The Rings of Power Season Two (Amazon): TV Review - One Ring to Bore Them All

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A truly terrible piece of television that desecrates its source material.

The Rings of Power, the billion-dollar Jeff Bezos-vanity project television series on Amazon Prime based on the footnotes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, just finished its second season.

The first season of The Rings of Power was a cultural irritant and major disappointment…the second season is…not surprisingly…equally as bad.

I confess am not a Tolkien fan boy. Yes, I have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, and I’ve seen the Peter Jackson LOTR movies and enjoyed them but I am not obsessed with or protective of Tolkien’s creation even though I greatly admire his craftsmanship and artistry.

Because of my admittedly thin grasp of Tolkien’s lore, I am not the type of viewer who will be deeply offended when lore is subverted or contradicted. I’m usually too uninformed to notice or to uninvested to care.

I say that only to clarify that when The Rings of Power plays fast and loose with Tolkien’s lore, and it does so quite a lot, I am willing to forgive (or forget) if the show were simply a successful dramatic endeavor that was at least minimally entertaining, never mind enlightening.

But The Rings of Power is neither entertaining nor enlightening. All it really is is embarrassing for the creatives involved and infuriating for viewers, like me, foolish enough to tune in.

The second season, which has eight episodes, follows a bevy of storylines with a diverse array of Middle-Earth’s populace. There are storylines involving Elves, Dwarves, Harfoots, Wizards, and even Orcs and Sauron himself.

Not a single one of these narratives is even remotely compelling, intriguing or dramatically potent.

The entire Numenor storyline is nauseatingly vacuous and has all the dramatic depth of a soup commercial. The palace intrigue in the Numenorian court and the family drama surrounding it is astonishingly bland.

The “Gandalf but don’t call him Gandalf!!” wizard/spaceman storyline that is the definition of dull. The Harfoot sub-plot of this storyline is a flavorless gruel.

Arondir the Elf is back and no one gives a flying fuck because that character is repulsively stupid and inane, and his travails as interesting as watching soup chill.

The entire Dwarf storyline is so gut-wrenchingly terrible that anytime those annoying little bastards were on screen I wanted to light myself on fire and jump off the roof.

The Celebrimbor and Sauron storyline is a tedious and tiresome slog that has all the gravity of a telenovela.

The acting in this show is just obscenely atrocious, no doubt accentuated by the truly amateurish and abysmal writing.

Morfyyd Clark plays famed Elf Galadriel…and this poor women has no business being on screen anywhere. Her performance is nauseatingly trite and vapid. Her snarling, girl-power take on Galadriel is, frankly, as ridiculous as it is uninspired. To be fair she isn’t aided by the egregious writing, but still, she does herself, and the character no favors with her flaccid performance.

Charles Edwards is an utterly appalling as Celebrimbor. Edwards looks like a lesbian gym teacher helping special needs kids put on a school production of As the World Turns.

Sophie Nomvete plays Disa the Dwarf and she is so bad it literally made my stomach hurt watching her. It is beyond belief that this character exists and this actress was tasked to play her.

Not a single cast member on this series has even a glimmer of magnetism, dynamism or charisma. The entire cast is not only devoid of gravitas, but is deathly allergic to it.

For a series that cost a billion dollars the question I kept asking myself was, why does everything, from the sets to the costumes to the props to the dearth of background actors, look so unconscionably cheap?

The sets look like they come from stage play put on at a public junior high school in a middle-class suburb. But it’s the paucity of background actors that gives the game away, as scenes are sparsely populated and feel amateurish because of it.

Unlike say, HBO’s Game of Thrones or The House of the Dragon, The Ring of Power looks and feels, and is written and acted like, a fantasy-themed soap opera.

Game of Thrones and The House of the Dragon were both able to find fabulous actors, mostly British, and mostly from the stage, and give them top notch scripts to work with. The results were and still are fantastic. That The Rings of Power has been unable to find the same level of acting talent at all (there’s not a single noteworthy performance in the show – not one), and write even remotely average quality scripts, has been the albatross around the neck of the series from the get go, stopping it from even being good, never mind great.

The reality is that The Rings of Power is an abomination, and a disrespectful degradation and desecration of Tolkien’s glorious work. It is so suffocatingly trite and amateurish it feels as if it were actually designed to both fail and infuriate.

The creatives behind the series, most notably showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, and to a lesser extent the cast, the directors, the writers and producers, should all be ashamed of themselves and deeply embarrassed at what they’ve produced.

If you’re a Tolkien fan you will hate this series…and rightfully so. If you aren’t a Tolkien fan but are considering checking out The Rings of Power…don’t…it is a waste of time and a deeply frustrating and grating viewing experience.

©2024

China's Totalitarian Rules for Performers are a Perfect Fit for Unrelentingly Woke Hollywood

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

In honor of China’s Orwellian rules for entertainment industry right-think, I’ve compiled a comparable list for working in equally unforgiving Hollywood

The two global gold standards when it comes to open-mindedness and tolerance for diversity of opinion have always been Hollywood and China.

Like Sauron and Saruman’s two towers in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Hollywood and China are monuments to artistic freedom and freedom of expression, at least I think that’s what the two towers stand for since I’ve never actually read the book or seen the movie because of my egregiously short attention span and intellectual laziness.

China has long had an informal list of rules and requirements, or as I prefer to call them, “right-think guidelines”, that its entertainers must follow in order to stay in the good graces of the totally non-totalitarian government.

Recently, the Chinese Association of Performing Arts made these informal rules official so that performers can better “self-regulate” and avoid punishments that could include a lifetime ban.

As a resident of the People’s Republic of La La Land, I believe that Hollywood should boldly follow this shining example and make their unofficial right-think rules official, so that the crucial cultural trait of artistic “self-regulation” becomes more efficient and effective here in America.

China’s rules, such as its demand that performers “ardently support the Communist Party’s line, principle and policies”, and that they become an “art worker for the new era…by using literature and art to serve the people and socialism” are conveniently very adaptable to Hollywood.

Hollywood already rightfully demands that performers ardently support wokeism and never deviate from the woke party line, principles and policies.

 For example, Gina Carano just got fired from The Mandalorian for allegedly equating woke cancel culture with the Holocaust, while her co-star Pedro Pascal committed the same exact crime but over Trump’s immigration policy with no consequences. Obviously, Carano is a wrong think hate criminal, and I say good riddance to her and to her free speech…oops…I mean hate speech!

And as evidenced by Hollywood’s endless cavalcade of insipidly sub-par yet gloriously diverse virtue signaling movies and tv shows, art and entertainment has thankfully already been thoroughly transformed into a conformist cultural propaganda machine, and thank god for that…or how else would we know the right thing to right-think?

China’s rules also demand that celebrities should “guide minors to establish the right kind of values and actively resist uncivilized behavior”, which is perfect for Hollywood since it has a very long and rich history of guiding and grooming minors that speaks to the industry’s uniquely affectionate and insatiable love of children.

To be blunt, some of China’s rules simply won’t translate to Hollywood…except in reverse. For instance, China bans obscenity, pornography, gambling, drugs, drunk driving and “endangering social morality” for its performers, whereas those things are basically mandatory in Hollywood.

Another Chinese rule that won’t make the cut here is the ban on lip-syncing at live performances. China deems it “deceptive”, but if America bans lip-syncing then 97% of pop stars will be unemployable except maybe as prostitutes…but I repeat myself.

The rest of the right-think rules for working in Hollywood are quite obvious but a bit different from China, so I will state them clearly here.

First off there is the ‘diversity/inclusion lack of responsibility’ rule, which states that if a female filmmaker’s movie is terrible, it’s because of misogyny, and if a black director’s movie is bad it’s due to systemic racism.

Speaking of diversity, every commercial, no matter the product, must always feature either a person of color, or a bi-racial couple, or a gay couple, or best of all a bi-racial gay couple. Every. Single. One.

Also, and I cannot emphasize this enough, cis-gendered actors CANNOT play trans characters. EVER. And straight actors cannot play gay characters. Basically straight actors, particularly the white ones, aren’t allowed to act anymore. But gay actors can play straight characters and trans actors can do absolutely anything because we must honor, respect and worship them.

There’s also the Meryl Streep rule, where artists are wholly encouraged to bravely speak up but only when they know everyone in Hollywood agrees with them and it costs them absolutely nothing.

There’s also the straight white guy rule, where straight white guys are punished for the hate crime of being straight white guys. This is self-explanatory, as pale-faced skirt chasers like me deserve to rot in hell for our disgusting heterosexual masculinity, no matter how great our allyship and self-loathing.  

Some may think these right-think rules are dictatorial, totalitarian and draconian, but those people need to be silenced, cancelled and disappeared. The truth is that Hollywood is a bastion of free expression, just as long as that free expression strictly conforms to woke ideology.

For example, Hollywood proudly permits all sorts of vacant, vacuous and vapid virtue signaling around the topics of race, LGBTQ and feminism or any other wokefully acceptable issue. But if some too-smart-for-their-own-good performer dares to malign or denigrate the corporate hand that feeds, or targets American empire or militarism, or challenges the actual power structure in America, namely the military industrial complex and Israel, I promise you Hollywood will get medieval on their ass.

In conclusion, Hollywood should courageously follow in China’s noble footsteps (or is it bootsteps?) regarding enforcement of right-think, because as we all know, artistic “freedom is slavery”, and “ignorance is strength”, which means Hollywood is filled with the strongest people in the world.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cursed, Netflix’s Girl Power Infused Re-Telling of King Arthur Legend, is More Proof That Wokeness Ruins Everything It Touches

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

The painfully p.c. Cursed is not the Holy Grail of a good King Arthur show…it is just another example of Hollywood’s infatuation with the wicked witchery of wokeness.

The legend of King Arthur is one of my favorite stories because it is one of the most psychologically and mythologically profound tales in the human canon.

Sadly, I have been consistently underwhelmed by Hollywood’s attempts to bring the story of King Arthur to the screen, but like the Knights of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail, I remain undaunted in my quest for a quality telling of the Arthurian tale.

It is in this context that I recently binge-watched Cursed, Netflix’s attempt to make a feminist prequel to the story of King Arthur from the perspective of Nimue, the famed Lady of the Lake from the original story.

Cursed doesn’t so much deconstruct the Legend of King Arthur as defecate upon it.

All the familiar heroes are presented in Cursed…Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival and Guinevere, but this “re-imagining” of the Arthurian story lacks all the profundity of the original myth and is little more than a delivery system to spread the gospel of girl power and the wonders of wokeness.

In keeping with woke doctrine, the men in Cursed are universally awful. For example, Arthur is a lying, treacherous thief, King Uther Pendragon is a sniveling, villainous buffoon, and Merlin is a drunken fraud suffering with a case of sorcery impotence.

In contrast, the women, like Nimue, are righteous heroes, and even the bad ones, like Lady Lunete, are the brains behind the vapid men on the throne.

Religion too is held up as a paragon of evil. The Red Paladins, who are vile Catholic crusaders that brutally hunt the magical Faeries of the forest and burn them on crosses, are akin to Arthurian era Klansman – dressed in red robes instead of white.

It’s worth noting the exception to the woke ‘all religious people are evil’ rule though, as there are two nuns in Cursed who are good…but that’s only because they’re lesbians.

In a painfully heavy-handed bit of social justice preening, some good humans, who not surprisingly are people of color, start an underground railroad in resistance to the marauding Paladin, and funnel Faeries to safety.

Another not-so-subtle declaration of wokeness is the colorblind casting, most notably in the role of Arthur. Any real-life historical King Arthur prototype would have been white, and is even portrayed as such in the Frank Miller graphic novel that Cursed is based upon, but on the tv show he is played by black actor Devon Terrell.

Colorblind casting is certainly a bold choice, and it is somewhat amusing in a woke-ish sense that Terrell plays Arthur, as his only other role of note was playing the modern-day, neo-liberal, establishment media version of King Arthur, Barrack Obama, in the movie Barry.

I assume when it comes to colorblind casting that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander though, so hopefully very soon we’ll get to see Macaulay Culkin star as Shaka Zulu.

The problem with Terrell in the role of Arthur is certainly not his skin color, it is his egregious charisma deficit. Terrell is so devoid of any magnetism the show would have been better served casting a cigar store wooden Indian as the future king.

The rest of the cast, with the notable exception of the pleasant Katherine Langford as Nimue and the always interesting Peter Mullan as Father Carden, are nearly as inept as Terrell, and they sure as hell aren’t aided by the egregiously hackneyed and exposition-laden writing.

Cursed wants to be Lord of the Rings meets Game of Thrones meets A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, all wrapped in an Arthurian woke cloak, but looks so unconscionably cheap and is so dramatically unsophisticated it is more akin to a backyard play put on by a bunch of neighborhood kids hopped up on too much Dungeons and Dragons.

Examples of Cursed being derivative abound, such as the Sword of Power being a nearly identical storytelling device as the One Ring from Lord of the Rings, with Nimue as an exceedingly more attractive version of Frodo.

The Sparrow cult of Game of Thrones is mimicked in Cursed by the religious zealotry of the Red Paladin. As is the plethora of palace intrigue and political maneuvering, but in Cursed that ends up being incoherently baffling rather than beguiling.

In leaving no unoriginal stone unturned, Cursed even has a mysterious Assassin’s Creed looking guy running around wreaking havoc with laughably absurd dancing fight moves.

It is amazing to me that something as mythologically potent and dramatically powerful as the Legend of King Arthur can be reduced to something as inconsequential and puny as Cursed, but I guess that is the destructive wizardry of wokeness at work.

If King Arthur were alive today and watched the derivative, dull, listless and lifeless piece of woke trash that is Cursed, he would pull Excalibur out of the stone just to gouge his own eyes out.

The bottom line is this…my quest for the ever-elusive Holy Grail of a good King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table show continues, but Cursed has left me feeling my noble quest is just that…cursed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020