The Flash: A Review - Running on Empty

****THIS REVIEW IS MOSTLY SPOILER FREE BUT DOES CONTAIN A CLEARLY MARKED SECTION WITH SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A mess of a movie that is a major letdown. If you really want to see it wait a few months until it’s streaming on Max.

In the weeks and months leading up to the release of the DC film The Flash there was a relentless stream of industry people vociferously declaring it to be a superhero movie masterpiece.

James Gunn, filmmaker and new co-CEO of DC Films, said prior to release that The Flash was “one of the best superhero movies (he’s) ever seen.”

Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav said that The Flash was flat out “the greatest superhero movie” ever.

It wasn’t just Warner Brother lackeys either, as none other than the Lord and Saviour of Scientology and Hollywood, Tom Cruise, allegedly called the film’s director Andy Muschietti after an early screening and raved about how much he loved it.

Even horror writer Stephen King got in on the action declaring of The Flash on Twitter, “This one is special. It’s heartfelt, funny, and eye-popping. I loved it.”

I went to see The Flash on its opening Friday and I can report that James Gunn, David Zaslav, Tom Cruise and Stephen King are all either shameless liars or mental defectives with severe cinematic taste dysmorphia.

The reality is that The Flash is, much to my deep, deep chagrin, at its very best, a sub-mediocrity, and at its worst, terrible.

Let me start off by saying that I really like the Flash as a comic-book character, and I think he’s very deserving of a major motion picture. Let me also say that I actually liked Ezra Miller in the supporting role of Flash in the previous Snyder-verse films…and on top of that I actually liked the Snyder-verse films (the director’s cuts anyway) considerably more than most…and on top of that in general I lean much more toward DC than I do Marvel.

That is a long-winded way of saying that I was predisposed to liking The Flash. And then I saw The Flash.

The movie is just a mess. Superhero fatigue is a real thing, and the abysmal failure of The Flash, both creatively and at the box office, is proof that the genre is running on fumes at the moment.

A big part of the problem with The Flash is that the story is convoluted and incoherent. There’s lots of talk about multiverses and time travel and such but the very core of the story, the murder of Barry Allen/The Flash’s mom, is a muddled and jumbled event that carries no weight because it makes zero sense.

Another major issue is that the CGI is egregiously abominable. The opening to the film features an action sequence where Flash has to save a bunch of babies falling from a collapsing building. The scene is reminiscent of the horrors of 9/11 but this time with babies in peril, which why I raised an eyebrow when Flash checks his watch during the action and it reads “9:10”. How odd.

The CGI in this sequence and throughout the film is just atrocious to the point of being ridiculous. Director Andy Muschietti has stated that the poor CGI was intentional as it gives the viewers the perspective of Flash…ummm…yeah, ok…and I intentionally failed trigonometry in high school so I could share the perspective of stupid people. Come on, that Muschietti claim is utter horseshit. The CGI is cheap and laughably bad and no manufactured, half-assed hindsight story is going to change that. The awful CGI matters because it undercuts the entirety of the cinematic enterprise from the get go.

On top of all that, Ezra Miller, who as I stated I liked in a comedic supporting role as Flash in the earlier Snyder-verse films, is simply not able to carry a feature film. Miller is a distinct type of actor, and he becomes more and more grating the more time you spend with him on-screen. That is only heightened in The Flash when you spend a great deal of time with him AND there are two of him…which is as annoying as it sounds.

To be clear, I actually don’t care about Ezra Miller’s much publicized legal issues – which have kept him from doing any publicity for the film, nor do I care about HIS preferred pronouns. I just find it mildly amusing and somewhat ironic that Ezra Miller is obviously batshit crazy and now stars in a movie featuring a bevy of Batmen.  

What made The Flash so frustrating was that it so easily could have and should have been not only so much better, but actually great. And the path to greatness, or at least making it better, is painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain in their head.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. SKIP AHEAD IF YOU WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS!!!

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Much Like Spider-Man: No Way Home, which featured three Spider-men and a cavalcade of villains from previous film versions of Spider-Man, The Flash could’ve exploited the deep reservoir of DC films and tv shows to deliver fan service, laughs and drama. Instead, the film badly stumbles in its attempt to be clever and pay tribute to the superhero projects that preceded it.

The marketing of The Flash made it clear that both Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton would be playing Batman in the film. Keaton’s return was, much to my chagrin since I like movies to keep their secrets, much hyped and given away in the trailers.

The prospect of two Batmen is pretty intriguing, but The Flash does nothing with it. It also does nothing with the cavalcade of other DC superheroes it very briefly visually references….like Christopher Reeves’ Superman, Helen Slater’s Supergirl, George Reeve’s Superman and Adam West’s Batman.

That The Flash is unable to adequately exploit DC’s back catalogue effectively for drama or comedy is cinematic malpractice criminal scale.

What the film should have done is Forest Gump (yes, I’m using Forest Gump as a verb!) the Flash’s red ass into quick scenes from the actual George Reeves Superman and Adam West Batman tv shows and get a laugh when Flash realizes he’s in the wrong universe.

Do the same and put Flash into Christopher Reeves’ Superman films (maybe even in a scene with Richard Pryor!). The same is true for the Nicholas Cage Superman movie that never got made – yes, Cage’s Superman is briefly seen in The Flash, but it could have been used in a more substantial way. Hell, why not use all the Supermen…like Henry Cavill, Brandon Routh (from Superman Returns), Tom Welling (from Smallville) and Dean Cain (from Lois and Clark) even if briefly and even if only for comic effect?

Same with Batman…why not exploit all the weird villains from earlier films, like DeVito’s Penguin, Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze and Jim Carrey’s Riddler? Maybe even get a cheer by putting Flash in the Val Kilmer Batman universe. You could even steal from Top Gun: Maverick and have an emotional scene with a sick Val Kilmer as an aged and beaten Batman on his deathbed meeting Flash yet unable to speak to him.  

And you could also do a brief crossover with the Flash tv show on the CW and have Miller’s Flash bump into CW Flash’s Grant Gustin in some weird speed force intersection. I’ve never seen the CW show but why not use and exploit all the IP in your power? Fans love that stuff and it would give this project a sense of scope and scale, and God knows Warner Brothers loves nothing more than self-congratulatory commercials for itself (see the LeBron James Space Jam movie…actually don’t, it’s awful).

As for the two Batmen most prominently featured in the movie, Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck, instead of having two Ezra Miller Barry Allen/Flash characters meet up, have Affleck and Keaton’s Batman characters jump into the other’s universe and meet up. It would be much more entertaining and much more dramatically and comedically satisfying to have Affleck and Keaton squaring off saying “I’m Batman” at each other and recounting how their parents died for the millionth time than to have Ezra Miller bantering back and forth with Ezra Miller for two hours.

Hell, imagine a fight between Affleck’s Batman and Keaton’s Batman, and then later they come together to fight against Zod or whomever. People would love that and come out to the theatre to see it.

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END OF SPOILERS END OF SPOILERS END OF SPOILERS

See, the possibilities for plumbing the depths of the DC catalogue for comedy and drama are endless, and yet what The Flash comes up with is the least creative, least interesting, least intriguing of all the possibilities.

The bottom line is that The Flash is the most disappointing movie in recent memory because it really should have and could have been at the very least entertaining…and maybe even great. But it’s neither of those things. What it is, ultimately, is a rather cheap, completely empty exercise in squeezing the very last vestiges of life from the superhero genre.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

James Gunn's Shockingly Unwoke 'Peacemaker' Finale

After demeaning and berating white men for the first seven episodes, in the season one conclusion, James Gunn flips the script.

This article contains spoilers for the season one finale of ‘Peacemaker’!!

The first season of James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’, the HBO Max series which follows the travails of the flag-waving, meat-headed DC superhero Peacemaker, played by John Cena, came to a somewhat surprising conclusion.

After the series spent the first seven, and the majority of the eighth and final episode, painting all white-men as, at best, adolescent buffoons, and at worst, unrepentantly racist and psychopathic Nazis, and all minorities and women as smart, savvy and tough, the show’s climax was downright shocking.

In the final episode, Peacemaker and his band of misfit special agents head to a farm to try and stop a giant alien caterpillar, which is the lone food source for a large population of alien butterflies that are embedding themselves in powerful people on earth, from being teleported to a safe location, thus ensuring that these butterflies take over the planet.

After a long battle scene, Peacemaker and the lead butterfly named Goff, which has embedded itself in an Asian-American female police officer Sophie (Annie Chang), stop fighting and talk.

Goff pleads with Peacemaker to help the aliens because they left their planet due to global warming, and have come to earth not seeking conquest but to save the planet from the same environmental calamity.

In Goff’s passionate monologue she rails against climate change deniers and those who “ignore science”, as well as the plethora of Neanderthals that see “minor inconveniences as assaults on their freedom” instead of as a way to save the planet. In our current age of Covid, this harangue by Goff sounds very familiar.

Peacemaker ponders Goff’s appeal, and it certainly seems like he’s going to be won over. As a viewer, I was rolling my eyes as I fully expected Peacemaker to follow the Hollywood blueprint and be fully redeemed through embracing the fight against climate change, a staple in storytelling in recent years.

But then, much to my surprise, Peacemaker shoots and kills Goff and uses a voice-controlled Peacemaker helmet being worn by Adebayo (Danielle Brooks), a black lesbian woman on his team, to use her as a missile that he launches into the giant caterpillar, killing it and ending the alien butterfly threat.

In the aftermath, Peacemaker helps Adebayo out of the caterpillar corpse, then picks up and carries his wounded, hard-nosed feminist compatriot Harcourt (Jennifer Holland) and carries her to the hospital, but not before cursing out the Justice League.

At the hospital, as Peacemaker awaits word on Harcourt’s condition, he second-guesses himself and asks Adebayo, “Did I just kill the world?”

Adebayo responds, “Maybe you just gave us a chance to make our own choices instead of our bug overlords.”

She then asks him, “Why did you choose not to help? Because of your proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom?”

Peacemaker replies, “Because I knew they’d hurt you and the others if I did (help them).”

In the context of the show, which I often found amusing despite its incessant woke preening regarding the evils of white men and the glories of everybody else, Peacemaker’s ultimate heroism was a stunner.

Equally stunning was the inherent admission from creator James Gunn that all the woke preaching in the previous seven episodes was a pose. Peacemaker may have a “proto-fascist, libertarian idea of freedom”, but he wasn’t a bad guy or a racist or misogynist, it was the bevy of snarky minorities and women around him that projected racism and misogyny onto his buffoonish and brutish personality.

The bottom line was that it was Peacemaker, the questionable white guy, who not only saved the day, but revealed himself to be considerably stronger mentally, emotionally, spiritually and physically, than all of the women and minorities who berated him for his barbarity throughout. And these women, like Adebayo and Harcourt, grew to love Peacemaker for who he is, and no longer hated him for what he wasn’t, and for the reflexive wokeness that he lacked.

In a way, this conclusion paints Peacemaker as the embodiment of the famous Jack Nicholson speech from the film ‘A Few Good Men’, where his Colonel Jessup declares, “You can’t handle the truth!...we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You?...You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know…and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall -- you need me on that wall.”

Peacemaker may be an idiot and a jackass, but the woke brigade on the show need him on that wall, as he is not only able, but willing, to do what needs to be done, and those that ridicule him for his prehistoric cultural politics are ultimately grateful for him because only he can keep them safe.

The irony of it all is that it’s uncouth, brutal men like Peacemaker, with their “libertarian ideas of freedom”, who do the nasty, dirty work that create the protected, safe spaces where the decadence of racial and feminist wokeness can be born and thrive.

‘Peacemaker’ isn’t a perfect series, and James Gunn’s writing and directing style can be grating at times, but to his and the show’s credit, Gunn cleverly turned the usual woke politics of entertainment on its head with ‘Peacemaker’s’ conclusion, which was a refreshing change in the suffocatingly uniform cultural politics of Hollywood.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

Peacemaker: Review of First Three Episodes

***THIS IS A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE. THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!***

James Gunn’s HBO superhero series ‘Peacemaker’ isn’t great, but it’s good enough.

DC Comic’s show is a mixed bag, but it’s elevated by the relentless effort of star John Cena.

Peacemaker is the new DC Comics superhero series for HBO Max which premiered its first three episodes on January 13, with new episodes being released every Thursday until February 17.  

The show, which stars John Cena and is written and directed by the controversial James Gunn, is a spin-off from Gunn’s The Suicide Squad movie from last summer.  

Peacemaker is DC’s first foray into prestige tv, and it’s in direct contrast to Marvel’s bevy of family-friendly Disney Plus tv shows in that it is decidedly raunchy, racy, irreverent and R-rated.

You see, Peacemaker the superhero isn’t the pretty poster boy for perfect patriotism like Marvel’s Captain America, no, he’s more like Captain America’s unbridled shadow. At best, Peacemaker is a morally ambiguous, sociopathic, white trash, trailer park superhero who demands the Dove of Peace be branded on all his weapons and who “loves peace so much he doesn’t care how many men, women, and children he has to kill to get it”…which sounds like something that should be chiseled in stone above the entrance to the Pentagon.

Of course, that’s what makes Peacemaker an interesting character is that while he is a lovable lunkhead, he’s also a walking, talking monument to America’s unadulterated adolescence and unabashed addiction to militarism, colonialism and fascism.

When the series opens, Peacemaker is given a clean bill of health after recovering from the grievous wounds that he received in The Suicide Squad. Upon his release from the hospital, he’s supposed to go back to prison to serve his life sentence, but instead gets co-opted by a “black ops” squad to assassinate some bad people under the moniker of “Project Butterfly”.

The very best thing about Peacemaker is unquestionably John Cena. I remember the first time I saw John Cena act it was in the 2015 Amy Schumer comedy Trainwreck. Cena had a small role in the film but stole every scene in which he appeared. The movie was awful but he was the best thing in it. He did the same thing in last summer’s The Suicide Squad, nearly stealing the whole movie.

What makes Cena so compelling is that he obviously isn’t a natural comedian, but he is absolutely fearless if not shameless, and works relentlessly hard to get a laugh, which is why he wins over audiences.

Admittedly, at times Cena’s act can wear a bit thin, but overall, it does work well on Peacemaker. Cena, with his cartoonish, comic book, pro wrestler’s body, comes across as a charismatic, magnetic and endearingly goofy on-screen presence.

The other driving force on Peacemaker is writer/director James Gunn. Gunn has grown a cult following for his work on the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and the signature bawdy banter he writes for his projects.

A few years ago, Gunn got into hot water when old tweets surfaced where he made some offensive rape and pedophilia jokes on Twitter. Not surprisingly considering our hyper-sensitive era which only grows more sensitive with every passing day, Disney fired him from future Guardians of the Galaxy movies because of his bad jokes. Incredibly, after actors and media outlets pushed back against Disney’s Gunn cancellation, the studio relented and brought him back into the Guardians of the Galaxy fold.

But while he was in Disney/Marvel purgatory he signed on with DC and Warner Bros. to make The Suicide Squad and now the spin-off Peacemaker.

Gunn’s work is an acquired taste and to be frank, I’m not exactly sure I’ve acquired it just yet. I liked his The Suicide Squad (2021) considerably more than the dreadful original Suicide Squad (2016), but that isn’t saying much.

I think what sort of grates me in regard to Gunn is that while he may pose as a rebellious edge lord, at his core he’s a kiss-ass sycophant who lacks the testicular fortitude to speak truth in the House of the Woke.

For instance, in typical flaccid fashion, on Peacemaker every white, male character is either an imbecile, a cuckold or an outright Nazi. How original.

According to Gunn, the second lead on the show is the character Leota (a poorly cast Danielle Brooks), who is, of course, a black lesbian, for no apparent reason other than blatant woke tokenism. How edgy.

To be fair, Gunn does at least occasionally get a bit clever with the woke stuff, like when he has hard-nosed beauty Emilia Harcourt (an excellent Jennifer Holland) give a passionate monologue to Peacemaker about how sick and tired she is of the oppressive and aggressive sexism of men in the world, and then cuts to a naked woman as Peacemaker has aggressive sex with her. But even that bit of self-awareness only results in highlighting Gunn’s overall weak-kneed woke acquiescence on the show.

Other issues are much more obvious, such as the action sequences being less than stellar and the production value being painfully thin.

But with that said, and even though the show is more amusing than laugh out loud funny, thanks to John Cena I still found Peacemaker compelling and entertaining enough that I will watch the rest of the series over the next month as the final five episodes become available.

Thus far the show isn’t anywhere near as good as say, The Boys, the more profound and less pubescently profane, brilliant superhero series on Amazon, but it is good enough.

The bottom line is that if you’re looking for some rather mindless, mildly amusing, bawdy and base, family unfriendly superhero fun featuring John Cena, then Peacemaker is definitely for you.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Suicide Squad: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A significant upgrade over 2016’s Suicide Squad, this movie is a stylized, at times amusing, blood-soaked comic book comedy that boasts a shockingly subversive political message at its heart.

This article contains spoilers to ‘The Suicide Squad’.

Despite garnering mostly good reviews and generating positive word of mouth, I didn’t watch director James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad when it hit theatres and HBO Max on August 5th here in the U.S.

I was, pardon the pun, ‘gun-shy’ about the film because I’d suffered through the previous cinematic crucifixion that was Suicide Squad, the David Ayers directed movie monstrosity from 2016.

Still bearing the scars from the Suicide Squad atrocity, I expected Gunn’s new pseudo reboot, oh-so-creatively titled The Suicide Squad, to be more of the lifeless, corporatized, Pentagon approved propaganda that passes for blockbuster entertainment nowadays.

That expectation was based on the fact that Warner Brothers is notorious for squeezing the artistic life out of their superhero movies and that leaked documents revealed that the Department of Defense were, not surprisingly, nefariously involved behind the scenes in the making of The Suicide Squad, no doubt assisting in extraction of anything remotely interesting from the final product in exchange for the use of military members as extras and the use of an Osprey aircraft.

But then a funny thing happened when I watched The Suicide Squad, I actually found a shockingly subversive movie wrapped in the usual corporate comic book cloak.

Now maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight, but it seems to me that Gunn’s greatest accomplishment with The Suicide Squad was sneaking its remarkably subversive political message past his controlling corporate overlords and censorious Department of Defense bureaucrats.

How else to explain a mainstream comic book film that boasts ‘9-11 was an inside job’ symbolism at its narrative heart, and anti-American imperialism at its sub-textural center?

The plot of The Suicide Squad is that two ‘suicide squads’ of super-villains are taken out of Belle Reve prison in Louisiana and sent on a mission by the U.S. government to invade a small island off of South America, Corto Maltese, which was ruled by an American-friendly dictator now deposed by a hostile military coup.

The first group of suicide squaders hit the Corto Maltese beach like the Bay of Pigs invasion force, and meet a similarly gruesome fate.

In another tinfoil hat moment, during this initial ‘Bay of Pigs’ type invasion fiasco, Blackguard (Pete Davidson) storms the beach and gets his brains blown out by a high-powered rifle, just like JFK did in Dallas, and yes, both of their heads went “back and to the left”.

When supervillain Savant (Michael Rooker) tries to run away from the fray, U.S. government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) detonates an explosive device implanted in his head in a Stalinesque lesson to the others to never retreat.

This is not exactly standard issue Pentagon propaganda.

This invasion is simply a distraction so a second suicide squad, led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and made up of Peacemaker (John Cena) – a super patriot and psychopath, Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and King Shark (Sly Stallone), can arrive unnoticed on Corto Maltese.

As the Suicide Squad go on their odyssey, they mistakenly massacre a group of rebels intent on overthrowing the anti-American military junta due to Ms. Waller’s order to “kill anything they see”.

Again, not exactly the usual pro-America message the Pentagon prefers.

The Squad’s mission is to break into a heavily fortified tower named Jotunheim that houses a powerful, one-eyed Sauron-esque alien named Starro, which can control entire populations of people by taking over their brains.  

The U.S. were complicit in capturing Starfish from space and now that an unfriendly government has taken over Corto Maltese, they want the Suicide Squad to blow up Jotunheim and kill Starfish.

The Suicide Squad eventually get to Jotunheim and, hold onto your tinfoil hats, they place C4 explosives on each floor of the tower. But the plan goes awry and the explosions happen too early, thus the tower only partially collapses.

The visual similarities of the demolition of the Jotunheim to the WTC towers collapsing on 9-11 are pretty blatant, and one doesn’t have to be a “conspiracy kook” to notice them.

For instance, Bloodsport escapes the tower’s initial collapse and finds himself atop what is left of the Jotunheim, but then the floor he’s standing on collapses to the floor below, which begins a cascading collapse where each floor pancakes onto the one below with Bloodsport surfing the crumbling building to the bottom.

The symbolism when Bloodsport arrives at the bottom of the tower is striking, as he finds super-patriot Peacemaker poised to execute Ratcatcher at the behest of the American government so as to keep a computer file detailing the U.S.’s involvement in Project Starfish from ever coming to light.

Donning an Izod shirt and short shorts, and brandishing a flag-waving, violent self-righteousness, Peacemaker is Reagan’s America incarnate, who’d do anything to maintain America’s ‘shining city on a hill’ image.

In the aftermath of the tower’s collapse, Starro escapes and sets out to control or kill the entire population of Corto Maltese but the U.S. government doesn’t care as long as America’s connection to the alien is forever hidden.

Speaking of hidden, in a nod to Operation Paperclip, Jotunheim was built by Nazis who escaped Europe after World War II, which is not the only Nazi symbolism in the film. Javelin, part of the first suicide squad invasion force, is a former Olympian who uses his javelin as a weapon. He’s German, a model of Hitler’s dream of Aryan supermen, and Harley Quinn, who has a crush on him, uses his javelin to pierce the eye of Starfish and ultimately destroy the alien, with the help of hordes of hungry rats (it’s a long story).

As for Starro, the beast released by the tower’s destruction, it’s symbolic of the mindless militarism and neo-conservate group think belched up by America after the twin towers were destroyed. Similar to America’s militarism and neo-conservatism, which led to the disastrous and failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, Starfish’s invincibility is punctured by a rag-tag group with primitive weapons (javelin) assisted by the reviled that live in the shadows (rats).

With an authoritarian, deceptive, murderous American government slaughtering friendly rebels and shrugging at the massacre of innocent women and children, a super-patriotic sociopathic serial killer, Nazis and implying 9-11 government nefariousness, this movie is definitely not the usual Pentagon approved propaganda.

The Suicide Squad is, like most comic book movies, a corporate money grab and commercial for future corporate money grabs, but it’s also a movie with a gloriously subversive political message hiding in plain sight. That’s either a testament to James Gunn’s creative stealth or to the winless-in-wars-over-the-last-80-years Pentagon beginning to slip in the propaganda department too. Regardless of how the message got there, the reality is that the film’s alternative politics are one of the things that make it at least a somewhat interesting and worthwhile watch.

All Gunn had to do with the The Suicide Squad was make it not as awful as Ayer’s Suicide Squad. A major step in the direction for the project was jettisoning the abysmal dead weight of the always dreadful Will Smith as Bloodsport and casting Idris Elba in his stead. Elba is an actor, Will Smith is a poseur.

The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, with Margot Robbie and John Cena as the standouts. The elevation of the acting can be attributed to Gunn as Viola Davis was utterly abysmal in the first film but actually does pretty well in this one.

The bottom line is this, I’m no Gunn fanboy, but it’s obvious he succeeded in his task by making a very stylized comic book comedy with a rip-roaring soundtrack that is best described as a foul-mouthed, blood-soaked, raucous romp akin to a second or maybe third-rate Deadpool…and I guess that’s good enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Shots Fired - James Gunn Part Two

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 57 seconds

"FREEDOM OF SPEECH...JUST WATCH WHAT YOU SAY" - ICE-T

On July 27th, I published an article at RT.com about Disney firing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 director James Gunn over some nearly decade old tweets in which he made bad rape and pedophilia jokes. In that essay I made the argument that Gunn's firing was the result of expansive corporate power and the effects of suffocatingly myopic political correctness on both corporate and American culture.

I got a lot of push back from readers of the piece in my inbox and at the comment section at RT. A reader left a comment on this website (oddly enough on a different article) that accurately represents the arguments made against my essay.  The comment is as follows:

"Just read your spirited defense of child rape enthusiast James Gunn. I have to assume you haven't read those vile tweets by Gunn, and that they go back nearly a decade doesn't make them funny, nor is it an excuse to defend this vile filth.

There is NOTHING funny, tweeting about doing degenerate perversions to kids, no matter what movies he directed.

But I see you're part of that Hollywood crowd that chortles about raping kids and babies, so either you're a pedo or just trying to protect your business.

Either way, that RT article almost made me vomit, they way you vigorously defended Gunn, making him out to be the victim of a nation gone mad on PC. I'll agree the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control, but not in this case.

What's your next article, defending Dan Harmon's skit about raping a baby doll? Oh yes, that's a real knee-slapper. Or maybe you'll claim that 'Steve-O' from the aptly name "JACKASS" franchise, who had a tattoo of a grown man sodomizing a baby was just youthful ignorance, and he has since repented by covering up the baby with the man now engaging in bestiality with an ostrich.

This is the crowd of sickos that love, and support that traitor Hillary Clinton, who had a good laugh about Qaddafi getting sodomized to death with a bayonet, and that crowd still wonders why she lost?

Looks like the Hollywood casting couch is still very much alive.

Greg Bacon"

THE JOKES POLICE

Mr. Bacon's thinking, or lack thereof, is emblematic of the rot at the core of American culture. He agrees that "the PC/SJW crowd have gotten out of control"...except in the case of Gunn. This sort of intellectual acrobatics is always how it goes when it comes to issues like this...we want freedom of speech for the things we agree with but not for the things we dislike. There is always some bright red line but it is always drawn around only the topics we hold dear. Mr. Bacon is either genuinely distraught by James Gunn's rape and pedophilia jokes or is cynically using them to take down a prominent member of the opposing political tribe, either way, Mr. Bacon is cooked in the grease of his own lack of intellectual integrity.

So, for example, while Gunn's rape/pedo jokes offend Mr. Bacon no end, there are people I know who would find his calling Hillary Clinton a "traitor" to be extremely offensive. He would laugh that off as absurd, just like others would laugh off Gunn's poor attempts at humor. Should Mr. Bacon lose his job as a probation officer or exotic dancer or whatever he does for a living just for his comment? Obviously the answer is no, and in my opinion, neither should Gunn.

Mr. Bacon's entire comment is soaked in the sort of emotionalist distortion that so often clouds rational and logical judgements. For instance, he repeatedly claims that I made a "spirited" and "vigorous" defense of Gunn's comments. If you read my piece it is pretty clear I do no such thing, what I argue is the overarching philosophy that currently drives our corporate and online culture is demented and damaging. I never quote Gunn nor do I defend him, what I am defending is a calm, cool rationalism.

THE SCURRILOUS AND THE RIDICULOUS

As Mr. Bacon's comment continues he descends further and further into his emotionalist fury, ejaculating out accusations that I am either a pedophile or selling my soul in order to "protect my business". If Mr. Bacon had done even a modicum of reading prior to commenting, he would've noticed that if there is one thing I certainly do not do in my writing it is put my business interests above my search for truth. I have written scathing articles here and at RT that have no doubt infuriated and offended numerous clients and prospective clients, the result of which is I have been made a pariah in some circles out here in Hollywood...so this charge is scurrilous at best.

As far as my being a pedophile or giving a pass to pedophilia, Mr. Bacon would be wise to read some of my yearly Slip-Me-A Mickey awards articles, where I repeatedly call out the worst sex offenders in Hollywood for their immoral proclivities. Even before the Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement came to the forefront, I had implored actors and actresses to come forward and take on sexual predators in Hollywood.

Mr. Bacon's lazy charges that I am a pedophile also highlight another issue with his lack of reasoning, namely that James Gunn wrote jokes about rape and pedophilia, he did not rape anyone or prey upon children. Mr. Bacon would be wise to learn that words are not action and there is a big difference between the two. For example, joking about rape, even if it is child rape, is in fact, not rape. This is the biggest difference between me and apparently everyone else on the internet...I do not care what someone says on Twitter (even, as I wrote immediately after the election, President Trump) or Facebook (and cannot understand why anyone would ever be on either of those platforms), what I care about is what people actually do.

THE BEST DEFENSE IS TO TAKE OFFENSE

In terms of being offended by something...here is some news for you...you do not have the right to NOT be offended. If someone or something offends you, that is about you, not the person or thing allegedly offending you. If you do not want to be offended, dig a bunker with no internet access and stay in it for the rest of your life.

If you do venture out into the world and are offended, take that as an opportunity to sharpen your argument against the offender or open your mind to their point of view or to grow thicker skin, but do not take it upon yourself to make sure that the alleged offender loses their job when others like their work or is otherwise punished just for saying something that hurts your delicate sensibilities.

PRINCIPLES OVER TRIBALISM

For me it is pretty simple, I think James Gunn should not have been fired. I also think Roseanne Barr should not have been fired. I also think Sarah Jeong, an Asian woman who just got hired by the New York Times, and who has a history of tweeting racist and hateful things about White people, and who remarkably blames White people for her tweeting those racist things, should not be fired. I am "offended" by Ms. Jeong's tweets, but I think it is more important for me to sit in my discomfort than demand that others rights to free speech be diminished in any way...to react any other way would be hypocritical.

If Roseanne Barr's tweet comparing a public figure, Valerie Jarrett, to Ari from Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes movie, offends you and you think Barr deserved to be fired, but you think Jeong should keep her job, you have zero intellectual integrity. You are nothing but a tribal activist wanting a "win" over the other side. The same exact thing is true if it is reversed, and you support Roseanne but not Jeong, or in the case of Mr. Bacon, you think PC/SJW's are out of control EXCEPT for when it comes to James Gunn. Now if you want to talk about truly offensive things that deserve to end in not just firing but imprisonment, torture and maybe even the death penalty, then Tim Burton and his atrocious Planet of the Apes movie is a legitimate target...I am just kidding...sort of...but not really.

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

In terms of Roseanne Barr, I know I am in the minority in not wanting her fired but my reasons are not just principled but strategic. Liberals were elated by the take down of Ms. Barr especially as a proxy in their war on Trump, but I find this thinking to be backward and self-defeating because in my eyes the Roseanne scandal was an opportunity, not for revenge, but for strategic gains.

Roseanne's show was enormously successful and it was a direct line into the living rooms of the Trump voters that liberals need to convince to come back into the Democratic fold. Her ratings were spectacularly high and the top ten cities where she performed the best were in order...Tulsa, Cincinnati, Kansas City (Mo.), Pittsburgh, Chicago, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Some may say that getting Trump voters to flip is an impossible task, but the numbers say otherwise, as many of the Midwestern Trump voters were Obama voters in 2008 and 2012...in fact Roseanne used to be a Democrat. Looking at the list of the cities where she performed highest, two are in Missouri, which has a female Democratic senator, and one each in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan...all states where Democrats lost in 2016 and could use all the help they can get in 2018 and 2020.

In my eyes, using Roseanne's racist tweet as leverage to get Roseanne, whom Midwestern Trump voters admire and respect, to use her show as a conduit to reach White working class Mid-Westerners and explore commonalities between working class people of all colors would have been a much more thoughtful and strategic thing to do rather than just emotionally firing her the same day as her infraction.

Two things could have happened in the Roseanne situation if liberals hadn't reacted so emotionally...the first is they could have attempted to use her as a direct line to communicate their message to White working class voters in the  Midwest, and two they could have maintained the high ground in regards to free speech. By firing Roseanne so quickly, liberals shot themselves in the foot and lost an opportunity to erode some of Trump's voting base. 

If liberals hadn't been so desperate to fire Roseanne and instead saw her situation as an opportunity, they could have not only started to sway Trump voters to change their votes, but maybe even change their perception of people of other races...then that would really shake things up...which is probably why ABC/Disney, the corporate embodiment of the establishment, acted so impulsively (and if Roseanne failed to live up to her end of the bargain than you fire her). ABC/Disney and the rest of the establishment, do not want things to change, they want racial animosity to divide the working class because then they are able to control the working class...but that is a story for another day.

"THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!" - BRAVEHEART

The truth is that I am also one of those crazy people who thinks that NFL players should not be stopped from protesting during the national anthem and that Colin Kaepernick should have a job. I also think flag burning should never be a crime and that White supremacists should be allowed to march in Charlottesville or anywhere they damn well please as long as they get the proper permits to do so. I also think that corralling protestors into "free speech" zones at political events violates both the spirit and the rule of the law and degrades our Constitutional rights.

I vehemently oppose liberals who demanded the ACLU not defend groups that carry legal weapons to protests. I also vehemently oppose tech companies or any other Orwellian entities policing the internet or anywhere else for content they find offensive.

I have been called a First Amendment fundamentalist by both liberal and conservative friends of mine for these stances. I find that hysterically funny. I've also been called a Second Amendment fundamentalist for my stalwart support of gun rights...and called even worse for my unbending support of all our constitutional, God-given rights.

YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Liberals and conservatives who are so quick to socially police the speech and thought of their opponents will quickly learn that double edged sword will be the tool with which the establishment powers execute you. If you are comfortable with an online mob or the totalitarian tech companies or big media being in charge of policing thought and speech in America, you are a brain-addled fool of epic proportions because they won't silence your enemies, they will end up silencing you.

In our current emotional pique, we have devolved into short-sighted fools who disregard the rights of others while we demand subservience to our personal feelings and whims. As the classical liberal foundation upon which our culture and civilization was built is torn asunder by the impulsive and despotic, we are quickly being stripped of any and all defenses save our over-inflated, self-serving sense of moral outrage and righteous indignation. When the manically totalitarian arbiters of thought and speech come for us, one by one, those flaccid defenses will leave us all at the mercy of our enemies...who, just like the rest of us...have proven themselves to be both vicious and merciless.

In this age of hyper-polarization and emotionalism where we no longer make arguments but only accusations, and where tribalism trumps principles, we are quickly spiraling down into an abyss of vacuousness and vapidity where the foundational pillars of our civilization will be crushed under the weight of our own insidiously myopic narcissism.

©2018

Guardians of the Galaxy Defeated by the Most Fearsome Super-Villain of All...Political Correctness

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 08 seconds

America is spiraling downward into a politically correct madness and big Hollywood corporations like Disney are hastening the descent.

On July 20th Disney fired outspoken liberal writer/director James Gunn from the film Guardians of the Galaxy 3 for a series of tweets he had written from 2008 to 2011 which the company deemed “offensive”.

The tweets in question, which were Gunn’s attempts at humor, were jokes about rape and pedophilia that were dug up by alt-right firebrand Mike Cernovich looking to bring the archliberal Gunn down a peg. Cernovich and his merry band of alt-right tricksters couldn’t have imagined in their wildest dreams that due to their twitter/media campaign against Gunn, the man who wrote and directed the first two  highly successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise films, he would end up being kicked to the curb by Disney.

Many liberals in Hollywood are outraged that Gunn was fired and a petition with 200,000 signatures is even going around to get him re-hired.

Others in the film industry, like the writer and director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (a Disney production) Rian Johnson, are quaking in their designer space boots over Disney’s reactive and swift punishment of Gunn. Johnson wisely erased his entire twitter history in the wake of Gunn’s firing, no doubt fearful he may have unwittingly violated Disney’s moronic retroactive bad joke policy.

Regardless of how entertainment professionals feel about Mickey Mouse being quick on the draw to take down Gunn, they better understand that this sort of hypersensitivity combined with zero tolerance is now the new normal in corporate Hollywood.

Proof of this is that Gunn is not the only Tinseltown big shot to have recently had their careers tossed overboard from the good ship Hollywood after running afoul of the p.c. police.

The most high profile case occurred on May 29th when ABC, a subsidiary of Disney, fired vociferous Trump supporter Roseanne Barr from her show Roseanne, the most popular new TV show in America, after she had tweeted racist remarks about a former Obama official.

Also, the same week that Disney had Gunn walk the plank, Paramount fired Amy Powell, head of their television division, after Powell allegedly made a comment about “angry Black women”. Powell strenuously denies the allegations, and is planning on suing Paramount for wrongful termination. The irony is that the comment in question was made during discussions about Paramount’s production of a series based on the film First Wives Club that has an all-Black cast.

While the obvious through line of all of these stories is political correctness run amok and the internet mob targeting and destroying people’s careers, another common feature of these stories is just as insidious…the expansion and abuse of corporate power.

It is bad enough that corporations are so short-sighted as to only make decisions based on quarterly earnings rather than long-term financial health, but now these business behemoths no longer seem beholden to shareholders or the bottom line at all, but rather, like impetuous adolescents, are slavishly and myopically addicted to such frivolous and fickle short-term measurements of their success as online popularity.

The fact that Disney would fire Gunn, whose two previous Guardian of the Galaxy films made the company nearly two billion dollars, over years old bad joke tweets, is astonishing for a media giant that has built its exorbitant power making money, not friends.

ABC/Disney’s decision to fire Roseanne, while more understandable in terms of the offensive content and recent timing of her tweets, also goes against the financial bottom line as it is estimated that it will cost the network tens of millions of dollars. And yes, firing Roseanne will appease people who were offended by her tweets, but in this hyper-polarized political atmosphere it will also alienate people who are her fans, making the whole enterprise a public relations wash at best.

Paramount’s firing of Powell will no doubt hit the company in its pocketbook as well, since Powell has stated she will sue for wrongful termination, and from all of the information currently made public, she has a very strong case.

This recent upsurge in political correctness and zero tolerance in the entertainment industry is born out of impotent liberals in Hollywood needing to vent their rage at Trump, so they use any chance they get to punish a proxy, whether deserving or not. Barr and Powell are no doubt stand-ins for racist Trump in the eyes of Hollywood liberals and make for useful and momentarily satisfying scapegoats.

The big studios have now co-opted the mindset of their liberal La La Land neighbors, enshrining into corporate policy the idea that error has no rights, and that those who don’t preach the politically correct party line are not only wrong but irredeemably evil.

While liberals cheered Roseanne’s firing as a victory over “racist” Trump supporters, hubris blinded them to the uncomfortable fact that using politically incorrect tweets as a cudgel to bludgeon their enemies is a tactic that others could turn against them, thus the alt-right used the same approach to bag their own big game in the form of James Gunn.

The inevitable outcome of Hollywood social justice warriors using revenge fueled, emotionally driven political correctness as a weapon is that it will invariably devolve into a self-defeating circular firing squad where liberals destroy and alienate just as many allies as enemies in their scorched earth approach at policing speech and thought.

This approach also conditions corporations into abandoning context and logic from their decision making, such as being able to see the difference in severity between Gunn’s old rape jokes and Roseanne’s recent racist barbs, and replacing them with a draconian and manic zero-tolerance policy in order to satiate whatever online mob, regardless of their political affiliation, targets them.

And so, while Trump-loving Roseanne is out at ABC, so is devout Democrat James Gunn at Disney. And while the liberal goal is for more diversity and racial sensitivity in studios, Amy Powell’s quick-trigger firing from Paramount will result in White studio executives being less willing to work with minorities for fear that they will unwittingly say something offensive and instantly lose their jobs. In mediation this is what they call a lose-lose scenario.

The scariest part of all this is that since the disease of zero tolerance political correctness has spread from universities to Silicon Valley and now to the behemoths of corporate Hollywood like Disney, which is on the precipice of controlling an astounding 40% of the box office market with their pending purchase of Fox, the contagion will only spread further to the rest of American industries through the mindless and spineless group think of human resource departments in corporations across America.

Being beholden to the whims of whatever mob of snowflakes or cynically inspired career assassins shriek the loudest is no way to run a business, an industry or a nation. The sort of Orwellian, Stasi level policing of thought and speech that brought down James Gunn, Amy Powell and even Roseanne Barr is pure and utter madness. I can assure you one thing…this insanity can not and will not end well for Hollywood or America.

A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT RT.COM

UPDATE: Right on schedule...Sarah Silverman is the newest Hollywood liberal to be idiotically raked over the coals for old pedophilia jokes on twitter. Once the Politically Correct beast is unleashed it cannot be controlled...a lesson Hollywood liberals are learning the hard way.

©2018

Captain America v Trump in Battle of the Useful Idiots

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 38 seconds

President Trump’s summit and press conference with Vladimir Putin on Monday in Helsinki went so poorly that even superheroes and superhero wannabes went into hysterics over Trump’s alleged betrayal of the American intelligence community.

The reason for the media uproar in the wake of the Helsinki summit was that in reply to a reporter’s question Trump stated, or misstated depending on whom you listen to, that he believed Putin when the Russian leader claimed there was no Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election in 2016.

On CNN, that silver-spooned, silver-haired Silver Surfer clone Anderson Cooper, immediately responded to Trump’s performance by shrieking,

“You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader certainly that I’ve ever seen.”

Former head of the CIA John Brennan, who looks and acts frighteningly similar to Thing of the Fantastic Four, tweeted…

“Donald Trump’s press conference in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Former director of the CIA and NSA Michael Hayden went full Hulk when in response to Trump’s contradicting the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Hayden monosyllabically rage tweeted…

“OMG. OMG. OMG”

Then a “real” superhero jumped into the fray. Chris Evans, the actor who plays Captain America in the Marvel franchise films who is the perfect representation of America because he is so boyishly handsome, ridiculously muscular, emotionally infantile and staggeringly empty-headed, tweeted of Trump…

“I don’t even know what to say. Today was a disgrace. @realDonaldTrump embarrassed America and should be ashamed of himself. Shame on anyone who chooses to ignore Russia’s interference in our democracy for the sake of Trump’s political well-being. I’m at a complete loss.”

I have a sneaking suspicion Mr. Evans is often at a complete loss…like when he comes upon a doorknob. Apparently the Captain’s twitter finger is even more powerful than his vibranium shield because he didn’t stop there…he followed up by tweeting…

“This moron, puppet, coward sided with Putin over our own intelligence agencies! On a world stage!! BASED ON NOTHING MORE THAN PUTIN’S WORD! Why? Can ANYONE answer that?? What the hell is happening. Politics aside, this is 100% un-American. Where are you @GOP???”

Captain America’s logic is pristine…I mean how could anyone in their right mind dare to question America’s saintly intelligence community about their limited and still evidence free “assessment” that Russia interfered in the American election?

Sure, the American intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel on 9-11, wrong about WMD’s in Iraq, ran a secret rendition and torture program, spied on American citizens, international allies and the U.S. congress, and then lied and perjured themselves about all of the above in order to cover their backsides…but when it comes to what happened in the 2016 election we should totally take their word for it!

Evans was joined in his twitter rampage shortly thereafter by fellow Marvel talent James Gunn, who in addition to writing and directing the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also produced this year’s smash hit Avengers: Infinity War movie. Gunn re-tweeted this…

In an ironic case of “he who liveth by Twitter, dieth by Twitter”, Gunn, who is notoriously quick on the draw when it comes to tweeting, transformed into an ex-Marvel talent later in the week when he got fired from directing Guardians of the Galaxy 3 after some entirely unrelated decade-old tweets of his surfaced in which he joked about rape and pedophilia. No doubt Gunn’s Twitter handle will now be holstered.

While Gunn’s re-tweeted Thanos meme is legitimately funny, equating Thanos, the villain in Infinity War who kills half of all beings in the universe in order to restore balance, to Putin, is hysterical…literally.

The mainstream media may claim otherwise, but the truth is Putin is not some omnipotent super-villain intent on universal or even global domination. Putin presides over a nation with only the 9th largest population, 11th largest economy (by projected GDP) and the 4th largest military budget (which is nearly ten times smaller than the U.S. military budget), that is not a Thanos level of super villainy…that doesn’t even rise to the level of Ultron, Loki or Lex Luthor for goodness sakes.

If Putin were truly a Thanos-level super-villain he would at least have the world’s largest economy, largest military budget, more foreign military bases than any other nation in human history, the largest prison population, a vast worldwide eavesdropping surveillance system along with extra-judicial kill lists and also have fomented coups and waged wars  in such far off and diverse lands as Ukraine, Libya, Egypt, Honduras, Yemen, Syria and Afghanistan. Of course in order to have all of those things Putin would have to be the President of the United States.

The reality is that Putin is nothing more than a Russian nationalist whose interest is in protecting Mother Russia and its people from existential threats, which historically for Russians are a much more pressing matter than for those of us living in the United States.

It is difficult for Americans like James Gunn and Chris Evans to grasp, but a little over 75 years ago the elite of the Nazi war machine were a stones throw from Moscow. Maybe if we Americans learned our history from somewhere other than Marvel movies we would know that it wasn’t Captain America that defeated the Nazis, it was the Soviets who broke the back of Hitler’s military monstrosity and who lost more than 26 million lives in the process.

Even in the last thirty years, Russians have had to survive the chaos and calamity that befell them when the Soviet Union collapsed, NATO encroached on their borders and America shamelessly meddled in their elections and economy.

The truth is that Anderson Cooper, John Brennan and Captain America Chris Evans, all inhabit different wings of the same American propaganda machine that has no interest in hearing differing or nuanced view points and has its heart set on demonizing and castrating Russia.

Cooper, a former intern at the CIA, cheerleads for American militarism and stokes the flames of Russo-phobia nightly on his CNN “news” show.

Brennan now plays a “serious” pundit on MSNBC, who routinely calls Vladimir Putin a “low-life thug”.

Since Brennan aided and abetted torture and treasonously spied on his own government while he was at the CIA, should he be considered a “high-life” thug because he is well paid as a member of the political and media establishment?

Chris Evans is also part of the American propaganda machine – the Hollywood wing. Is Evans aware that most of Hollywood, including Marvel and its parent company Disney, make movies in cooperation with the Pentagon? Does he know that in exchange for use of military equipment, personnel and expertise, the Pentagon gets creative control of those projects and eliminates any negative narratives that shed a bad light on the U.S. or its military to insure that those films will be coercive advertisements for American militarism?

Is Chris Evans aware and comfortable with the fact that America’s intelligence community also has a fruitful working relationship with Hollywood that has distorted history and whitewashed torture?

Does Chris Evans also support the cavalcade of anti-Russian films and television shows being churned out in recent years by Hollywood that brazenly dehumanize Russians and make Americans more susceptible to believe any negative story they hear about Russians in the mainstream media?

Maybe the vacuous gruel that is the Russiagate case will expand to become a sumptuous feast of evidence proving Putin’s guilt and Trump’s complicity. And maybe Trump is exactly what the media and Captain America claim he is…a useful idiot who is a “moron, puppet and coward”…but upon closer examination, the same could also be said of Evans who, wittingly or unwittingly, enables the Pentagon and Intelligence agencies’ militaristic and Russo-phobic propaganda campaigns to indoctrinate the American people to be gullible to the media, subservient to authority and aggressively belligerent toward Russians.

Add in the fact that liberals in Hollywood and the media are now so deeply in the throes of their virulent anti-Russian hysteria that they actually equate any alleged Russian election interference with the atrocities of 9-11 and Pearl Harbor, and you have a perfect recipe for a potential war…talk about useful idiots.

This article was originally published at RT.

©2018