Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn't Get Any Worse, the "I Take Responsibility" Video Comes Out

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 21 seconds

In response to America’s racial unrest, Hollywood celebrities once again feel the need to flex their virtue signaling muscles with a nauseating, self-serving video.

Unfortunately for us, Hollywood never lets a good crisis go to waste.

First there was the coronavirus pandemic.

Hollywood bravely responded to that calamity with Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, and a cavalcade of her clueless celebrity friends putting out a video of themselves “singing” John Lennon’s saccharine anthem Imagine.

The world responded by collectively throwing up in its mouth.

With Imagine, Gadot and company appeared to have the Cringe-Worthy Video of the Year Award all wrapped up.

But then there was the police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man in Minneapolis, followed by protests, riots and looting across the country.

A new collection of entertainment industry nitwits has responded to that catastrophe with an anti-racism video titled ‘I Take Responsibility’.

Ladies and gentleman, the race for the Cringe-Worthy Video Crown has a new front-runner.

‘I Take Responsibility’ features Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, Kesha, Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux, Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard, Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and Aly Raisman telling us they “take responsibility” and “stand against hate”.

The unintentional comedy of the video is absolutely off the charts, as it is littered with sub-textual ironies like the fact that it is shot in black and white (apparently it doesn’t see color!) and is entirely devoid of any racial or ethnic diversity.

One of the more hysterical moments is when these Hollywood dopes repeatedly tell us that they “take responsibility” for “every not so funny joke, every unfair stereotype”.

What about the funny jokes and the fair stereotypes? Who is going to take responsibility for those? Wouldn’t a video made by the people taking responsibility for the funny jokes and fair stereotypes be much more enlightening and entertaining than this dour diatribe?

Other lowlights of ‘I Take Responsibility’ are the egregiously brutal performances.

Aaron Paul, who is one of the worst actors of his, or any other, generation, strains so hard to be credible he appears to be actually moving his bowels on camera. And if you listen closely enough when he speaks, you can actually hear the wind whistle through the vacant and cavernous void where his brain should be.

Debra Messing only makes a brief appearance and seems to have been abruptly awoken from a nap to record her lines. I understand why she is so tired, as she looks like she was up all night haunting houses. Yikes.

The talented Sarah Paulson brings much-needed gravitas to the festivities in the form of ridiculously oversized glasses. As everyone knows, it is a scientifically proven fact that people who wear oversized glasses are both serious and incapable of racism…especially when they have an adorable lisp.

Academy Award winner Julianne Moore appears in the video and nobly casts hyperbole aside and tells the unvarnished truth when she adamantly declares “black people are being slaughtered in the streets!”

I’d be willing to bet that not only are the streets where Ms. Moore lives devoid of slaughtered black people, they are most likely devoid of all black people.

Stanley Tucci and Justin Theroux get in on the act by not acting at all. They are so flat and dead eyed they could’ve, and should’ve, been reading from the phone book.

Speaking of reading…by far my favorite part of the video is the fact that these actors and actresses, who literally memorize dialogue for a living (and they make a very good living), apparently care so little about “taking responsibility” and “standing against hate” that they cannot be bothered to put in the least amount of effort and memorize their idiotic mini-monologue.

This cornucopia of clowns may have set out to highlight how “not racist” they are, but instead, by obviously reading their lines, they only proved how entitled and lazy they truly are.

As I watched this train wreck I couldn’t help but wonder…who is the target audience for this thing?

The answer is self-evident, as the video is made solely for the people in it and their fellow privileged Hollywood elites who enjoy watching masturbatory displays of faux, me-first moralism.

As a not-so-proud resident of Los Angeles and an active member of both the entertainment business and the creative community, I do hereby declare that I do NOT take responsibility for anything these mindless morons vomit out onto the world.

They claim to stand against hate…how impotently and insipidly trite of them.

In contrast…I stand against virtue signaling. I stand against moral preening. I stand against the vain, vacuous and vapid pandering of elitist prigs. I stand against the shameless self-indulgence and self-righteousness of Hollywood narcissists too enthralled by their own sense of superiority to see that they are utterly and ridiculously absurd.

In conclusion, I think I speak for every sentient being in the universe when I take a knee and plead with these imbecilic celebrities to pretty, pretty please…from now on, just…Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Bird Box: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A derivative supernatural thriller that holds little to no cinematic appeal.

Bird Box, written by Eric Heisserer (based on the book of the same name by Josh Malerman) and directed by Susanne Bier, is a supernatural thriller about a woman trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world. The film stars Sandra Bullock with supporting turns from John Malkovich, Trevante Rhodes and Sarah Paulson among many others.

During my recent daily online reading routine I kept coming across headlines saying that the Netflix film Bird Box was racking up prodigious amounts of views. Falling prey to the Netflix marketing campaign, which included those sure to be bogus view numbers and the plethora of manufactured stories about said bogus numbers, and also being the mindless lemming that I am, I decided I too should watch Bird Box to see what all the fuss was about.

Upon seeing the film I can now report that the fuss is phony. Bird Box is a glorified made for tv film that is an amalgam of other not very good movies, and some downright awful movies. If M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, one of the worst movies imaginable, had sex with its first cousin that was a cheap knock off of A Quiet Place, and then gave birth to a six-toed simpleton that had a regional theatre’s version of Sophie’s Choice’s next door neighbor’s friend from high school’s sister as its wet nurse, you’d get Bird Box.

Bird Box, and the online hype surrounding it, reminded me of when I was a kid and one of the networks (there were only three back then) would hype an apocalyptic movie of the week where killer bees or fire ants turn on humans, or something equally absurd. I was always a sucker for such movies, but being young was never allowed to stay up and watch them, thus they got to maintain their mysterious power over me even as I grew into an adult (or whatever I am now). Of course those killer bees/fire ants movies were awful and everyone who wasn’t twelve or younger at the time knew it, even the poor local newscaster who would tease a story during a commercial break and then try and stay solemn and professional as he uttered with liquor fueled indignation the classic phrase, “stay tuned for that story and sports with Champ and Brick with the weather on the 11 o’clock news at the conclusion of the movie”.

Like those movies of the week, Bird Box does have an interesting, if not entirely original, premise, that for some mysterious reason there are waves of mass suicides taking place. This post-apocalyptic world is ripe for exploring numerous philosophical questions on the meaning of life, God, humanity and purpose, but instead of serving a rich feast of cinematic questions, the film takes dramatic shortcut after shortcut and ends up being a thin gruel of regurgitated pablum with no value whatsoever.

Bird Box’s alleged success is really a result of the marketing team cashing in on having Sandra Bullock as the movie’s lead actress. Bullock does commendable work in the film, and I am assuming/hoping she received hefty remuneration for her duties because all of those views Netflix is bragging about are because she is still “America’s sweetheart”….a less grating version of Julia Roberts.

Bullock carries the film from start to finish and does so with her usual down to earth, approachable aplomb, but that doesn’t mean the acting is top notch, it isn’t. The cast includes some big name actors like John Malkovich, Jacki Weaver, BD Wong and Sarah Paulson, none of whom distinguish themselves bringing their paper thin characters to life.

Bullock and Paulson play sisters and their interactions early in the film are so forced and wooden it is stunning. To be fair, the dialogue in these exchanges is so laden with exposition it would be difficult for any actor to find signs of life within that barren wasteland.

As the film progresses it becomes populated by a rainbow of caricatures, the bitter drunken asshole with a heart of gold, the gay Asian guy with a heart of gold, the Black Iraq war vet with a heart of gold, the nerdy conspiracy novel writing guy with a heart of gold and on and on and on.

The internal logic of the film is pretty tenuous as well, with a lot of instances where you stop and go, “wait a minute…that doesn’t make sense!”…like when the Black guy with a heart of gold takes the time to put his pants on before he runs over to pick up a walkie-talkie that is signaling the first glimmer of hope for the survivors since their ordeal began, or the cavalcade of other illogical oddities that you just have to shrug at and go with if you want to keep watching.

Besides the shallow script and uneven performances, the visuals of the film are pretty lackluster. Considering that sight is a main plot point in the film, you’d think a cinematographer or director worth their salt would find a way to exploit that fact with some artistic flair, but alas with Bird Box it is not to be. Cinematographer Salvatore Totino delivers a very flat and cinematically dull film that looks like episodic television, and that is not a compliment in the slightest.

Director Susanne Bier fails to adequately draw the viewer in with either the look of the movie or an interesting perspective on the story. Once the histrionics of the collapse of society take place, the film is reduced to a stage play of stereotypes that is terribly predictable and devoid of much tension or drama.

The one thing the film does have going for it is that Sandra Bullock is a pleasant person to spend two hours with, which is really the secret to her very successful career. Bullock is always Bullock, but that is what makes her a movie star. She is a charismatic and compelling screen presence and while the film that surrounds her is derivative and trite, her presence elevates the material to at least being tolerable.

In conclusion, Bird Box is a mish-mash, fish stew of old Hollywood tropes, cliches and caricatures that never rises to its slightly alluring and intriguing premise. It fails to adequately explore the multitude of philosophical, social and/or political questions it alludes to and never successfully builds enough tension or drama to be worthwhile. It is for these reasons that I cannot recommend Bird Box in the slightest…but if you want to see a similar thriller but one that is original, skillfully made and riddled with quality performances, then wait until A Quiet Place comes out on Netflix and watch that, it will be a much better use of your limited free time.

©2018