9th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards: 2022 Edition

THE 2022 SLIP-ME-A-MICKEY™® AWARDS

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are the final award of the interminably long awards season. The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™®, or as some lovingly call them, The Mockeys™®, are a robust tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year.

Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So, any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this year’s Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next year’s Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Amsterdam – An astonishingly awful film that is so incoherent and incomprehensible I can only posit that the Illuminati running Hollywood (and the world) demanded it be intentionally so poorly crafted in order to scuttle any discussion of Smedley Butler and the Business Plot.

She Said – Imagine making such a shitty a movie that audiences end up rooting for a deplorable fucking pig like Harvey Weinstein by the end. Quite an accomplishment!

Don’t Worry Darling – No, actually DO worry, darling. This turd was an absolute shit show of epic proportions and may very well have mercifully ended Olivia Wilde’s directing career…for that we can be grateful.

My Policeman – To quote Kurt Cobain, “what else can I say, everyone is gay!”…including Harry Styles apparently. A gay plot about gayness that is totally gay, but still makes no sense, that is infused with instantly forgettable performances turned this derivative drama into Return to Blokeback Mountain.

Pinocchio – Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks should return their Oscars after churning out this mindless, heartless, craft-less sack of shit. Just utterly abysmal from start to finish.

The Fabelmans – An alarmingly amateurish, poorly written, directed and acted piece of vapid, narcissistic garbage that is filled to the brim with cringe. Besides that it’s just fine.

AND THE LOSER IS…AMSTERDAM! – It’s actually quite an accomplishment to make a movie this bad and to stand out from this collection of shit sandwiches.

WORST VIRTUE SIGNALING FILM OF THE YEAR

She Said – A movie that featured the stunningly brave, earth-shattering thesis that Harvey Weinstein is bad and women are good! Too bad this empty movie had nothing original or interesting to say. Total piece of junk meant to signal its virtue to the usual suspects in order to garner awards…but was so dreadfully made even its target audience stopped pretending it was good.  

Women Talking – A stagey, whiney, bitchy movie about Mennonite women debating each other like they’re know-it-all know-nothings at a late-night bitch session at Wellesley College. As pretentious, pompous, poorly made and transparently virtue-signaling and awards-thirsty as any movie as we’ve seen in years.

AND THE LOSER IS…WOMEN TALKING – The most blatant bit of vacuous and vapid virtue signaling imaginable. The fact that it is a truly horrendous movie but still won an Oscar tells you all you need to know about its pure pandering business model.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR

Tom Hanks – Tom Hanks has won two Best Actor Oscars, yet this year with his truly abysmal work in Elvis and Pinocchio, he has proven himself to be the worst best actor of all time. Hanks’ inability to play a character, or speak with an accent, were on full display this year, as was his hackneyed, hokey, shticky acting approach, and we’re all worse off for it. Please go away forever Tom Hanks.

Harry Styles – Harry Styles was poised to have a break out year and become a big movie star…and then we saw him in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling and his rocket ship to superstardom exploded on the launching pad. Holy shit this kid can’t act…not even a little. As uncomfortable and unnatural a screen presence as we’ve seen since Cindy Crawford in Fair Game.

Seth Rogan – Seth Rogan is an unwiped anus. His work in The Fablemans was a healthy reminder that he is an odious screen presence. I, for one, yearn for his vanishing from the public eye and/or the planet.

AND THE LOSER IS…TOM HANKS! Hanks should be embarrassed and humiliated by his work over the last twenty years, but he’s incapable of feeling anything but smug and superior. This hack should fuck off forever.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR

She Said – Bar Scene – An astonishing piece of cinema that is so atrocious as to be amazing. This scene has everything! From the poor dialogue (“these are the menus”), to the egregious virtue signaling, to the one-dimensional strawman, to the heinous acting. Just an all-around miraculous piece of cinematic shit that would be laughed out of a freshman year student film festival.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR

The Fabelmans – The Fabelmans isn’t just a bad movie, it’s an embarrassing movie. That it was Oscar nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, as well as Best Actress, is a testament to how corrupt Hollywood truly is. If this film were made by anyone other than Steven Spielberg, it would’ve been vociferously labeled cringey, amateurish horseshit…but since St. Steven made it we are supposed to fawn over how “personal” it is. Get the fuck outta here with this garbage. This movie is shitty to the extreme and absolutely sucks donkey balls. If you liked it you’re an incorrigible idiot and an unrepentant asshole.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE

David O. Russell – Russell has never been a good director, but for some reason he has been considered among the elite moviemakers in Hollywood for the past twenty years or so. I think with the trainwreck that is Amsterdam, Russell has convincingly disabused Hollywood of the notion that he is even remotely able to make movies. To see even the most-simple of things, like setting actor’s eye lines, be fucked up in this deplorable shitshow, was jaw-dropping to witness. Russell put all of his copious amounts of shittyness into the Amsterdam stew and a few of us poor souls had to take a stinky bite. Yikes. Hopefully this asshat never gets another shot to make a movie.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Meghan and Harry – Only these two self-absorbed, narcissistic pieces of shit could make a pervy prodigious pedophile like pecker-face Prince Andrew seem like a half normal person.

These two half-wit shitbags hate publicity and the public eye so much they moved to Hollywood and got into the entertainment business. And now you can’t avoid them because they won’t shut the fuck up and stay off camera for a single, solitary moment.

Prince Harry is a sad-sack eunuch and a ball-less buffoon and Meghan is a diabolical and devious shrew who has successfully neutered her needle-dicked husband and isolated him from his in-bred family.

My wish is that the new King Charles invites these two insufferable cunts to his coronation, they show up and then right after the ceremony King Charles has them beheaded, old school style, on live television. This would please Harry and Meghan because they’d get a lot of attention and get to be victims, and it would also ensure that Charles would be the most popular King in the history of England.

P.O.S ALL-STARS

Sean Penn – I’ve always liked Sean Penn as both an actor and a guy. He and I have very similar personalities…which isn’t exactly a brag on my part.

This year Penn has brought some of his famous screen characters to life in the real world, as he’s publicly morphed into the mentally challenged young man from I Am Sam combined with the gay activist politician Harvey Milk from Milk. Penn has made this transformation in order to bang the drums of war in Ukraine as loudly as possible.

Yes, Sean Penn who was so vociferous in his righteous anti-war sentiments regarding Iraq in 2003, is now out there demanding the U.S. and the military industrial complex get further involved in the war in Ukraine, including direct combat.

What a fucking genius.

Maybe someone should remind Sean that he has a son who’s the perfect age to go fight in Ukraine…and if that country’s “freedom” is so fucking important to him maybe he and his son can gear up and move out and go kick some Russian ass halfway across the world.

If that isn’t something he’s interested in, then maybe I Am Sam should shut the fuck up and stop talking and acting like a fucking useless retard. Maybe Mayor Man Milk should stop shouting that “I’m here to recruit you…to die in the war in Ukraine for the U.S. elites who absolutely hate you and only want to use you for cannon fodder!” Penn’s I am Sam/Harvey Milk character sounds like another famous gay buffoon, George W. Bush, as he marched us into war in Iraq…and as we all remember that went spectacularly well. Mission accomplished motherfucker!

So, Sean Penn, do us all a favor and SHUT THE FUCK UP. If you want to fight, I’d be happy to meet you and your movie star biceps anywhere, anytime, and slap the stupid out of your thick fucking skull. And by the way maybe try and do another exercise bedsides curls when you’re at the gym, you might find your bulging biceps to be less than useful in combat, be it in Ukraine or in a scrap with me. You’re welcome you fucking empty-headed shit heel.

And thus ends the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Awards and the cinema calendar for 2022…thank God!!

Hopefully the losers this year will be the winners next year…you never know. One thing I can guarantee though is that there will be movies and performances worthy of the Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® Award next year…and I’ll be ready!!

Thanks for reading!

 FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Harry and Meghan and the Rot of American Culture

Lifetime’s new cheesy movie, Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace, is predictably terrible, but is also a depressing glimpse into the vacuousness of American culture.

We need much less of Harry and Meghan, the dynamic duo of woke royals, in our news and popular culture, not more.

Sometimes a movie comes along that is so exquisitely crafted, masterfully written, expertly directed and gloriously acted that it transcends the cinematic art form and bequeaths philosophical and emotional insights upon its audience. Lifetime channel’s new movie Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace, is not that movie.

No, Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace is exactly what you expect it to be, a laughably low-rent, tawdry, tabloid-inspired piece of trash, which ironically is somehow very profound since that’s exactly what Harry, Meghan and their royal rivals are as well.

To no one’s surprise the movie’s script is laughable, the dialogue ridiculous, the directing atrocious and the acting amateurish. The puppets from Spitting Image give more nuanced and life-like performances of the royals and Harry and Meghan than the cast of Escaping the Palace.

Unbeknownst to me, Harry and Meghan: Escaping the Palace is actually the third movie in a trilogy of vapid Harry and Meghan-themed Lifetime movies, coming on the heels of what I assume are the equally forgettable A Royal Romance (2018) and Becoming Royal (2019). I consider myself blessed for not only not having seen those two films, but of having never heard of them.

If Escaping the Palace is any indication, the Lifetime business model regarding the royals seems to be to make decidedly pro-Harry and Meghan movies where they’re portrayed as a brave, fairy tale couple of noble social justice warriors fighting racism in the media and the royal family.

No doubt this narrative decision was made for business reasons because the odds of Harry and Meghan being desperate enough in the future to actually collaborate with Lifetime seem pretty good.

The actual royal family are too self-deluded with that old-fashioned notion of ‘dignity’ to allegedly lower themselves to such a degree and are therefore out of reach for Lifetime and thus out of luck when it comes to their portrayals on the network.

Prince William is definitely the villain of Escaping the Palace and is shown to be a very disagreeable fellow indeed, so much so that it would be accurate to describe him as “snarling”. To further reinforce this villainy, his baldness is accentuated to a comedically delicious degree. It’s noteworthy that the also-balding-in-real-life Harry is portrayed in the film with a full head of luscious ginger hair, thus cementing his status as the screen hero.

William’s bride Kate is also painted as a villain as she is shown as two-faced and manipulative, a royal Karen of the highest order, who can’t hold a candle to the luminous Meghan.

Watching a bad movie like Escaping the Palace, that’s just bad and not enjoyably bad in a campy way, lends itself to the mind wondering, and my mind wondered to some strange places.

For instance, I had a ‘through the looking glass’/Matrix-esque/fever dream moment while watching the scene recreating the famous Meghan Markle-Oprah interview. As the scene wore on it occurred to me that I was actually watching a bad actress (Sydney Morton – playing Meghan Markle) act badly while portraying a bad actress (Meghan Markle) acting badly. Whoa, man.

After piercing the void with that notion, I saw a commercial for the documentary that was set to follow Escaping the Palace on Lifetime titled The American Royal Baby, which was an ABC News produced documentary on Harry and Meghan’s daughter Lilibet, born this past June. In the commercial, famed British nanny Jo from the reality tv show Supernanny was talking about how Meghan was going to parent her children.

This seemed to nicely sum up the entire absurd notion of Harry and Meghan and America’s odd obsession with them. Harry and Meghan are nothing but another cog in the tabloid/reality TV industrial complex.  

This is why Harry and Meghan were so desperate to get out of the royal family and the glaring spotlight of the media, which Harry blames for the death of his mother Diana, but then went to the media capital of the world, Hollywood, and dove into the entertainment business with a big deal with Netflix.

Harry and Meghan not only want the drama, they crave it, and that’s why they keep doing interviews and making self-absorbed projects like Harry’s Apple TV Documentary The Me You Can’t See.

Like any cheesy reality TV stars or social media influencers, Meghan and Harry would shrivel and die if it weren’t for the constant-attention they claim to so desperately loathe.

The truth is that all of the royals, but most especially the attention-whores Harry and Meghan, are simply Kardashians without the asses, or more accurately, they’re just media-whoring asses.

A line of dialogue from Escaping the Palace where William, while conspiring to out maneuver Harry in some palace intrigue, admits “we can’t cancel the most woke bloke and his feminist bride!”, rung uncomfortably accurate from here in America.

No, in our American empire in rapid decline with its vacuous and vapid reality tv culture meant to distract and deceive rather than enlighten, which magically morphs the most privileged and entitled into the marginalized and oppressed, we can’t cancel the most woke Harry and his feminist bride Meghan because their contrived drama and self-promoting political posturing and pandering are the thin gruel that sustains not just millions of American morons but also greases the wheels of the insidiously insipid mainstream media.

That said, it would be far healthier, for them and us, if they just disappeared from our collective consciousness for a long, long time.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Me You Can't See: Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

The navel gazing narcissism of Prince Harry’s mental health series The Me You Can’t See is not something you need to see

The series focuses too much on royal gossip and self-serving celebrities and not enough on how to help regular people struggling.

The Me You Can’t See is a five-part documentary about mental health issues produced by Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry that premiered on May 21st on the streaming service Apple TV.  

The uneven series features interviews with Oprah and Harry, Lady Gaga, Glenn Close, and a plethora of regular people. Thankfully, unlike their thirsty celebrity counter parts, the segments featuring non-famous participants and unconventional approaches to mental health hold some value.

The most compelling of these regular-folk are the parents at the Selah Care Farm, who have lost children to suicide. Their brutal honesty and unfathomable, gut-wrenching grief are deeply moving and profound.

Equally compelling is the story of a young boy named Fawzi, a Syrian refugee living in Greece. The trauma Fawzi suffered in Syria is horrifying, but the doctor helping him heal is a beacon of hope for humanity.

Other captivating and insightful stories include Rashad, a black man suffering depression, Forget, a granny in Zimbabwe who provides mental health care in her remote area, Ambar, a young woman diagnosed with Schizophrenia, and Ian, a man with an egregiously traumatic childhood who takes part in a study on the hallucinogen psilocybin as a way for people to address their trauma, anxiety and depression.

Unfortunately, The Me You Can’t See doesn’t focus entirely on everyday people but instead wraps itself in the shallow Oprah aesthetic and the toxicity of celebrity and victimhood culture.

Oprah has long been painfully obtuse in regards to mental health and even admits as much on the show, but despite this admission she is still completely incapable of being anything other than a carnival barker and new age snake oil saleswoman, as The Me You Can’t See proves.

The big draw of the series is Prince Harry who’s featured throughout speaking about his journey to therapy, his struggle with the death of his mother, the “neglect” and “bullying” he suffered at the hands of the Royal family and his ultimate escape from it all.

Harry claims he began therapy four years ago at Meghan Markle’s insistence. What is so peculiar though is how completely devoid of self-awareness he seems to be.

For example, near the end of the series Harry says he “has never had any anger through this”, but he is obviously seething whenever he talks about the “firm”, the media and the paparazzi.

Harry seems to be in denial of his shadow, and it would serve him better to acknowledge this anger with the paparazzi in particular, because then he might come to better understand that the paparazzi is not the disease that killed his mother, it is merely a symptom.

The disease that killed Princess Diana was fame, and by moving to Hollywood, becoming enmeshed in the entertainment world, and putting himself front and center in this series, Harry is not shunning the beast that devoured her but embracing it.

The series is a frustrating viewing experience because while it tackles a worthwhile subject, it uses celebrity culture as the gateway into that discussion, which is the equivalent of serving booze at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

The reality is that celebrity and victimhood culture is a trauma upon our society just as much as fame is a trauma upon those who attain it because it confuses sadness with depression, nervousness with anxiety, and obstacles with trauma while breeding a populace of fantasists fueled by delusion and narcissism.

Oprah, Harry, Lady Gaga and the rest may genuinely suffer but their celebrity status makes their public struggle feel performative and self-serving. And in many cases if the famous wanted to decrease their anxiety and trauma they could do so by simply withdrawing from public life.

For instance, Harry claims that he and Meghan simply could not withstand negative media attention anymore. So, his solution was for them to start a production company, sign a deal with Netflix, do a huge interview with Oprah and publicly navel gaze on an Apple TV series. This is obviously self-defeating.

Also self-defeating is the rich and privileged Harry being filmed doing an EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) therapy session where he recalls a trauma from his life and then hugs himself, rapidly moves his closed eyes and rhythmically taps his body. That treatment may be effective but it comes across as so ridiculous as to be a hyper-parody, and will set back working-class views of psychiatry two hundred years.

Ironically Fight Club’s Tyler Durden accurately diagnosed our current mental and emotional dis-ease and malaise much better than The Me You Can’t See when he said,

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war... Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

And we’re very depressed and anxious too…and The Me You Can’t See would’ve been better served preaching as the antidote to those maladies the power of resilience, becoming comfortable with discomfort, and overcoming petty traumas and not identifying with them. Instead, the series is an often-vapid, victimhood touting, celebrity culture band-aid on a complex and cavernous existential spiritual and philosophical bullet wound.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Harry, Meghan and the Royal Reality TV Show

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

Last night I debased myself, as did millions of others, by watching the much-hyped Oprah Winfrey interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

The fact that mindless proles like me tuned in to watch a billionaire interview two millionaires about how hard their life has been, is the most absurd thing imaginable. Yet here we are.

The sit-down in Santa Barbara was billed as a major scoop-fest as it was the first time that Meghan and Harry have spoken out since their very public spat and split from the royal family.

The British monarchy is the longest running soap opera in human history and no doubt millions tuned in last night hoping for some salacious details relating to the royal rift.

Unfortunately, this interview felt like when Geraldo Rivera opened up famed mobster Al Capone’s vault on live television and there was nothing in it. In this case, Oprah opened Meghan and Harry’s heads only to find a cavernous void.

This event was all sound and fury, signifying nothing, and felt more like a manufactured PR enterprise mixed with a high school gossip session rather than a journalistic endeavor.

The basic takeaway was that Harry and Meghan shamelessly threw the entire royal family under a double-decker bus in an attempt to play the victim and boost their woke credentials in Hollywood.

I am not a fan of the royal family…at all. I find them all to be arrogant aristocratic oligarchs, vicious colonialists and pompous, entitled in-bred buffoons. And yet my impressions from this interview are that Meghan is a self-serving, petulant, ambitious, adolescent, controlling, manipulative and abusive shrew that has successfully estranged her husband from his family. And that Harry is a royal eunuch whose masculine crown jewels are kept tightly locked up in Meghan’s purse.

Watching Harry and Meghan claim victimhood status was pretty amusing. Their bemoaning their perilous financial situation made me think of an episode of the British puppet show Spitting Image. In the episode Harry moves to LA and fails to find employment. He comes home to Meghan and cries, “I’ve tried every career there is - Prince and Hitler - and nothing has worked!”

Watching the two of them both claim that they simply saw no way out of the despair of royal life reminded me of a Simpsons episode where Ned Flander’s beatnik parents tell a child psychologist, “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

People will either believe Meghan and Harry’s harsh yet egregiously unspecific accusations of the royal family’s cruelty, indifference, and racism, or they won’t. It would have been nice to have an interviewer who actually held their feet to the fire and put their claims under scrutiny to help viewers decide.

Oprah has always been more P.T. Barnum than Edward R. Murrow, and her patty cake “interview” with Meghan and Harry was all socially distanced hugs devoid of insight.

What was so frustrating was that there were ample opportunities for some actual truth to be revealed, but Oprah, who is not only friends but business partners with Harry and Meghan (they are co-producing an Apple TV documentary together about mental health which is currently on hold) never pressed the couple for answers when they were being evasive…which was often.

For instance, Harry and Meghan both claimed that a royal family member had raised concerns about the potentially dark skin tone of their then unborn child Archie.

Meghan demurred when Oprah asked who said it, and then when Harry was questioned he said he was “not comfortable sharing” the guilty party because it would be very damaging to them.

A real journalist would’ve pressed the issue and made clear that by refusing to name the person who allegedly said it, Harry and Meghan should be assumed to be making the story up.

Racism was brought up numerous times throughout, most notably in regards to the British tabloids mistreatment of Meghan. Harry and Meghan claim, and Oprah obviously agrees, that the only reason the tabloids picked on Meghan was because she is of “mixed race”.

The problem with this accusation and assumption is that there is strong evidence to the contrary which was brought up in the interview. Namely, Harry voiced his concern that what the tabloids did to his mother Diana would happen to Meghan. The tabloids savaged Diana. They did the same to Charles and Camilla and virtually any and all major players in the royal family. The tabloids are awful…to everyone, not just “mixed race” royals who are Americans, actresses and divorcees.

 It seems quite obvious that what has happened with the royal family is that Harry and Meghan wanted special treatment while everyone else thought it strange that they should be treated any different than any other royal, who all had their time in the unpleasant tabloid barrel.

What I find endlessly amusing is that Meghan and Harry wanted out of this scorching spotlight, so in search of the simple life they moved to…Hollywood, and set up a production company and signed deals with Netflix and Spotify and did a much hyped interview with Oprah. They just replaced one delusional cesspool for another, albeit sunnier, one.

If Meghan and Harry are tired of the drama, why do the interview in the first place. They weren’t setting the record straight talking to Oprah, they were trying to settle some scores, and that will no doubt only lead to more tabloid drama.

The royal family is a walking tourist trap because it is a reality tv show, and so the vacuous drama is completely the point. Without the endless, mindless, manufactured Sturm und Drang, the royal family, including Harry and Meghan, are entirely irrelevant. And that can never be allowed to happen…and so this Harry and Meghan interview is just another episode in the relentless soap opera known as the House of Windsor. Tune in next week for the royal response to all the scandalous allegations!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Royal Family Documentary: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Not enough of value to see here to make it worth your time.

Royal Family, the 1969 fly-on-the-wall BBC documentary that chronicled a year in the life of Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family, which the Queen banned in 1972 for “cheapening” the royals by removing their mystique, recently resurfaced on YouTube and caused much consternation at Buckingham Palace.

Both Buckingham Palace and the BBC wanted the film to remain under wraps and so Youtube removed it for copyright infringement. Prior to the leak on Youtube, the documentary had also been brought back into the public’s attention this past year by the hit Netflix show The Crown, which dramatized the making of the film and the reaction to it.

Being the ever-intrepid film critic that I am, I tracked the royally blacklisted film down and gave it a gander, and I’m wondering what the Queen is all bent out of shape about.

The film doesn’t “cheapen” the royal family…the thing that has cheapened the royal family has been their sordid, low-rent behavior these past 50 years.

The film’s most shocking and most genuine scene, comes at the end, where Queen Elizabeth II recounts to her family how difficult it was to keep a straight face when meeting the U.S. Ambassador because he looked like “a gorilla”.

I suppose the Queen calling the U.S. Ambassador a gorilla could be seen as a big deal in 1969, but after the last 50 years of royal chicanery, it barely registers as a blip on the radar screen.

For instance, “Gorilla-gate” pales in comparison to Prince Charles being exposed as a spineless (and lacking another piece of vital male anatomy) coward for his treatment of his wife Diana, his affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles and his ugly divorce.

It also pales in comparison to the Prince Andrew-Fergie fiasco and the recent revelations regarding Prince Andrew’s pernicious sexual predation. 

And it isn’t nearly as bad as Prince Harry’s falling for the malignant malcontent Meghan Markle, and then the ensuing embarrassment of Megxit.

While the film closes with the mild chuckle of “Gorilla-gate”, what precedes that is an hour and a half of the most horrifically monotonous and mundane documentation of royal minutiae imaginable.

The most striking thing about the documentary is, like the royal family itself, how painfully dull, contrived, manufactured and repetitive it is.

The film aggressively tries to paint the royals as a “working family” whose family business happens to be being royalty. It incessantly refers to the Queen ‘going back to work’ or even while on holiday, and she seems to be perpetually on holiday, still being ‘on-duty’. What that duty is exactly is never quite clear.

Some of the most unintentionally funny scenes are of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip pretending to do paperwork. Like bad actors they poorly improvise scenes where they blankly look at papers and inanely talk to aides about it…and it’s hysterical. This happened so often it felt like the movie should’ve been titled “The Banality of Busy Work”.

The two of them are also perpetually looking at a bevy of newspapers, but like illiterate extras on a big-budget movie set, they don’t seem to actually read any of them, just scan them looking for pictures of themselves.

To be fair, the Queen does almost come across as human a few times, but the biggest takeaway regarding her is that if dead-eyed, mindless small talk were Olympic sprinting she would be Usain Bolt.

Not surprisingly since he is a pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license, Prince Philip comes across as a complete pompous blowhard and jackass with a pilot’s license.

As for Prince Charles, the documentary opens with a scene of him, then in his early twenties, water-skiing shirtless. The sight of the pasty Charles, a black hole of anti-charisma, as the allegedly athletic man out on the water in his swim togs isn’t exactly reminiscent of Sean Connery as James Bond as much as Mr. Bean as James Bland.

In a later scene the cartoonishly goofy-looking Charles plays Cello with his youngest brother and it made me think of the in-bred, mental defective hillbilly from Deliverance playing banjo.

The purpose of Royal Family was to humanize the royals and make them relatable to show they’re just like the rest of us. That premise doesn’t fair so well when the Queen goes through her stunning jewelry collection marveling at the glorious history of pillaging that has bequeathed her such impressive accoutrements. 

They also don’t seem very relatable as they castle hop from Buckingham to Balmoral to Windsor and back again, or travel the globe on their giant yacht or personal train.

The documentary isn’t so much ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ meets ‘The Real Housewives of Buckingham Palace’ as it is an episode of The Contrived Chronicles of the Cold, Clueless and Criminally Comfortable.

If you like watching spoiled, mindless mannequins smiling vacantly and waving robotically as they live lavish, unearned lives and attend endless ceremonies and pageants in 1969, then Royal Family is for you.

If you prefer robustly absurd comedy mixed with seedy melodrama and sex scandals, then you’re better off skipping Royal Family and watching the daily news coverage of the royal family instead.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Spitting Image: The Satirical British Puppet Show is Back - Here's a Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

After a 24-year absence the show doesn’t always hit the mark, but thankfully it also never pulls any punches.

The first two episodes of Spitting Image, which were aired on BritBox in the U.K. on October 3rd and October 10th, were funny but at times uneven as the creative’s fought to find their sea legs in the stormy waters of modern day comedy. 

Thankfully the born again show, despite its flaws, is just as relentless and ruthless in its comedy takedowns as the original. The humor isn’t always uproarious but it’s certainly biting and interesting because it’s simultaneously heady and gratuitously base.

The first episode, which featured some scathing mocking of Prince Harry, Trump, Boris Johnson and his advisor Dominic Cummings, is the better of the two, but the second episode had some notable highlights as well.

Trump and Boris Johnson are the main targets of the resurrected Spitting Image’s comedic fire, not surprisingly since they are in power and are grotesque caricatures all on their own even before ever being made into puppets.

In the first episode Trump is ridiculed for being the blowhard that he is, with a recurring theme being his arsehole, which looks like a repulsive creature out of Ridley Scott’s Alien, does all his late night tweeting for him.

The first episode also has Prince Harry literally cutting off his nose – maybe to spite his face, and lamenting his failure to succeed on his own in Los Angeles as he utters the spectacularly funny line, “I’ve tried every career there is – prince and Hitler!”

Other targets are Disney’s woke preening in the form of a black baby Yoda, Lewis Hamilton’s social justice hypocrisy and Greta Thurnburg’s shrieking and shrill environmentalism.

The second episode rakes Trump and BoJo over the comedy coals as well, the best instances being when Trump is fine after catching a case of coronavirus but coronavirus suffers greatly when it catches a case of Trump, and when Boris’s scatterbrained satellite navigation system drives a confused couple off of a cliff.

The very best scene in the second episode though is when Greta Thurnburg reluctantly goes to an English soccer match and surprises herself by getting really into it. Afterwards she becomes very Greta about it as she laments, “The referee has stolen my childhood with his reckless decisions. I must save West Ham!”

A reliably funny recurring bit in both episodes is the struggle of the distinguished Sir David Attenborough to navigate social media and technology, something that always ends in failure and a flurry of expletives.

The less successful scenes on the show are the songs, one has New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardearn as a coronavirus defeating Mary Poppins, the other has a time-traveling Elon Musk singing David Bowie’s song “Starman” except with the word “Conman”.

Remarkably, Spitting Image has yet to find a broadcast home in the U.S. According to some reports that is due to networks and streaming services being afraid of offending the Trump administration, which seems far-fetched since nearly every major news organization does the journalistic equivalent of Spitting Image to the Trump administration every day.

It is unfathomable that the show is not in America, even on Britbox. Americans can catch new episodes on Facebook for 24 hours after they originally air in the UK…but that just seems a silly, arbitrary and self-defeating approach.

The U.S. is currently saturated with political comedy, with the tiresome, predictable, relentlessly propagandic bitching and moaning from flaccid clowns like John Oliver, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, but the nation is starving for top-notch political satire – which Spitting Image, despite its flaws, does deliver.

Saturday Night Live is the only notable political satire in America right now and it is disastrously dreadful. The biggest problem with SNL is that its humor is based on advocacy rather than comedy. The show shamelessly embraced Hillary in 2016…who could forget the cringe worthy sight of Kate McKinnon as Hillary singing an embarrassingly maudlin and melancholy version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallejulah” in the immediate aftermath of her election defeat, and this year touted Kamala Harris (played by Maya Rudolph) by having her declare to cheers the need for a WAP – Woman as President. Yikes.

Thankfully, unlike SNL and the rest of the emotionalist establishment late night court jesters like Oliver, Maher and the rest, Spitting Image doesn’t aim to advocate, only eviscerate. And while the first two episodes were somewhat hit or miss, the show at its best still comedically slices and dices with the very best of them and never chooses sides.

An example of the bi-partisan belittling is a hilarious recurring theme in episode two is Nancy Pelosi suffering from Panderititis, a disease that makes her cravenly pander to identity groups for votes. She switches between African garb, a hard hat with rainbow dildo attached, and Orthodox Jewish clothing, in order to appeal to black, LGBTQ and Jewish voters.

Another example is Biden being a dementia-addled fool, and the charisma deficient Keir Starmer getting a much-needed makeover by Elton John…excuse me…Sir Elton John.

Spitting Image‘s sense of humor is not for everyone and the show isn’t life changing, but it is at times extremely funny. There are certainly worse ways to spend half an hour…like watching the insipid John Oliver for example.

The bottom line regarding the show is this - the world needs more comedy, not less, so some courageous executive at NBC, Hulu, Netflix or Amazon should quickly grab Spitting Image and give Americans a glimpse of some solid political satire at the height of the election silly season, we sure as hell could use it. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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