shown of Amy Cooper, the infamous Central Park ‘Karen’ who called the cops on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black birdwatcher who told her to leash her dog, as an example of the unbridled evil of white people.

What is interesting about the use of this clip is that Kmele Foster recently investigated the Central Park ‘Karen’ incident and came away with a much more nuanced view of the situation. Basically, Amy Cooper isn’t the entitled, one-dimensional racist villain the media portrayed her as and Christian Cooper isn’t the martyred saint they made him out to be.

But Homeroom, its protagonists and director Nicks have no interest in, or tolerance for, such nuance and complexity regarding race, only in branding scapegoats.

For example, Denilson shamelessly decries the white middle class people attending school board meetings, claiming they’re “hijacking” it, and then tells a white board member he expected her to vote against his initiative because she’s white. Other minority students in the film say that gentrification, an influx of white residents, has driven them out of their neighborhoods.

Of course, if whites didn’t attend the school board meeting, they’d be branded as aloof and not caring about the community. And demonizing white people for moving into a black neighborhood is the evil of “gentrification”, while whites moving away from a black neighborhood is racist “white flight”.

That same circular illogic will also apply to Oakland Unified School District’s police. When they are abolished, crime will undoubtedly go up in schools, and then these same activists will claim that no one is protecting minority children.

The bottom line is that Homeroom is the sort of biased racial propaganda that we need much less of in our culture. It’s rightfully unimaginable that a white teacher would ever be celebrated for lecturing his class on black on white crime, or that black school board members would be singled out for their skin color, or that “middle-class blacks” would be admonished for attending a school board meeting.

All of this racial resentment is cheered as “activism” by the filmmaker, whose sole focus is on multiple African-American, Latino and Asian students, but not a single white student, despite whites making-up the largest percentage of Oakland’s diverse population, 35%.

As someone who has worked in California schools I sympathize with the student-activists featured in Homeroom. I can also unfortunately attest that the school-to-prison pipeline is very real and that major educational reforms are desperately needed, but the hyper-racialization and intolerance showcased in Homeroom and the wave of activist indoctrination taking hold in schools across the state (and country), are not the answer and will not lead to a happy ending for anyone involved, especially minority students.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Top Ten Virtue Signalers of 2020 - Entertainment Edition

Estimated reading Time - 3 minutes 56 seconds

This year has been a bad one for most of us, but for the woke virtue signalers of the entertainment world, it has been the very best of times.

It is unsurprising that the entertainment industry, which naturally attracts the intellectually vapid, the emotionally insecure and the rabidly self-absorbed, boasted some of the most egregious and aggressive virtue signaling in the history of the art form in 2020.

Anyone who has ever waded through the intellectual cesspool of our narcissistic culture is all too familiar with the compulsive public expressions of moral superiority and shameless self-righteousness of entertainment industry wokeness.

In 2020 entertainment industry virtue signalers, in a desperate attempt for attention and validation, vomited such copious amounts of their odious, self-serving woke bile into the public sphere that it felt like we were all living in a giant virtue vomitorium.

In honor of the worst year in recent memory, I have put together a list of the ten worst virtue signalers in entertainment for 2020. Enjoy!

10B. New York Times Film Critics – The NYT’s list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century (So Far) and the Best Actors of 2020 studiously ignored talent, skill and reality and instead went all in on virtue signaling by including a cavalcade of minority, foreign and elderly actors as well as ridiculous Tik-Tok performers. The final result is a human resources department’s wet dream and looks more like the waiting room at a casting call for a diversity and inclusion public service announcement than a collection of best actors.

10A. Berlin International Film Festival – The home of the famous Golden Bear and Silver Bear Awards announced this year that they were going gender neutral in their acting awards…how very Weimar of them. Next up - Golden and Silver Bears announce their pronouns are they/them and zi/ze.

9. HBO Max – Put a warning label on Gone With the Wind so that people knew they were bad for watching it and evil for liking it. Also put out UNpregnant, a zany, whacky, fun-loving teen abortion movie. So much virtue to signal! 

8. Kristen Bell – Bell had an All-Star caliber virtue signaling year…she quit a voice role because she is white, did the ‘I Take Responsibility’ video – the gold standard of the virtue signaling art form, then said she raises her kids anti-racist and doesn’t care about their sexual choices. The Quadruple Crown of virtue signaling! Ask not for whom the virtue signaling Bell tolls…it tolls for all of us!

7. Richard Brody, Film Critic at The New Yorker – Brody turned the virtue signaling up to eleven this year by being inappropriately amorous with the pedophile starter kit known as Cuties and by ranking Spike Lee’s abysmal and amateurish Da 5 Bloods as #2 on his ‘Best of the Year’ list. Apparently Brody doesn’t care if people think he’s a pedophile, but he REALLY doesn’t want people to think he’s racist…now that’s some quality virtue signaling!

6. Late Night Comedy – As evidenced by the insipid woke comedic stylings of Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Fallon’s impotent apology for wearing blackface 20 years ago, Stephen Colbert literally crying about Trump, and the eunuch brigade of Jimmy Kimmel, John Oliver and Trevor Noah going all in on the safest, wokest, establishment-approved comedy imaginable, virtue signaling has spread like a contagion through late night comedy. These flaccid, pandering clowns make Jay Leno seem downright Carlin-esque. Yuck.

5. Disney/Hulu – Disney attached absurdly verbose content warnings to some of their classic animated films like Dumbo and Lady and the Tramp and Hulu (which Disney controls) pulled episodes of 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs, Golden Girls and Community for committing the sin of comedy “black face” in the past. Disney - where adults get treated like children!

4. The Oscars – The Oscars opened 2020 by virtue signaling about the environment and ended it virtue signaling about diversity.

 To paraphrase Schindler’s List, the Oscars’ new diversity and inclusion initiative isn’t just some good old fashioned hating of straight, able-bodied white men…it’s official policy now.

If the Academy Awards’ goal is to signal its virtue enough to make straight, able-bodied white men persona non grata in Hollywood, destroy cinematic quality and bankrupt the film industry, they are succeeding spectacularly. Bravo!

3. “Imagine” Video – Imagine being so self-absorbed that you think making a video of you and your wealthy friends singing the saccharine anthem ”Imagine” from your mansions during a pandemic when ordinary people are suffering unimaginable-to-you hardships such as losing their jobs, their homes and their loved ones, is a really good idea.

I ‘Imagine’ a glorious utopia with no jackass celebrities or pathetically pandering corporations and certainly no virtue signaling. I know it will never happen, but it is a pleasant dream.

2. NBA/LeBron James – This year the NBA emulated the flopping and vacant histrionics of its players by doing an extravagantly exaggerated, dramatically over-the-top embrace of “social justice”.

In the NBA bubble in Orlando – The Happiest Place on Earth,  ‘Black Lives Matter’ was painted on every court and players wore trite woke slogans on the back of their jerseys. The absurdity and obscenity of filthy rich, pampered, dim-witted athletes, safely sealed in five star hotels with all expenses paid, adored by millions of people worldwide, wearing jerseys demanding fans “See Us” and “Love Us” is so astronomical as to be immeasurable.

Then there is the MVP of Virtue Signaling, LeBron James, who should trade in his Nikes for clown shoes after he wore a Breonna Taylor “Say Her Name” t-shirt and did an egregiously adolescent and nauseatingly pretentious Wakanda salute when Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman died. Yikes.

LeBron’s won the NBA Championship in 2020 and nearly took the virtue signaling title too!!

1. “I Take Responsibility” video – A collection of imbecilic, dead-eyed actors morally preening by reading words on camera so that everyone knows they hate racism and “take responsibility” for “every not so funny joke, every unfair stereotype” is the Mona Lisa, the Hamlet, the Beethoven’s Fifth and the Citizen Kane of virtue signaling.

 This video is a pure masterpiece and the apex of the art form. It will never be equaled or topped…well at least not until the next shameless spectacle of woke virtue signaling comes along in 2021! Virtue signaling – the gift that keeps on giving.

Congratulations to all the virtue signalers of 2020. Your grating, self-serving displays of phony virtue are a towering monument to your own shamelessness and self-righteousness.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020