The Disaster That is Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” – my motto for the last 8 years, borrowed from Rudyard Kipling.

This past weekend the esteemed New York Times Magazine ran a piece titled “Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?” written by Kabir Chibber.

The article caught my eye because as long-time readers can attest, I have been writing critically, and seemingly endlessly, about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ for the better part of eight years now. If Cassandra and Nostradamus had a child prodigy whose sole gift was the ability to clearly diagnose the excesses of Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ as it was happening but to be ruthlessly ignored/punished for their correct prophecies…that child would be me.

I would link to the articles to prove my bona fides as a critic of the ‘Diversity Era’ but there are so many of them it would be ridiculous to even try. If you type “woke” into the search bar of this website your computer, and your brain, may explode at the avalanche of articles that confront you.

I don’t know, and don’t really care, who this Kabir Chibber is…but to quote John McClain from Die Hard…”welcome to the party, pal”…even if it is 8 years too late.

Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ essentially started in 2015 with the mathematically ignorant protest movement named Oscars Too White. In the wake of that nonsense came the calamity that was Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton, followed by the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter and the rest.

Hollywood, and some audience members, went into a tailspin of emotionalism and lost their minds in a hysterical fever of self-righteousness in the wake of these events. This hysteria forced them to embarrass themselves by seeing racism and sexism everywhere, and by steadfastly ignoring quality in favor of diversity when it came to cinema, and by also being deathly allergic to reality.

Examples abound of how asinine and insane the ‘Diversity Era’ has been…here are a few tips of the very crazy iceberg.

The ‘Diversity Era’ made the middling Marvel movie Black Panther into a Best Picture Academy Award nominee, and had middle-aged white women giving black power salutes in theatres like they were Huey Newton.

It turned mind-numbing mediocrities like Jordan Peele and Greta Gerwig into award-contending auteurs and made the mundanities that were Peele’s Get Out and Gerwig’s Lady Bird into Best Picture nominees. Hell, people were furious when Gerwig wasn’t nominated for Best Director last year for the insultingly awful Barbie. Oh yeah…and it made Barbie into a box office blockbuster too.

Ava DuVernay, one of the truly atrocious filmmakers of her time, becoming a Hollywood power player due to DEI is one of the signs of how widespread and potent the ‘Diversity Era’ disease really was.

Disney lost its fucking mind in the ‘Diversity Era’ and essentially sabotaged its two largest cash cow franchises, Marvel and Star Wars, on the altar of wokeness by going Girl Power crazy and replacing all their white male leads with women, women of color or people of color. Ironically, no white guys were allowed in the ‘Diversity Era’.

Marvel went from being the biggest box office behemoth of all-time to being a franchise in free fall, all because executives in the C suite wanted to signal their virtue by getting rid of their white male leads.

The post-Endgame Marvel lineup looks like it was assembled by an HR department at a Seven Sisters liberal arts school. Thor was replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther was replaced by Lady Black Panther, Iron Man was replaced by black Lady Iron Man (Iron Heart), Captain America was replaced with black Captain America and Shang-Chi – a second rate character if there ever was one, got his own movie, as did the female fronted and directed Eternals – one of the worst films of the last decade. All of these movies were absolutely abysmal by the way.

Star Wars was turned into a girls and gays franchise over these last 8 years with the Rey storyline and the incessantly PC narratives and casting of their television series like Ahsoka and The Acolyte. Again, white guys need not apply…in either the creative process or the viewership.

Film critics across the mainstream media sacrificed their credibility and integrity on the altar of the ‘Diversity Era’ too as they bent over backwards to pretend to like sub-par movies just because they were ‘diverse’, and/or had a female or person of color director and/or star, and they continuously handled all ‘diverse’ projects with the most patronizing of kid gloves.

The list of Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards in the recent past highlights how deep the ‘Diversity Era’ hysteria went. It all started with Moonlight, a story about a gay black boy - directed by the entirely forgettable Barry Jenkins (a black man) who hasn’t done a damn noteworthy thing since, winning Best Picture in 2016 over La La Land as a reaction to Trump’s election.

In the following years we’ve had Nomadland – a story starring the insufferable Frances McDormand about the wandering underclass in America that somehow manages to celebrate the corporate behemoth Amazon, winning Best Picture and Best Director because it was directed by an Asian woman, Chloe Zhao.

Then we had the embarrassingly bad CODA win because it was directed by a woman, Sian Hader, and was about deaf people. This was followed by the egregiously overhyped Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won because it was about an Asian family and was co-directed by an Asian man. Quality, talent, craftsmanship and skill be damned…diversity for the win!!

As for the details of Chibber’s article, what infuriated me about it was that it acts like the insanity and inanity of the ‘Diversity Era’ only now has become obvious, and that it was impossible to recognize while it was ongoing.

Chibber opens his piece writing, “Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization”

My question is…why on earth would anyone listen to a writer like Chibber who was completely blind to what was occurring for the last 8 years WHILE IT WAS ACTUALLY OCCURING. Contrary to what Chibber thinks, eras are not only apparent in retrospect. I am not a genius by any stretch, but apparently, I am extraordinarily good at my job…you know how I know that…BECAUSE I WAS AWARE OF THE ERA AS IT WAS HAPPENING! Unlike Mr. Chibber.

Chibber goes on to describe the Hollywood formula during the ‘Diversity Era’ as being “the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.”

I wrote that exact thing over and over while it was actually happening over the past 8 years and I lost jobs, clients and friends because of it. Telling the truth in hindsight takes no courage. Doing it while the battle rages, takes not only a keen eye and perception but gigantic balls of steel. Mine are apparently the size of fucking Jupiter while Mr. Chibber is a eunuch.

Chibber then writes of the ‘Diversity Era’ and its excesses that “The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed.”

Bullshit. The moment was glaringly obvious when it was happening but as Mr. Chibber and his ilk in the establishment media proved over and over again that it is difficult to see things clearly when your livelihood depends on you not seeing it. To quote Orwell, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a struggle”. Well, Chibber and his pampered set are incapable of struggle, while I was born to thrive in it.

The funniest thing Chibber writes is an admission of something I have been writing about so often even I am tired of hearing myself. Chibber writes in regards to the end of the ‘Diversity Era’, “At least we no longer have to pretend to like something because it has the right politics, or because the people most vocally against it are Nazis.”

So just as I wrote for these long 8 years, critics, pundits and creators were pretending to like things simply because they had the “proper” politics and because they hated the people who disliked those projects. You think I’d be more comfortable being right considering it happens so often.

The movie studios, particularly Disney, literally turned that formula of having the “right” politics and the “right” enemies of those politics into their business model.

Amazon has done the same thing, just look at the catastrophe that is the Rings of Power series with its diverse, and dreadful, cast, and how Amazon uses the Disney model of making all criticism of their projects into claims of racism and sexism.

I have to admit, I have found Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for wokeness, political correctness and diversity uber alles over these last 8 years to be extremely depressing.

Cinema and television have never been at such a low point creatively in my lifetime, and it is all because of the woke, PC, diversity and inclusion agenda which rules our current era and cares not a bit about quality, but only about signaling virtue and having the proper politics.

I hope cinema as an artform can make a comeback in the coming years and decades, but I’m not optimistic. The signs all point to movies going the way of music…in other words, losing ever more artistry, creativity and cultural power through corporate and creative malfeasance.

As for Mr. Chibber and his article…it is the height of irony that a “person of color” like Mr. Chibber, who got the ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood completely and utterly wrong while it was occurring, is now hired to write an article about it for the lofty New York Times, while I, a brutish white man who was 1000% correct in every way about Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ from the jump, can’t even get a respectful comment in the comment section on an op-ed published by the fierce gatekeepers at the Old Grey Lady.

It seems Mr. Chibber’s insights on the excesses of the ‘Diversity Era’ forgot to mention the fact that he’s one of the big beneficiaries of it, as he’s proven through his ignorance of, and blindness to, the ‘Diversity Era’ that he is just another mid-wit DEI hire who in a saner, less hysterical time, never would’ve been chosen to write for the New York Times because he brings zero insight to the topic and is intellectually incapable of producing even one original thought.

Don’t kid yourself, Hollywood’s ‘Diversity Era’ isn’t over by a long shot. And even if the hysteria is ebbing a bit, that doesn’t mean the damage done to the art of cinema, and the business of entertainment over the last decade isn’t indelible and won’t have long term consequences. It will…and not for the better, no matter what Mr. Chibber and his kind may claim to think.

©2024

Eternals: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dismal, dull and dopey god-awful mess of a movie which is in the running to be the worst Marvel movie ever.

The new Marvel movie Eternals, written and directed by Oscar winning Best Director Chloe Zhao, and starring a cavalcade of stars including Angelina Jolie, is supposed to be the blue print for the newest phase of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Kevin Feige, the MCU mastermind who intricately weaved 25 movies into a coherent over-arching narrative that dominated pop culture for almost 15 years, said of the movie, “The impact Eternals will have on the MCU will be nothing less than redefining the cinematic universe entirely.”

That declaration should scare the crap out of Marvel fanatics and Disney executives alike because Eternals is as catastrophically atrocious a cinematic venture as Marvel has churned out in their 26-film run.

The film, which has an ungodly two-hour and thirty-seven-minute run time that often feels eternal, tells the story of the Eternals, a bunch of immortal super-beings sent to earth to protect humanity from the Deviants, a group of vicious, wiry monsters. Superhero movies are often only as good as their villains, and the Deviants are as generic as it gets.

I’d dive deeper into the plot, which frequently jumps back and forth in time, but it’s so convoluted as to be incoherent.

Think of the Eternals as sort Avengers Plus, as they’re more akin to ancient gods than they are to modern superheroes. The Eternals are comprised of Sersi, Ikaris, Thena, Kingo, Phastos, Sprite, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh and Ajak.

Unlike with The Avenger films, which featured well-known characters, many of which had already had multiple solo films to explore their background and inner life, part of the problem with Eternals is that the superheroes on display are not well-known to casual fans. So, the movie must try and develop the characters and the audience’s connections to them on the fly while also attempting to entertain. It fails miserably at all of these endeavors.

The blame for these failings falls on writer/director Chloe Zhao, who is utterly hapless and hopeless at the helm. Zhao, who is respected as a maker of small, intimate, introspective films like Nomadland, is completely out of her depth on the sprawling Eternals as she flounders in every aspect of the storytelling. The pacing is abysmal, the character development nearly non-existent and the dialogue forced, trite and overwhelmed with exposition.

In addition, the visuals of the film are flat, the CGI second-rate, and the action sequences dull, unimaginative and repetitive. Every fight sequence features someone being “unexpectedly” saved from sure death by the swift action of an unseen superhero off-screen swooping in at the last minute, and consistently throughout “Eternals assemble” type shots - where all the characters come together in a line in a movie poster pose, rear their manufactured head.

Another major problem with Eternals is that in our age of wokeness and corporate virtue signaling, it seems more concerned with waving the diversity, representation and inclusion flag than with making an entertaining movie.

The wokeness on display in Eternals is so inane as to be ridiculous. For example, in the comics, Ajak, leader of the Eternals, is a man, but in the movie he’s a middle-aged Mexican woman (an uncharismatic Salma Hayek). Latina box checked.

Makkari, the Eternals’ Flash-like superhero, is no longer a white guy like in the comics, but instead is now a mixed-race woman who is deaf for some inexplicable reason, and of course, is played by a mixed-race, deaf actress, Lauren Ridloff. Disability box checked.

In the comics, Phastos is a muscular bad-ass black man, but in the movie, he’s transformed into a frumpy gay guy played by Brian Tyree Henry. It goes without saying that a gay kiss is featured in the film, no doubt used to hit over the head the people too dense to pick up on Phastos’ homosexuality by the fact that he has a husband. LGBTQ box checked.

Considering that Marvel movies are usually populated by beautiful people in skin tight outfits, Henry is an odd choice to play the first openly gay character in a Marvel movie. Unlike his co-star Kumail Nunjiani, who obviously spent an inordinate amount of time in the gym transforming his body to look more Marvel-ish to play the comic relief character Kingo, Henry looks as if he’s allergic to exercise in general and barbells in particular. I like Henry as an actor, but he is woefully miscast in this role.

Speaking of the casting, the usually luminous Angelina Jolie just looks odd and bored as Thena, and the beautiful Gemma Chan is exposed as being rather anemic as the film’s lead Sersi.

The only bright spot was Richard Madden, who was surprisingly dynamic as Ikaris, so much so that I actually thought he might make a passable James Bond should the opportunity ever present itself.

As of this writing, Eternals has a well-earned Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 49%, the lowest in MCU history. Considering all the blatant woke pandering in the film, and critics’ consistent genuflection at the altar of all things “diverse”, the dismal Rotten Tomatoes critical score is even more damning.

Making money is currently baked into the Marvel cake, and Eternals will no doubt have decent box office returns, but the film is the poster child for Marvel entering the creative bankruptcy phase of its self-destruction.

If, as Marvel guru Feige claims, Eternals is the blue print for the next phase of the MCU, then “get woke, go broke” will be made manifest as Disney/Marvel are killing their cinematic cash cow by worshipping the golden calf of wokeness and sacrificing quality and entertainment at its altar.

Eventually, audiences will tire of this type of hackneyed and hollow identity-politics based pandering and shoddy filmmaking, and Disney/Marvel will have no one to blame but themselves.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Oscar Train Wreck

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 20 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Joke courtesy of Leo - Da Irish Poet!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Minari: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped venture that ultimately underwhelms.

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chung’s South Korean immigrant family as it tries to achieve the American dream in 1980’s Arkansas. The film, which stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung and Will Patton, has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Yeun) and Best Supporting Actress (Youn).

Having survived the slog of cinema that was 2020, where even the very best films of the year like Mank, Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah are not great films, I held out hope for Minari to ride in on a white horse and save this year of cinema from death by a thousand mediocrities.

Unfortunately, Minari is not up to the task.

Minari is not a terrible movie, but it is not a very good one either. It suffers from many flaws, most notable being it doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be and therefore ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

For example, in theory it has all the trappings of an arthouse movie but is so painfully conventional in execution it becomes devoid of interest and artistic credibility.

Minari is sort of like a working class Korean immigrant version of Marriage Story mixed with a culture clash/fish out of water/American Dream story, but it never successfully or even adequately tells any of those stories, preferring the approach of throwing everything into the stew yet creating no flavor.

A major flaw with the storytelling approach of Minari is that it has a generalized perspective, so there is no one particular protagonist to lead us through the story. Since Chung is writing auto-biographically, it would have been interesting to have his childhood perspective lead the way. But Chung seems incapable of the skill that would require, and therefore he halves the baby and spreads perspective around which saps the story of dramatic power.

Chung is also a rather unimaginative visual stylist, as Minari is a painfully flat film with sub-par framing and composition as well as a dull and stale color palette.

There are some interesting performances in the movie, most notably by Yeun and Will Patton of all people, but Chung’s lackluster direction is unable to contain these performances and therefore the drama dissipates even when the actors are running on all cylinders. Chung’s inability to break through the conventional leaves viewers detached and disinterested in the plight of these characters despite some skillful acting work.

Chung’s biggest failing though is as a writer, as he is incapable of trusting his audience with a pure arthouse experience and therefore sprinkles in narrative arcs and beats that are cookie-cutter conventionalities that fall dramatically flat. The contrast of this conventional story being wrapped in the deliberately paced trappings of an arthouse movie creates a frustrating movie decidedly at cross purposes with itself.

Ultimately, with the generalized perspective, the conventional narrative arcs and the tedious visual aesthetic, Minari feels like a bad tv drama more than a serious piece of cinema and Oscar contender.

As evidenced by the plethora of Oscar nominations and a stunning 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, Minari is being lauded as a phenomenal film. But it seems to me that this is wishful thinking rather than accurate analysis of the film on screen.

In the wake of last year’s stirring success of Parasite, a spectacular piece of filmmaking by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Minari has no doubt been given a boost among the critical elite in the hopes of bolstering “diversity and inclusion” and recreating Parasite’s stirring success.

In the flat earth society that is our culture, Parasite and Minari are in the same category despite having nothing in common except that they share the same language and ethnicity of director. This is absurd, but it is how our culture thinks and works, especially in the era of identity politics.

If Minari were the same story but centering around the struggles of some white family, critics would rightfully ignore it for the uninspired, middling movie that it is. The fact that mediocrities like Chung and Minari are nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay speaks to how precipitous the decline in the art of cinema has become and to the hyper-delusional nature of a film business glorifying “diversity and inclusion” instead of talent, skill and craftsmanship.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about Minari. It is an underwhelming and instantly forgettable film that is not deserving of any accolades or praise. If you want to see a mundane, middle-of-the-road movie, Minari is definitely for you.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

On this weeks episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I hop in a van and hit the road with Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland starring Frances McDormand. This episode contains discussions on grief and the meditative nature of the film, the required arthouse mindset, and the power of non-actors on-screen. Also featured are scintillating conversations about Jeff Bridges' Snicker bar diet, Chocolatey Chocolate Balls, Amazon's nefariousness and a live blow-by-blow account of a Wild Kingdom moment in Mike's backyard.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

Thanks for listening!

©2021

The Asinine and the Absurd 78th Annual Golden Globes Awards

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

Just kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Nomadland: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An exquisitely crafted film that boasts a powerful yet grounded performance from Frances McDormand.

Oscar front-runner Nomadland chronicles the working class despair wrought by American capitalism, but still manages to kiss Amazon’s ass.

The film gives a gritty glimpse into the struggle of the working poor but genuflects to corporate power instead of exposing it.

Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and written and directed by Chloe Zhao, tells the story of Fern, an older woman who lives in a van and survives as a seasonal worker in various locales across America.

The film, which is currently in theatres and streaming on Hulu, is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century and uses some of the real people from the book to play themselves in the movie.

Nomadland is fantastic and an Oscar front-runner, but it’s not for everybody as it’s an arthouse, verite style film with a loose narrative structure that lacks predictable dramatic beats. It is less a straightforward story than it is a melancholy and mournful meditation.

It is the topic of that meditation - American capitalism, impermanence and grief that makes Nomadland such an intriguing piece of cinema.

The story begins with Fern being forced to leave her long time residence in Empire, Nevada after the town’s US Gypsum plant closes and the once bustling area is abandoned.

Fern then takes to the road to run from her grief over losing Empire and her husband and travels throughout the west searching for seasonal employment.

She makes friends with fellow travelers, all suffering in similar circumstances, as she lives out of her van while working menial jobs in Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Chloe Zhao’s deft directorial touch gives the film a looser pace which results in a narrative with great space to breath. Zhao allows space, silence, framing, lighting and a very effective soundtrack work in unison to finely cultivate the drama instead of imposing it upon viewers.

The sense of isolation and desperation felt by Fern is heightened by cinematographer Joshua James Richards’ gorgeous panoramic shots of the vast and beautifully bleak western landscape.

Like the desolate landscapes, the deep lines in McDormand’s gloriously cinematic face also tell the story of all the hardships and heartbreaks throughout the years that have brought Fern and her working class kind to the brink of extinction.

Speaking of extinction, the film repeatedly refers to dinosaurs, and the sub-text is clear, the meteor of globalization, financialization and anti-unionism has hit and Fern and the working class in America are dinosaurs destined to aimlessly walk the darkened earth searching for scraps until they drop dead from exhaustion.

The film also frequently references carnivores, the symbolism of which is that American capitalism eats up and spits out working class people like Fern. In one scene Fern is horrified watching a crocodile in a zoo devour skinned rabbits for lunch, her primordial horror is driven by the fact that American capitalism is the crocodile, and she and all the poor people she loves are the rabbits.

Fern and her friends all bought into the lie that is the American dream, and now they find themselves older with dwindling energy and resources, alone and vulnerable living out the American nightmare. They’ve worked hard their whole lives and have nothing to show for it except for the existential terror of life without any safety net.

Despite the finely crafted filmmaking, McDormand’s powerfully grounded performance and the film’s chronicling of the wandering underclass and rightfully bemoaning the Titanic-esque economic state of America, it disappoints because it refuses to name or chastise the corporate villains hiding in plain sight.

For example, Fern works every Christmas season at an Amazon warehouse. The film actually got permission to shoot in a real Amazon fulfillment center, and that undoubtedly compromised its integrity.

The Amazon related scenes seem as if they were scripted by the company’s human resources and marketing departments as they’re basically shameless ads for the corporate behemoth.

Fern is shown leisurely meandering down vast warehouse walkways smiling and waving to other employees, and having fun in the break room with new friends, and telling others about how much money she makes and how the company covers the cost of her long-term van parking while she is an employee. The reality of employment at Amazon is much different, as the union busting, worker exploiting Bezos beast brutally cracks the whip on its employees like a frantic pharaoh building a pyramid one box at a time.

On its surface Nomadland is a descendant of the Sean Penn directed film Into the Wild and John Ford’s famed adaptation of Steinbeck’s working class masterpiece Grapes of Wrath.

Fern is somewhat a cross between Into the Wild’s free-spirited protagonist Alexander Supertramp and The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad. The problem though, as highlighted by Nomadland’s shameless acquiescence to Amazon, is that Fern is Supertramp without spirit and Joad without spine.

Maybe the film’s lack of testicular fortitude in regards to Amazon is just another piece of sub-text, surreptitiously alerting viewers that the real problem is the modern demonization of masculinity and the feminization of America. In this way Fern is a castrated Tom Joad, not only unable, but unwilling, to fight against oppressors, instead preferring to collaborate in her own exploitation and denigration. 

More likely though is that the film’s Amazon ass-kissing is a function of that corporate monstrosity’s massive influence over Hollywood. Amazon is now a major movie and tv studio, and the suck ups and sycophants in Hollywood know that to get on Amazon’s bad side is a potentially fatal career move…so they pucker up and play act at caring about working class concerns rather than actually doing something about them.

Nomadland will probably win a bunch of well-deserved Oscars, but unfortunately the film is The Grapes of Wrath without the wrath, as it ultimately genuflects to the corporate power that created the working class tragedy it masterfully chronicles.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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