The Acolyte: TV Review (Three Episodes) - In a Galaxy Far, Far Away...the Same Old Culture Wars

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT.

The Acolyte, the new Star Wars series streaming on Disney +, tells the story of a murder mystery and intrigue involving the Jedi during the High Republic era a hundred years before the Skywalker saga begins.

The series’ first two episodes premiered on June 4th and a third episode was released this week, with a new episode releasing once a week for the next five weeks.

The Acolyte has generated a great deal of conversation online because, according to its detractors, it shatters the lore upon which the Star Wars franchise is built and is copiously filled with an over-abundance of token diversity. In contrast, the show’s adherents cheer the show exactly because of its diversity and covert socio-political agenda.

While I have enjoyed, to varying degrees, the Star Wars franchise over the years, I’ve never been a super fan and so I really don’t have a dog in the fight between the old traditionalist Star Wars fans and the new progressive Star Wars fans. All I want is for Disney to produce good Star Wars series and films.

Disney’s track record on Star Wars, particularly the shows, is not great. On the bright side, The Mandalorian seasons one and two, and Andor, were phenomenal.

On the down side, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi Wan Kenobi, season three of The Mandalorian and Ahsoka were absolute trash.

After having watched the first three episodes of the 8-episode season of The Acolyte, I can objectively report that the show is a dull disappointment that dwells among the latter rather than the former.

The Acolyte is a perfect embodiment of everything that is wrong with Disney’s Star Wars output. The writing is egregiously bad, the staging, cinematography, fight choreography, production design, directing and acting are so sub-par as to be astonishing and outright embarrassing.

The show is created by Leslye Headland, whose previous claim to fame is the series Russian Doll and having been Harvey Weinstein’s assistant (yikes!).

Headland’s visual style is one of claustrophobia, as nearly every shot and every set is cramped and confined. The resulting affect isn’t one of dramatic intensity but of artistic bankruptcy.

Headland’s story, at least what is seen through three episodes, is completely ignorant of the power of myth and archetype, dramatically inert and narratively adolescent. The dialogue, in particular, is so puerile as to be painful.

Adding to the issues of Headland’s extremely limited artistry and stunted creativity is the fact that this show, which boasts an enormous $180 million budget, looks unconscionably cheap. The sets look like something borrowed from a drama school stage play and the costumes and makeup fare no better, as everything feels thrown together and lacks definition and detail.

One of the biggest issues with The Acolyte is the poor casting and consistently abysmal acting.

Amandla Stenberg stars as two characters, twins Osha and Mae, and she is truly terrible in both roles. She is awkward, unskilled and unathletic, and is so devoid of charisma and screen presence she’s as compelling as a dog turd baking in the hot sun.

Stenberg fails to make any distinction between her portrayals of Osha and Mae and thus you’re never sure who you’re watching in any given scene…which doesn’t add to the drama but only confuses it.

Stenberg isn’t helped by the childish script – which has her waking up breathless no fewer than three times in the span of about fifteen minutes or so, but Stenberg certainly isn’t ready to carry a series on her diminutive shoulders with her exceedingly minimal talent.

Lee Jung-Jae, who recently starred in The Squid Game, fares no better with the script. Lee, who learned to speak English specifically for this role, struggles to speak with any cadence or rhythm, and thus brings every scene he inhabits to a grinding halt.

The rest of the cast are equally incompetent, most notably the two actresses playing Osha and Mae as children. I know it’s difficult to find child actors but good lord these two kids are a train-wreck.

The one bright spot in the cast is Jodie Turner-Smith who plays a witch who is the “mother” to the young Osha and Mae. Turner-Smith is the only actor on the series who fills her character with an inner life and whose eyes project a dramatic meaning and purpose. While everyone else is play-acting, Jodie Turner-Smith actually IS acting.

Disney’s marketing plan for its Star Wars (and Marvel) franchise projects is to be aggressive in turning these traditionally male myths into female led stories chock full of diversity with minimal white male presence. Or as South Park so expertly said in its evisceration of Star Wars production chief Kathleen Kennedy and Disney, “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay”. Mission accomplished, Ms. Kennedy.

The reason for this “chick/lame/gay” approach is that Disney wants to politicize their franchise projects by turning them into referendums on culture war issues. This is meant to aggravate and alienate traditionalist fans (mostly straight white men), and arouse progressive non-fans (women, LGBTQ etc.) in the hopes of turning them into loyal fans. The idea being that the original fans will never leave, even if it means they hate watch, and new progressive fans will watch out of political loyalty turned into brand loyalty, rather than due to unabashed fandom.

When the traditionalists cry foul over a show or movie with a female lead or color-filled cast, the progressives, most notably in the media, will reflexively and instinctively rush to defend the show because if the “bad people” (white men) are against it…then it must be good. And even if it isn’t good, it must be defended because the fight really isn’t over the quality of the show but rather over the importance of the diversity on display.

The Acolyte, which has a gay non-binary woman of color as its lead, and which features – and this is no joke – a coven of lesbian witches who create human life without males (and this coven is involved in one of the worst scenes in any Star Wars venture – it’s during a ritual and it is like something you’d see at a junior high school drama club production at an all-girls school), and which is created by a lesbian (Headland) who has openly stated the series is the gayest Star Wars show ever, is the perfect example of Disney’s divide and conquer culture war approach.

The results are as you’d expect…critics from the establishment media adore the show, giving it a robust 85% rating. Meanwhile, audiences despise it having given it a 20% rating. Of course, the critics counter that the series is being “review bombed” by disingenuous audience members who they claim are “racist, sexist and homophobic”.

What the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Uber Alles brigade fail to recognize is that while the audience score may be a result of “review bombing” by a handful of troglodyte ne’er do wells, the critical score is also likely a result of “review bombing” by shameless shills and socio-political sycophants among the media establishment.

What is always amusing to me is that months after having rabidly defended the latest Star Wars or Marvel atrocity and having praised it for its daring diversity and inclusion these same critics will usually, and sheepishly, admit that the show or film actually really does suck but that it was still “important” because of its diversity and inclusion.

I have long said I don’t give a flying funnel cake about diversity and inclusion, my only priority is quality. Make a good show and it makes no difference to me who wrote it, directed it or starred in it.

For example, you never heard anybody bitching about Andor being led by a Mexican (Diego Luna) and being filled with a plethora of female characters. You know why? Because it was fantastic. That show was so expertly written and exquisitely executed that troglodyte trads didn’t bitch about diversity and critics didn’t have to lie about its quality. The female characters in Andor weren’t girl power tokens, they were complex creations with specific intentions and purpose, and are among the very best ever created in the history of the Star Wars franchise.

In comparison, The Acolyte, which by the way is a great name for a show – too bad it’s ruined on this piece of poop, is so atrociously made as to be criminal. The characters are paper-thin, the acting abysmal, the plot inane and the production astonishingly sub-par. And it’s because it’s so bad that’s why Disney and its media minions have turned it into ground zero for the culture war.

I, for one, am so tired of the endless and fruitless culture war, and by extension Star Wars and Marvel and the rest of our lazy and disingenuous pop culture, that I want to gouge my eyes out and light my brain on fire. And yet…here I am, once again, bitching about the same old culture war issues in a galaxy far, far away, that makes our own galaxy such a very unpleasant one.

The bottom line regarding The Acolyte, at least through the first three episodes, is that this show isn’t worth fighting over as it is simply bad television. I have no idea if it violates and upends the foundations of Star Wars lore and mythology, I just know it fails to reach even the most rudimentary level in regards to entertainment and storytelling.

If you’re a huge Star Wars fan you’ll probably watch the show because you watch everything Star Wars, and you’ll probably dislike it but not enough to break your addiction to all things Star Wars. If, like me, you’re a fair-weather fan, then you can definitely skip The Acolyte...because, to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, “this is not the Star Wars you’re looking for.”

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Echo (Disney +): TV Review - The Cries of Failure Echo Forever

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and idiotic waste of time.

Echo is the new Marvel five-episode mini-series streaming on Disney + and Hulu. The show stars Alaqua Cox in the title role, with supporting turns from Vincent D’Onofrio and Graham Greene.

Echo, in case you don’t know, is a Native American woman named Maya who is a master martial artist who is also deaf and has lost a leg. The character was first introduced to the MCU in the Disney + series Hawkeye.

I liked Hawkeye a great deal, and thought Echo was an interesting and intriguing hench woman. As a peripheral character she added depth to that show, but as the lead in a project she falls decidedly flat.

Echo is an absolute mess of a show. I’d call it an unmitigated disaster but disasters are more interesting.

The plot for Echo is laughably bad, the execution of it even worse. The action anemic and the acting atrocious.

Echo is categorized under the banner of Marvel Spotlight, which means it is supposed to be a stand-alone series, but if you haven’t seen Hawkeye, Echo will make absolutely no sense. Although to be fair, even if you have seen Hawkeye, Echo will still not make any sense.

Echo is set in Oklahoma, where Maya goes to get away from trouble in New York City and reconnect with her family and her native American roots.

The show leans heavily into Maya’s Native American lineage, and it is littered with flashbacks to the birth of Native people and the mysterious power Maya’s family has inherited from them. When these flashbacks aren’t incoherent, they are idiotic.

We also see flashbacks of how Maya lost her leg, and how a deep rift grew among her family. None of it is interesting or even adequately rendered.

Alaqua Cox stars as Maya, and she herself is actually deaf in real life, and also has lost a leg. One can only imagine the diversity, equity and inclusion orgasm Kevin Feige and Bob Iger experienced when they found a deaf, one-legged Native Woman to put in one of their projects. If Ms. Cox had been trans and/or queer too Iger and Feige’s loins would’ve gone thermo-nuclear.

Let me say first off that I’m glad that Cox has found acting work because it cannot be easy to be deaf and one-legged and get a lot of auditions. But it also must be said that Alaqua Cox isn’t exactly Meryl Streep as she is…by her nature, a very limited actress. The rest of the cast aren’t exactly the Royal Shakespeare Company either.

A major issue when committing to cast from a very specific ethnic group, in this case Native Americans, is that the talent pool is very, very limited. There are fewer actors to choose from and among that group there are even fewer good ones. Echo is populated by third-rate native actors and actresses that are entirely out of their league even on a silly series like this one.

The same thing happened with Martin Scorsese’s recent film Killers of the Flower Moon, where the Native actresses, in particular, were really dreadful. Lily Gladstone did solid work in the film, but besides her the cast is noticeably sub-par.

In Echo, Alaqua Cox is…not good, but she is someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged playing someone who is Native, deaf and one-legged…so she has that going for her. Besides that, she is quite wooden and impenetrable.

Graham Green is usually a very good actor, but even he is awful in this show. He plays a grandfather type figure to Maya and he seems to be fluctuating between sleepwalking and play acting.

My old friend Vincent D’Onofrio reprises his role as Kingpin in Echo and it is an embarrassment, not so much because of D’Onofrio’s acting, but because of how demeaning the entire enterprise is to the iconic character.

D’Onofrio was perfect as Kingpin in the Netflix series Daredevil, which for my money is easily the very best Marvel series ever made. But after a brief appearance in the Hawkeye finale, and now here in Echo, Kingpin’s status as a big, brutish badass, is in danger of being revoked.

Disney is reviving the Daredevil series and is returning the majority of the cast, but one cannot help but fear, if not expect, that they will completely fuck it up just like they’ve fucked everything else up in recent years. The castration of Kingpin in Echo points to the likelihood of the Daredevil series being neutered as well.

Disney is a disaster area and Marvel (and Star Wars) is in a state of such rapid decline and decay as to be shocking considering it stood at its apex just 5 years ago the culmination of its Infinity War saga.

Disney and Marvel’s addiction to feminization and diversity has sapped the MCU of its mythological meaning and its narrative and dramatic purpose.

Marvel has been turned into a weapon for cultural engineering instead of being a myth-making, and money printing, machine. Disney’s princess brigade has successfully castrated and feminized both Marvel and Star Wars, and both franchises are now left empty husks of their former selves.

As I have been saying all along, the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey are two completely different things, and you cannot simply replace a hero with a heroine and expect it to resonate in the collective consciousness. In other words, Disney/Marvel’s feminization/princess-ification of their franchises does not, as they hope, empower women, but rather strips the stories of all of their psychological, mythological and archetypal power.

Echo is a bad series not because it stars a twice disabled, Native American woman. No, Echo is a bad series because Disney/Marvel think that if a series stars a twice disabled, Native American woman that is all it needs. To Disney/Marvel, the show doesn’t need to be good…it just needs to be.

This is why diversity, equity and inclusion is such a cancer, it’s because diversity becomes the main focus, and quality is reduced to an after-thought if it is thought of at all.

In conclusion, Echo is a complete waste of time. The show is shoddy, shitty and stupid. I watched Echo so you don’t have to…and trust me…you really don’t have to.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Ahsoka (Disney +): TV Review - The Force is Female...and Boring as Fuck

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

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a poorly written, poorly acted (with the lone exception being Ray Stevenson) series that further diminishes the Star Wars brand.

This past week Ahsoka, the most recent of Disney’s Star Wars series, concluded its eight-episode first season on Disney +. The series, which is a spin-off from The Mandalorian and stars Rosario Dawson in the title character, follows Jedi Warrior Ahsoka Tano as she investigates a potential threat to the New Republic in the wake of the fall of the Empire.

If I’m being kind, I would declare that Ahsoka is completely and entirely forgettable. If I’m being honest, I would say it is an embarrassment. This series, like so much of Disney’s Star Wars material, is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst an absolute atrocity.

Ahsoka’s failings are numerous and include, but are not limited to, completely ignoring any sort of previously set rules for the Star Wars universe. For example, the “rules of the force” are abandoned entirely, as is the deadly nature of the light saber, a once fearsome weapon which is turned into a mere flesh wound maker on Ahsoka.

Besides destroying the most fundamental of things from Star Wars canon, one of the other major issues with Ahsoka is the abysmal acting and inferior cast.

I remember seeing Rosario Dawson when she made her big screen debut in the unnerving Larry Clark film Kids (1995). Dawson was a natural screen presence and absolutely magnetic in Kids, but a lot has changed in the last 28 years. Over the ensuing decades Dawson has become not just a bad actress, but a terrible one. She was so atrocious in the recent Hulu series Dopesick as to be shocking. Here in Ahsoka she is so uncomfortable on screen that it left me actually perplexed. If I saw one more scene where a wooden Dawson as Ahsoka just folded her arms and stared blankly at her scene partner, I was going to light myself on fire. Dawson folds her arms so often on Ahsoka that if you did a drinking game where you did a shot every time she crosses her arms in an episode…you’d die.

Then there’s Dawson’s awkward, anti-athleticism in the fight scenes. To be fair, the fight scenes on Ahsoka are poorly staged, poorly shot and poorly executed. They all seem slow, dull and like they’re being performed underwater, but Dawson in particular moves like an arthritic, elderly woman in a nursing home….as opposed to the mere unathletic middle-aged woman she is.  

The younger actresses in the cast fare no better in terms of fighting or acting either.

Natasha Liu Bordizzo plays Sabine Wren, a Mandolorian and former Jedi apprentice to Ahsoka. Wren is an egregiously poorly written character, but Bordizzo doesn’t help matters by being so vacant in the role. Sabine is supposed to be the energizing force in the series but she’s so vacuous as to invisible. Making matters worse is that Bordizzo is just as bad as Dawson in the action sequences despite being half her age.

Diana Lee Inosanto, daughter of famed martial artist Dan Inosanto (under whom I trained many moons ago), plays Morgan Elsbeth, and unfortunately, is not a good actress. Inosanto is terribly stilted and uncomfortable to watch as she’s devoid of even the slightest bit of presence. Even her fight scenes are yawn-inducing, which is shocking considering her impressive lineage.

Then there’s Eman Esfandi who plays Ezra Bridgers. Esfandi looks like a guy who would be cast to play Jesus in a National Geographic documentary re-enactment, and has that same level of talent too. Esfandi has all the charisma of a tumbleweed and seems like a background actor who mistakenly stumbled in front of the camera.

The big bad in the series is Grand Admiral Thrawn, underwhelmingly played by Lars Mikkelsen. Thrawn is an epic character in the Star Wars universe and here he is reduced to loitering through each scene which he so barely inhabits.

The most striking thing about Ahsoka is Ray Stevenson, who plays Baylon Skoll, a Dark Jedi who stands in the way of Ahsoka as she pursues the truth. Stevenson is literally the only actor in the entire series who brings any inner life to his character. He’s also the only actor with presence and gravitas. When Stevenson is on-screen he effortlessly demands your attention. Stevenson is one of those British actors who is just highly skilled and a master craftsman. His skill and craftsmanship are subtle but extremely effective and the rest of the cast would have done well to learn from him.

Baylon Skoll is also the only interesting character in the whole series, but unfortunately, he is sidelined for the majority of it. Even worse, Stevenson tragically died after filming the series, which is a terrible loss for all of us…made all the worse in that Baylon Skoll will never get his own series.

That Stevenson, who had a bit of a knock around career despite being a fine actor, is the best actor in this series by a mile says a great deal. In contrast, Andor, another Star Wars series, was littered with top notch performances by people with similar careers and backgrounds to Stevenson. Why the hell can’t Disney just cast decent actors like Stevenson in EVERY Star Wars series and movie and in every role?

The writing on Ahsoka is as bad as there’s ever been in a Star Wars series, which is quite an accomplishment. The plot is incomprehensible to the point of being just plain silly (lightsabers can’t kill, there are stormtrooper zombies, witches, and space whales…yes…fucking space whales), and the dialogue is Junior High School drama club level of bad.

Of course, there’s the usual Star Wars nostalgia injection to placate old timers hungry for their lost youth, this time in the form of Anakin Skywalker, the always dreadful Hayden Christensen, and C3PO. One would need to be lobotomized to care the slightest about either cameo.

Since Disney bought Star Wars back in 2012, the franchise has undergone a transformation that has left it bereft of the things that made it noteworthy in the first place. To be fair, Lucas hadn’t exactly crushed it with his lackluster prequel trilogy, but Disney’s post-Lucas Star Wars output makes the prequel trilogy look like The Godfather trilogy.

Since the Disney takeover of the galaxy far, far away, the studio and Executive Producer Kathleen Kennedy have, for some reason, decided to declare that “The Force is Female”. The problem is that the female force, whether in films or series, has proven to be boring as fuck.

Why Disney has leaned so far into gender politics in Star Wars that they’ve stumbled over their own sagging tits is beyond me. Star Wars has, for the most part, been something boys have nerded out over since it hit big screens back in the 70s. The animating myth and archetype of Star Wars is, as Joseph Campbell told us, a masculine one. Disney’s intention to turn the franchise mythos into a girl power vehicle is so obviously self-defeating as to be demented as it neuters the Star Wars myth and renders its archetypes psychologically powerless, diminishes the Star Wars brand and alienates the core audience.

That Disney is also castrating their Marvel myth and brand with the same diminishing creative, artistic and commercial results, only makes the decision to feminize Star Wars all the more perplexing.

The bottom line is that the Star Wars franchise in general, and Ahsoka in particular, are symptoms…and Disney is the disease. Disney’s steadfast determination to inject cultural politics into all of their franchise material and ignore artistic and dramatic quality has aggressively corroded the value of Star Wars (and Marvel) to an astonishing degree.

Star Wars tv series like Ahsoka should be slam dunks for Disney as the franchise is chock full of fascinating stories and characters, and yet the studio consistently churns out underwhelming, if not abysmal, series that act as little more than cultural political vehicles that ultimately actively destroy what people used to love about Star Wars.

In conclusion, Ahsoka is simply not worth your time or energy. Even hardcore, rabid Star Wars fans should skip Ahsoka as it really is a blight on the brand.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Mandalorian - Season Three Review: This is NOT the Way

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A major disappointing season from this once terrific series.

Season one (2019) and two (2020) of The Mandalorian were as good as it gets in terms of Star Wars storytelling. So much so that a dear friend of mine, the biggest Star Wars fan I know, once waxed poetically to me about how the series’ creator Jon Favreau was the savior of the Star Wars franchise.

Whether you believe that about Favreau or not, the truth is that The Mandalorian undoubtedly set the bar very high for the bevy of Star Wars series that came in its wake. Unfortunately, the majority of them have failed to live up to the standard.

For example, the alarmingly awful The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi fell shamefully short of The Mandalorian’s high standards. Things were so bleak at Mickey Mouse’s money-making machine after the back-to-back egregious embarrassments of Boba Fett and Obi Wan, Disney’s Star Wars television ventures seemed on the precipice of annihilation like Alderaan on the wrong end of a Death Star blast.

Then the top-notch Andor arrived on the scene. Andor was able to equal, and in some ways exceed, season one and two of The Mandalorian’s high storytelling standards and Disney once again felt like the had righted the good ship Star Wars.

But now the roller coaster continues with season three of The Mandalorian, whose eight episodes concluded on Wednesday, which scuttled all the creative and artistic momentum of its previous two stellar seasons and of the superb Andor.  

Unfortunately, season three of The Mandalorian feels more like an extension of the sub-par work of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi than a continuation of the excellence of seasons one and two of The Mandalorian.

Season three is an exceedingly frustrating, irritating, incoherent, dull, lore-desecrating exercise that besmirches the once mighty legacy of The Mandalorian brand, reducing it to just another Star Wars piece of junk in a galaxy quickly filling up with Star Wars junk.

The storyline of season three lacks immediacy and consistency, and instead feels like writers/producers trying to sell Star Wars toys while they kill time waiting for other series, most likely the forthcoming Ahsoka, to carry the Star Wars narrative load.

The (spoiler-free) loose premise of the season is that Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his de facto adopted son Grogu – aka Baby Yoda, join with Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sakchoff) to try and return to Mandalore.

The premise never compels, and the villain (I won’t say who it is to avoid spoilers), once revealed, feels like a creative cul-de-sac that is repetitive and redundant and redundantly repetitive.

The series featured the worst episode (episode six – which contains cameos by Lizzo and Jack Black – God help us!!) in the history of Star Wars tv which is an astonishing accomplishment considering the staggering level of incompetence of The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi.

The season finale, while not a great finale, was an action-packed episode and was, to a point, entertaining, but it didn’t elevate the series or make it make sense.

As much as I enjoyed some of the action at times in the finale it was also ridiculous to the point of shameful, and it stretched Star Wars lore and the established rules of the series and the Star Wars universe beyond recognition.

For example, earlier in the season Mandalorians chasing a giant monster had to stop because their jet packs ran out of fuel after roughly a half mile. But in the finale, Mandalorians were flying thousands of miles and breaking through the atmosphere of a planet and into space with ease using their jetpacks.

Another example is that in the finale the villain/villains have great powers (I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers) and yet they end up being like every other dopey background actor stormtrooper who gets felled with ease by the good guys.

The biggest problem with season three though is that it felt like it was no longer about The Mandalorian but rather about the WOmandalorian. Female warrior queen Bo-Katan Kryze became the focus of the drama and the hero who continuously kept saving the damsel-in-distress Din Djarin from peril.

Making things worse was that Katee Sakchoff, an actress I loved on Battlestar Galactica, was dreadful as Bo-Katan. In season two Din Djarin worked with a bad-ass woman warrior Cara Dune, played by Gina Carano. Dune was really cool and Carano was great in the role, but then she said something on social media about Nazis that made the Nazis at Disney upset so they fired her. The reason I bring this up is because, and I never thought I’d say this in my entire life, but Katee Sackhoff is no Gina Carano, and The Mandalorian season three suffers under her relentlessly weak performance.

Which brings up another issue that is becoming glaring, and that is Disney’s princess problem. What I mean by that is that Disney made its bazillions by telling female-centric stories for girls about princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and on and on. The problem is that they’ve purchased Marvel and Star Wars, two brands that tell archetypal stories about boys and men for boys and men.

Instead of embracing what made Marvel and Star Wars successful, Disney has reverted to form and gone about dismantling the male archetypes and replacing them with “princesses” - inadequate and inappropriate female characters.

So, in Marvel we get Thor replaced by Lady Thor, Black Panther replaced by Lady Black Panther, Hawkeye replaced by Lady Hawkeye, Iron Man replaced by Iron Heart aka Lady Iron Man…not to mention the cavalcade of female led-projects like Black Widow, Captain Marvel (who originally was a man in the comics) and now The Marvels. In Star Wars the most obvious example was that the center of the latest trilogy was a female, Rey, while the two previous trilogies focused on Luke and Anakin.

I understand Disney’s insipid impulse to feminize everything and even understand its insidious desire to socially engineer through its products, but what shocks me about this is Disney’s incredible misunderstanding of the basics of myth and archetype.

As Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung teach us, the woman’s hero journey (or heroine journey if you will) is very different from the male hero journey. Different narratives and archetypes are needed and necessary in order to tell the heroine’s journey, but what Disney (and most other modern storytelling) is doing is simply replacing men in the hero’s journey with women.

The reason why these stories, on the whole, fail is because they do not resonate in the collective unconscious due to their mythic and archetypal misunderstandings.

This does not mean that women can’t be leads in action stories…quite the contrary, but they must go on a heroine’s journey not a hero’s journey. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien is a perfect example of the heroine’s journey in an action role. Ripley is at her core a feminine mother character (in the first film this – among other reasons - is why the cat is so important – as Ripley must nurture and save it), just like the mother creature she fights.

Another example is Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) from the fantastic 2015 film Sicario. Macer is an FBI agent but she must navigate the brutal world of men all the while knowing that she, as a woman, is more vulnerable than the men she is surrounded by. As much as she wants to be “one of the boys”, she never will be and that is part of her journey…coming to understand the nature of things and the perilous, nearly indecipherable world of men.

While audiences, for social or political reasons, may support these Disney designed female-led hero’s journeys, on a very deep psychological level, they are agitated by them and often repulsed by them and that’s because they are the anti-thesis of our inherent psychological and mythological conditioning.

No doubt there are some who, again for social or political reasons, want to decondition audiences from what they would describe as an archaic view of men and women, but the human psyche and collective conscious and unconscious, don’t work that way as they have been built over thousands of years and don’t bend to whatever is fashionable in the decadent society du jour.

Back in 2015 right after the female-led The Force Awakens hit theatres, I was at a dinner party with a bunch of Angelinos and the movie came up as a topic of conversation. I chimed in and said I didn’t think it was very good and a woman sitting next to me, who was there with her maybe ten-year-old daughter, leaned over and whispered into my ear, “yes, but the message it sends to girls, and to boys about girls, is really important.”

I nearly bled to death biting my tongue in an attempt to avoid a social mis-step. What I wanted to tell this woman was that the privileged life she led, the big L.A. house she lived in with the “I’m With Her” sign in front, and the security of her existence, was built by…men. Many of them ugly, brutish men, who she would despise simply because they were ugly and brutish men. These are the same men who throughout history have eliminated any and all threats to her plush, decadent, million-dollar, echo-chamber existence.

This is the type of woman, a pampered princess, who demands “equality” for women and girls, but when push comes to shove, she only wants the kind of “equality” where she is awarded unquestioned deference and privileges due to her “victim status” as a woman which elevates her above by those deplorable men who intervene to protect her from the vicious darkness of the world.

If this woman lived in Ukraine she would, as did most of the Ukrainian women, leave to go live in other parts of Europe while all the men of fighting age (and well beyond and beneath fighting age) were forced, through force or conscience, to fight, and ended up being slaughtered by the vastly superior Russian military.

This is why Sicario is so impactful, as it shows in the bleakest, bluntest terms, that play-acting as a tough chick won’t cut it in the world of men. Men inherently understand this as we’ve navigated the perils of the brutal world of men our entire lives and know what the real deal is.

Yes, women have been on the receiving end of toxic masculinity…but they’ve also benefitted from men’s sacrifice and masculinity’s ability to protect them in a dangerous world to such a degree that they now feel safe and secure enough to incessantly bitch and moan about how all masculinity is toxic.

That’s a long way of saying that when Bo-Katan saves Din Djarin for like the fifth time in season three on The Mandalorian, it made me laugh at how ridiculous and shameful it was even for a silly, sci-fi series on a corporate streaming service hellbent on promoting a social-political agenda.

It is fitting that Disney now turns its Star Wars hopes to Ahsoka, which hits Disney plus in August and tells the story of the female Jedi who was once the Padawan of Anakin Skywalker. The girl power galaxy strikes again.

As far as The Mandalorian season three goes, it was a major letdown compared to season one and two. The series lost not only its cohesiveness and its competence, but more importantly its purpose and meaning, and there’s no telling if it’ll ever get it back.

Season three of The Mandalorian was so deflating, it left me wondering not only what the future holds for Star Wars, but if it has a future at all.

The cold, hard reality is that The Mandalorian, Star Wars, Marvel, and our entire culture in general, is an utter mess, and it needs to get its balls back and quick if it wants to survive.

As the Mandalorians would say, “This is the way.”

©2023

Andor: TV Review - Andor shines as darkness descends on Darth Mouse and the Disney Empire

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a real spy drama that happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Well crafted, and very well acted.

Andor, the most recent Star Wars live action series, finished its twelve-episode first season on Disney + this past Wednesday November 23rd.

The series, which tells the story of Cassian Andor and his introduction into the early-stages of the rebellion against the Empire, is a prequel to the film Rogue One and is set prior to the events of Star Wars: A New Hope.

To say I was reticent going into watching Andor would be a massive understatement. You can’t really blame me. The previous two Star Wars series, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, were both utterly atrocious. These series, most specifically Obi Wan Kenobi, were so bad as to be embarrassing, so one can understand why any fan would expect the worst when it came to Andor.

But then I tentatively waded into the series and was at first relieved, and then surprised and finally excited. Andor may very well be the best Star Wars series thus far – at the very least it’s equal to The Mandalorian, and the reason for that is because an actual professional, Tony Gilroy, whose career includes writing the Bourne trilogy and writing/directing Michael Clayton, created the series…and it shows.

Andor is certainly the most sophisticated Star Wars series to date. It’s a real show about a growing, underground rebellion that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. You could set the story in modern-day Iran, China, US or Israel and you wouldn’t have to change all that much.

The acting in Andor is the best there’s ever been in any Star Wars story, be it movie or tv series. The cast across the board are truly phenomenal.

I’m not much of a Diego Luna fan, but he’s fantastic in Andor as the lead. His performance is contained yet kinetic. Luna reveals just enough, but never too much, of Andor, and it makes for compelling viewing.

Genevieve O’Reilly is spectacular as Mon Mothma, an Imperial Senator from Chandrila trying to thread the needle of her public image, personal politics and family life. O’Reilly is so good in the role, and Mon Mothma is such a fascinating character, that I was yearning for a series about her alone.

Stellan Skarsgard is also brilliant as Luthen Rael, a key figure in the rebellion who no one can seem to pin down. Skarsgard shines in the role because Rael, like the actor playing him, must constantly change the masks he wears and along with them his behavior. Skarsgard is a great actor, and having him bring his considerable talent and skill to a Star Wars series indicates how seriously the creators of the series took the story.

The rest of the cast, in big roles and small, are uniformly terrific, and it elevates Andor beyond the usual Star Wars fare and turns it into a legitimate spy drama.

For example, Rupert Vansittart plays Chief Hyne, a small supporting character, and in one small scene he is so good as to be astonishing. This is what happens when you cast skilled actors…everything gets elevated.

The overall aesthetic, most notably the set design, is also top notch. Each set feels real and not like some set on a studio backlot. Visually, everything has a visceral, tangible feel to it, and creates an atmosphere reminiscent of major science fiction like Blade Runner.

To be clear, not everything works perfectly. A few storylines felt forced and fell a bit flat, such as the odd relationship between Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), an ambitious supervisor of the Empire’s Security Bureau, and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), a-down-on-his-luck security inspector for a corporate entity working with the Empire.

Gough and Soller are both very good in their roles, but the arc of their characters and their relationship rang hollow and felt superfluous, and their climax is easily the weakest part of the otherwise well executed series, and it isn’t even close.

From what I understand, Andor is not generating big numbers for Disney +.  The situation is so dire that Disney is running the series on ABC in order to generate some interest in it. This is unfortunate but not surprising.

When you roll out second and third-rate garbage like The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re not going to generate trust from fans, and so they don’t give a series like Andor the chance it deserves.

A great friend of mine, let’s call him Doug, is the biggest Star Wars fan I know. He’s truly a fanatic. But as Andor’s first season wore on I kept asking him if he’d watched it and he said “no”. He said he hadn’t given it a chance because he “didn’t want to be crushed with disappointment again.”

That Doug, who literally gets dressed up in costume and attends opening night of Star Wars movies, is reticent to watch a Star Wars show because he can’t take anymore soul crushing disappointment, is a sign of major problems for Disney.

I think Disney knows it too, which is why CEO Bob Chapek is out and guru Bob Iger is back in. Iger retired in 2020 and left Disney, the company he built up into a staggering entertainment powerhouse with acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox, in the hands of his one-time protégé. But now he has some serious decisions to make if he wants to pull Disney out of its current tailspin - which includes a 40% drop in stock price over the last year.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Big Dick Bob Iger will wheel and deal his way out of trouble, maybe by buying Netflix, or maybe even by selling Disney to Apple.

Buying Netflix seems improbable to me because Netflix carries massive amounts of debt and brings nothing of note to Disney, which already has a robust streaming service.

Selling to Apple makes more sense, at least financially, as it would mean a boon for Iger personally as it would attach his vast Disney holdings to Apple, a Teflon tech company that isn’t going anywhere.

But these choices would simply be a distraction for Iger from the bigger decision he must make which is, he can either double down on the creative direction Disney is going now with its numerous properties like Star Wars and Marvel, or he can dramatically change course.

Doubling down means continuing with the cultural political stuff in Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, which is a big part of the reason Disney is in such trouble at the moment. It would basically mean Disney deciding to stay the course and do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. In other words, it would be insane.

As insane as it would be, I could totally understand why it would happen. The Disney employees, like mindless cult members, truly believe in this woke stuff, and in their own righteousness. And the ruling class in the Disney executive suite live in the most isolated of bubbles that aggressively reinforces the importance of wokeness, and their own self-righteousness.

That said, Bob Iger is no moron. He has to know that his bottom line, and all of his personal stakes in Disney, are getting seriously damaged by the company’s embrace of wokeness, including denigrating and attacking fans as racist, sexist and homophobic who critique their product.

The other option is for Iger to reverse course and to go back to the middle of the road in terms of staying away from cultural politics. That’s no easy task, especially when his workforce and the social circles the executives run in, will put up serious resistance.

At this point the problem can’t be solved just by returning to making quality movies and tv shows, as evidenced by Andor being such a great series but no one tuning in. The disease of wokeness has taken deep hold and Disney is suffering from a stage four version of it, and it is killing the company by alienating customers.

Everything is trending down for Disney. The recent spate of dismal Star Wars series pre-Andor are seriously eroding fan interest. The same is true of Marvel, where the recent batch of movies aren’t just bad but underperforming at the box office…all while their budgets bloat beyond belief. Marvel tv shows are just as bad if not worse than the Star Wars shows, and they don’t pay any dividends anymore.

The reality is that the good ship Mickey Mouse was on its way to the utopia that is the Fantasy Island of Wokeness but it hit the Iceberg of Reality and is now quickly taking on water. It seems to me that bringing back Bob Iger to rearrange the deck chairs won’t solve any of the bigger problems.

Maybe I’m wrong and Iger will right the ship and Disney will be back to its robust self in no time. Or maybe Disney is doomed because it didn’t listen to Cassandras like me who were warning them early on that “get woke, go broke” was inevitable if they kept on the self-righteous path.

Regardless of all that, the truth is that building back trust from fans is a difficult thing to do and it takes years. There is no quick fix. But Andor, which is as good The Mandalorian, is a terrific first step.

Disney needs to put together a string of quality Star Wars series, and eventually Star Wars movies, in order to bring the bevy of Star Wars fans back safely into the fold. The same is also true of Marvel.

I hope they do it. I also hope you check out Andor, because it’s very well-made, and well-worth your time.

©2022

TV Round Up: House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, She-Hulk and Andor

There’s a lot happening in TV at the moment, and I just wanted to give an update on my thoughts about some of the bigger series dominating discussion.

I’ve already written reviews of the first few episodes of The House of the Dragon, Rings of Power and She-Hulk when they premiered, so here are my thoughts midway through their runs as well as my initial reaction to the new Star Wars show Andor.

House of the Dragon – HBO Max – 3 stars

At the halfway mark of the ten-episode first season of The House of the Dragon, the verdict thus far is that the show is not as good as its culture dominating predecessor…but it’s also not bad.

Fortunately, the first season of the Game of Thrones prequel has gotten progressively better with each successive episode.

A big part of that improvement has been the evolution of lead actress Milly Alcock as Princess Rhaenyra. Alcock’s growing comfort in the role has mirrored her character’s maturation and it’s been compelling to watch.

In fact, almost all of the acting in The House of the Dragon has been sturdy, if not stellar. The lone exception being Emily Carey as Alicent Hightower, who is not particularly charismatic and has never fully grasped her role with any vigor.

Alcock and Carey are set to be replaced in the next few episodes by Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke respectively, who will play their characters as adults, and it remains to be seen if this transition will work seamlessly. I admit I have my doubts but hope for the best.

But overall, thus far The House of the Dragon stands out among the latest batch of prestige TV offerings because of its terrific cast – most notably Paddy Considine and Matt Smith, truly superb production design and costumes, and for its writing.

The show isn’t perfect by any stretch and is in many ways a distant shadow of its predecessor, but to its credit it definitely keeps you engaged, and that’s good enough for me.

Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power – Amazon Prime Video - .5 stars

Five episodes into the eight-episode first season of The Rings of Power and the series feels like it’s the Titanic…not the movie Titanic but the actual ship that sank into the Atlantic and sent 1,500 souls to their icy death. Episode five seems like the moment the Titanic went vertical just before its steep plunge to its watery grave.

The truth is that The Rings of Power is just an atrocious tv show.

What’s astounding to me is that Amazon supposedly spent a billion Bezos bucks to make this show and yet it looks unconscionably cheap. The sets and costumes are laughable and look like something from a high school drama class. The background actors too are abysmal, and the dearth of background actors populating the crowd scenes further undermines the credibility of the show.

But the two biggest culprits in The Rings of Power’s demise are the cast and the writing.

The cast are, across the board, dreadful. Morfyyd Clark plays the lead role Galadriel (or as some have mockingly called her – GUY-ladriel) and she is woefully miscast and criminally under-directed. Clark is an aggressively grating screen presence at best and is so unathletic and ungraceful as to be astounding. Galadriel is meant to be the hero but is one of the most annoying and unlikable characters in recent tv history.

Another awful performance comes from Ismael Cruz Cordova as Arondir the Elf. Cordova seems to have had charisma bypass surgery and is a chore to watch.

The rest of the cast are equally sub-par. It’s impossible to not compare and contrast The Rings of Power to The House of the Dragon as they premiered in the same time frame and are both “fantasy” shows. The thing that stands out so much between the shows is that The House of the Dragon is inhabited by professional, high-quality actors, and The Rings of Power rolls with second and third-rate actors and rank amateurs.

Another comparison of note between the two shows is that The Rings of Power’s production design and costumes are a bad joke compared to The House of the Dragon, as is The Ring of Power fight choreography, which is an utter clown show (the scene where Galadriel teaches Numenorian soldiers to fight is jaw-droppingly bad and ridiculous).

Ultimately, The Rings of Power seems like nothing but a low quality, CW-level fantasy soap opera that used Bezos’s big bucks to buy the prestige of the Tolkien name. It’s the equivalent of putting a Rolls-Royce hood ornament on the front of a Ford Pinto.

She-Hulk – Disney + - zero stars

Speaking of pieces of shit…It’s actually somewhat astonishing that despite seeming an impossible task, She-Hulk, which is six episodes in to its nine-episode first season, has managed to get more awful with each successive episode.

When I’m in the midst of watching it, She-Hulk feels like not only the worst show on tv right now, but the worst show to have ever appeared on any television at any time.

She-Hulk is allegedly a comedy but it’s as funny as watching an autopsy. I’ve never once cracked a smile viewing this shitshow.

The writing, acting, special effects and production design for She-Hulk are all an abomination.

Tatiana Maslany is just dreadful as She-Hulk, and her supporting cast are equally abysmal.

Anyone and everyone associated with this horrible show should be imprisoned for the rest of their natural born lives.

Andor – Disney + - 3 stars

Andor, which premiered its first three episodes of its twelve-episode first season this past Wednesday, is a prequel set five years before the events of the film Rogue One, which I consider to be one of the better Star Wars movies and certainly the best of the newest bunch.

In a case of benefiting from very low expectations, and considering the two catastrophically awful shows that preceded it – Obi Wan Kenobi and The Book of Boba Fett, my expectations were extraordinarily low, I find myself enjoying Andor.

A big reason why I like the show thus far is that it looks terrific. The set design is so much better than the previous two Star Wars shows, which looked terribly low budget and cheap. On Andor, every set has a tangible, grounded, gritty feel to it, and looks like a real place not just some generic set on a studio back lot.

In addition, the overall aesthetic of Andor feels sort of like the corporate dystopia of Blade Runner. The show has been described as a Star Wars series for adults, and I tend to agree with that as it doesn’t genuflect to the cutesy nonsense that so often overwhelms the franchise. The show is like a real story, a sort of spy thriller, that just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe.

As for the acting, I’m not much of a fan of Diego Luna but thus far I think he’s been very good as Cassian Andor. Luna brings a sense of wounding and grievance to the role that is palpable and very compelling.

Other smaller roles are also done quite well. For instance, Rupert Vansittart is phenomenal as Chief Hyne, a superbly cynical bureaucrat. In a small scene that in lesser hands would’ve been mundane and throw away, Vansittart brings his skill and craftsmanship to bear and turns it into the best scene of the series, and maybe any Star Wars series, so far.

Andor still has nine episodes to go, so a lot can go right or wrong for it from here, but thus far I like the show and hope it keeps up its positive start. Consider me cautiously optimistic that Andor will be worth sticking with ‘til the end.

Thus concludes my TV round-up! I will check in with further thoughts at the end of the run of each of these series.

©2022

The Rings of Power: Amazon's Weaponization of Tolkien and Tokens

Oligarch Jeff “Sauron” Bezos is using craven culture war issues like “diversity, inclusion and representation” to deceive liberals/progressives into fighting for his diabolical corporation and the 1%.

The Agenda. The relentless, tedious, ever-present Agenda, has come to Middle-Earth.

Amazon’s long-awaited, highly-anticipated, extraordinarily expensive, Lord of the Rings tv series, The Rings of Power, has finally arrived, and thus far it is only notable for its artistic shortcomings and its slavish commitment to the insidious Agenda of diversity, inclusion and representation over quality.

Amazon’s Sauron-in-Chief, Jeffrey Bezos, wanted his own Game of Thrones type fantasy series, so he paid $250 million for the rights to the appendices from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and committed upwards of a billion dollars of his sweatshop empire’s gains for five seasons of elves, dwarves, hobbits (harfoots) and orcs.  

The first two episodes of the series premiered on Amazon Prime Video Thursday September 1st, and they are, to be kind, rather uninspiring. The series may well improve dramatically over the next six episodes of season one, I certainly hope it does, but thus far it has been slow and rather unsteady going.

What is most enlightening about The Rings of Power though is that the heated discussion around the show is much more energetic than the show itself.

In case you haven’t heard, the series has a diverse cast of “actors of color”, and features three feminist heroines as its leads, which some argue is contrary to the source material written by J.R.R. Tolkien.

This debate around the show’s “diverse” casting and its centering of three female leads, which has infuriated some and delighted others, at least has passion, whereas The Rings of Power feels diabolically staid and sterile.

THE PLAYBOOK

As for that debate and the ever-insistent Agenda, the reality is that for Amazon, or any studio releasing a product into the public, controversy around casting “minority” actors and featuring female leads is a feature, not a bug.

This is all part of the plan and right out of a well-worn playbook.

The playbook is as follows.

1.   Cast “actors of color” or women in roles that traditionally would be played by white actors or men and heavily market the “diverse and inclusive” casting.

2.   Claim victimhood, which in our current era conveys cultural status, by alleging “racist/sexist attacks” on the diverse cast leading up to the premiere of the film or series.

3.   Create the paradigm where liberals/progressives feel that supporting the film/series is a way for them to signal their virtue and believe they are being actively “anti-racist/anti-sexist” (in other words it makes them feel like they’re actually fighting injustice by watching a movie or tv show).

4.   Stigmatize all criticism of the film/tv show by conflating criticism of the film/series with racism/sexism, which results in critiques of any kind from fans and professional critics being stifled and self-censored.

5.   Claim all negative fan reviews on various review aggregator sites are the result of “review bombing” by racist/sexist trolls on have banned or banished.

6.   As the controversy heightens, put out inflated viewership numbers as well as a carefully crafted statement declaring the parent company/studio “stands with” the diverse cast and against racism of all kinds.

7. Declare moral victory (“we did the right thing!”) no matter how spectacularly the film/tv show fails.

That’s the basics of the playbook, which Disney and Amazon in particular, have used extensively in recent years.

THE OBJECTIVE

These manufactured racial/gender cultural conflagrations and their paradigm of stigmatizing criticism as racism/sexism, are meant to trigger conservatives/traditionalist into attacking and liberals and progressives into defending.

The most troubling aspect is the libneral/progressives who are triggered into vociferously defending a corporate entertainment product, and by default unconsciously or consciously aligning with the nefarious corporation behind the film/tv product, all because a film/tv series is now nothing more than a proxy battle in the culture war.

In the case of The Rings of Power, the racial/gender casting issue is meant to inflame conservatives/traditionalist and actually distract liberals/progressives from a bigger issue. Instead of noticing that Amazon is a company that exploits its workers to a shocking and disgusting degree and that Bezos is one of the most deplorable people on the planet, liberals/progressives now go to battle for their ideological opponents, in this case Amazon and billionaire Bezos, rather than against them.

This distractionary tactic works incredibly well because liberal/progressives have been conditioned to downplay tangible economic issues in favor of more amorphous, emotionally resonant issues like race, gender and sexual orientation.

In addition, liberals/progressives have also been conditioned to never actually debate or discuss these topics but rather simply resort to bigoteering and calling anyone and everyone who disagrees with you a racist/sexist. In other words, no argument need be made, all one has to do is give a reflexive display of righteousness, virtue signal and claim victory.

The liberals/progressives currently baring their teeth to alleged “racists” and “sexists” over The Rings of Power, are the ones who should, in theory, be outside Bezos’ mansion with pitchforks and torches (think of how hyper-racialization in our cultural politics completely destroyed the Occupy Wall Street movement and spirit), or at least trying to hold Amazon’s feet to the fire in terms of unionization, not defending them.

THE EVIDENCE

Make no mistake, all of this outrage and controversy is staged and manufactured for corporate benefit. The playbook is obvious.

If Amazon had wanted to make gobs of money it could have followed the very clear path already cleared by director Peter Jackson, who made three Lord of the Rings movies and three Hobbit movies which in total made roughly $6 billion.

But instead, Amazon pushed aside Jackson and decided to go for social engineering rather than servicing Tolkien fans who have proven their loyalty and commitment to mostly faithful adaptations.

This is similar to how Disney continuously chooses to alienate its Marvel and Star Wars fans with social engineering instead of giving them what worked in the past, which is what they want and what they will gladly fork over their money for.

Also note how Amazon has flexed its muscles to get media outlets to rush out dubious sob stories from The Rings of Power cast about allegedly facing “racist” or “sexist” backlash prior to the series premiere, just like Disney does with every Marvel and Star Wars movie or series.

Also notice how Amazon, like Disney before them, shouts from the rooftops about the insidious racist “review bombing” against The Rings of Power on rotten tomatoes. Amazon has gone so far as to halt reviews of the series being placed on the Amazon website in order to stifle “racist trolls”.

Of course, there’s no proof that any review bombing is going on, or that people leaving negative reviews are racist…but that reality is inconvenient to Amazon and so it isn’t just ignored, but disparaged. And as an aside, why isn’t it ever considered review bombing when it is positive reviews inundating rotten tomatoes?

In keeping with the playbook, Amazon claimed without evidence that 25 million viewers watched the premier episode of The Rings of Power (this is contradicted by a SambaTV report with significantly lower viewership numbers – 1.8 million in US). Amazon also just put out a brave statement saying they stand with their actors of color and reject all “racist attacks” from deplorable fans – who they claim aren’t really fans at all. As Dan Rather would say, “courage”.

THE AGENDA

The fact is that Amazon sullying Tolkien’s timeless myth with the insipid cultural politics of today is not the least bit shocking considering that in 2021 Amazon Studios released its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” playbook which lays out the rules and regulations regarding diversity quotas (50% of all creative roles must be women and/or from under-represented groups) on all Amazon Studio projects.

In other words, the plan all along was to turn Tolkien into tokens for Amazon and Bezos’ cultural political gain. They tried the same thing with their deservedly-much-maligned and ultimately ignored fantasy series The Wheel of Time.  Of course, to speak this obvious truth is met with even more shrill cries of “racist!” and “sexist!”

Amazon’s “Diversity, Inclusion and Representation” playbook makes it very clear that the company is committed to a cultural/political agenda and is not interested in the quality of their product or…and this is still shocking to consider…how much money it makes in its entertainment division.

Of course, one wonders if Amazon and Disney and all the rest will hit a point where their social engineering becomes too financially untenable to continue?

The answer to that might be as simple as “get woke, go broke”. Either that or this social engineering is here to stay because these entertainment behemoths are too big to fail and will only expand their monopolies and eliminate all opposing voices. The current sorry, sycophantic state of professional film/tv criticism indicates they’re well on their way to snuffing out dissent.

THE LAPDOG

The easily manipulated liberal/progressive Pavlovian response to all things race and gender related is perfectly summed up in a review of The Rings of Power from LA Times critic Robert Lloyd. Lloyd reveals his inability to actually think, nevermind have an original thought, by regurgitating the most weak-kneed, shallow and vacuous drivel imaginable.

For example, Lloyd writes of The Rings of Power,

“And sometimes (some) fans defend the wrong things, as when attacking the production for its foregrounding of female roles and casting actors of color where Tolkien (and Jackson, following his lead) only saw white.”

Tolkien “only saw white” because he was writing a myth for Northern Europeans using folklore from those regions where mostly, if not all, of the people are white. It should also be noted that Tolkien created the entire Lord of the Rings universe…so it’s his and his vision. Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, only saw white because he was, shock of shocks, trying to stay true to Tolkien’s written word.

Lloyd then actually unintentionally makes the case that the fans now being labelled “racist” have made all along, that Tolkien’s work is clearly designed as a founding myth for Norther Europeans/English, and casting it with “people of color” undermines the author’s intent.

“Evidence has been advanced to show that Tolkien was anti-racist in life, but there is no getting around the fact that in his books, Northern European types save the day from swarthy types from the South and East, who are characterized with giant elephants and (as in Jackson’s “The Return of the King”) quasi-Arabic garb.”

Lloyd’s use of the term “anti-racist” is revealing, as it’s a nod to his political tribe that he has “done all the reading”, including Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s egregiously vapid book How to be an Anti-Racist.

It’s also telling that the haughty and insolent Lloyd still manages, despite “evidence…that Tolkien was anti-racist” to smear the great author as a racist in the same sentence.

Lloyd then lets readers know that he’s truly one of the good white guys when he writes,

“To be honest, I was a little worried the series would continue in that distasteful vein and happy to see that it did not; Tolkien, some would say, was just a man of his time, but these are different times.”

Bravo Mr. Lloyd on the virtue signal! It’s glorious how Lloyd rides in on his white steed and tells us that he’s glad that Tolkien’s “distasteful” approach when writing one of the greatest selling books of all-time, has been discarded, which makes him “happy”. Lloyd sounds like like a toddler getting ice cream after his tantrum forces his parents to take the filet mignon away.

Lloyd then makes his intellectual insipidness completely clear as he writes,

“(I reject out of hand all arguments that employ the word “woke” or use “diversity” in a negative sense.)”

Replace the words “woke” and “diversity” with “Jesus freak” and “Christ” and this is the type of thing you’d say if you were some backwards ass bible-thumper.

Rejecting the notion that “diversity” can be anything but good is an indicator of one’s blind faith and strict adherence to dogma, not someone with a serious and vibrant intellectual yearning. “Diversity” to the woke is like the divinity of Christ to the Christian. It can never be up for debate. It only just is…and it is always good.

God knows I fear nothing more than being dismissed by Lloyd as an unserious critic, but I must say, Lloyd’s blanket banning of the term “woke” and his refusal to consider the nuances of “diversity” clearly outs him as a devout member of the Church of Wokeness and a frivolous, insignificant thinker to boot.

What is most amusing is that Lloyd then follows this supercilious inanity up with an admission that The Rings of Power does, in fact, do what many of the alleged “racists” claim it does.

“The Rings of Power” does, in a few instances, too obviously adopt the language of modern American prejudice to make a point, but that is a matter of poor writing rather than a bad idea.”

Because Lloyd is so self-righteous and has spent so much energy signaling his virtue, he believes he can make the same complaint other people have made – that the show is too contemporary in its cultural politics, but avoid being labelled “racist”, even as he himself calls those people with the same opinion as him “racist”. Incredible.

CONCLUSION

In the final analysis, all of this venting and vexing about “diversity’ and “inclusion” and “representation” is just meant to divide and distract.

Amazon uses the same bigoteering, divide and conquer playbook as Disney and every other major corporation in America which were so quick to shout “Black Lives Matter!” when it was a convenient way to signal their virtue and cover their asses. This is the same playbook the ruling elite use to maintain the corrupt power structure by keeping the proles at bay and constantly at each other’s throats.

Divide and conquer has kept the oligarchs and the American aristocracy on the throne of power time immemorial. And will continue to do so because the myopic, historically illiterate American populace is being relentlessly indoctrinated by an insidiously deceptive corporate media day in and day out, thus rendering the majority of Americans, who are emotionalist fools, completely incapable of any critical thought.

Ultimately, the sub-par series The Rings of Power is not entertaining, but it is enlightening, because it’s an obvious example of the strings of power being pulled by the elites to manipulate people into fighting for their true enemy (Amazon and Bezos), rather than against them.

©2022

Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney +): The Final Verdict

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

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Disney + money-grab of a mini-series has finally come to its miserable conclusion.

I wrote a wholly negative review of the first three episodes of the show and remarkably the series managed to make the last three episodes even worse than the first three.

A drunk toddler playing with its feces in a bathtub has more commitment to narrative coherence than the makers of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s not hyperbole to say that Obi-Wan Kenobi is so illogical, idiotic and imbecilic as to be insulting.

For example, not once, not twice, but three times in this series, a character is killed/left for dead and then comes back to life.

Reva Sevander (played by the impossibly awful actress Moses Ingram) dramatically “kills” the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) by stabbing him with her light saber…and then he pulls a Lazarus and shows up again later. Darth Vader slices and dices Reva with his light saber but then, for some completely inconceivable reason, doesn’t finish her but just walks away and she goes on to no doubt get a shitty spin-off series (God help us!). And then there’s the Obi Wan and Vader battle where Obi-Wan vanquishes the evil one with some fine light sabering but decides to…you guessed it, just walk away instead of killing him.

To the show’s credit, the Obi Wan – Vader fight in the finale contains some of the few visually pleasing shots in the entire anemically photographed show, but for some ungodly reason they end up turning the cinematic light saber duel into a literal rock fight. Sigh.

Besides the apparent ineffectiveness of the light saber to kill anyone, other egregious inanities abound.

For example, in the finale Vader’s star destroyer is chasing and firing upon a transport vehicle filled with every single member of a rebel group, including Obi Wan. Obi Wan, in a cringy scene with O’Shea Jackson Jr., or as I call him Li’l Ice Cube, who is so bad at acting he makes his ham-handed father Ice Cube look like Sir Laurence Olivier, decides to leave the ship to distract Vader.

Obi-Wan then jets off in a small shuttle and Vader says ‘go after him instead of the rebel transport’. The Grand Inquisitor wisely retorts, ‘hey, we can kill the entire resistance right now if we go after the transport…’, and Vader says, ‘nah…let’s take this big star destroyer and follow Obi Wan instead’. Of course, anyone with half a brain in their head would say, ‘hey Darth, why don’t you go after Obi Wan in your own ship and we’ll kill the rebels?’  But no, that makes too much sense.

So then what happens? The star destroyer follows Obi Wan to some planet and then Vader says, ‘hey everybody, I’m gonna take my own ship down to the planet because I want to fight Obi Wan alone!’ If I were working on that star destroyer Vader would most definitely have strangled me because I would’ve told him, ‘Hey genius, why didn’t you do that in the first place so we could kill the resistance and finally put an end to all this stupid bullshit and put us all out of our fucking misery?’

It's this sort of clownish, childish storytelling that makes Obi-Wan Kenobi just not brutally bad but downright offensive.

The other absurd thing about the entire enterprise is that, as I stated in my initial review, it’s based entirely on false jeopardy. Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, Leia, Luke and his aunt and uncle, are never in actual danger because we know they’re going to live to star the cavalcade of movies about their futures that we’ve all seen already.

The whole series is like an grown-up watching home movies of themselves at the beach when they were a kid and trying to convince themselves they might have been eaten by a shark. You know you weren’t eaten by a shark because you’re sitting here two decades later entirely uneaten watching videos of yourself playing in the sand.  

And of course, the acting in Obi Wan Kenobi, sans a committed Ewen McGregor, is just as atrocious in the final three episodes as it was in the first three.

For example, I kept praying that they would just replace the terrible little kid playing Leia with Peter Dinklage in a wig. And I’ve already written much about the awfulness of Moses Ingram as Reva, and God-damn she is still utterly abysmal.

The thing that horrifies me about the monument to empty tokenism that is Moses Ingram’s acting career is that the ending of Obi-Wan Kenobi makes it perfectly clear that they intend to give this lackluster character and the talentless actress who plays her a spin-off series. One can only imagine the artistic and creative depths of the Disney/Star Wars septic tank that will be dredged to bring that turd to life.

In conclusion, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a great character, but Obi-Wan Kenobi is a truly heinous and atrocious, dead-on-arrival series which, if there is any mercy in the universe, will not see a season two.

If Disney does pull the trigger and there is a season two of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and/or a spin-off Reva Sevander series, the only sane response will be to simply say…May the Force Go Fuck Itself.

©2022

Obi Wan Kenobi (Disney +) : A TV Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The first three episodes of this pile of crap feature some of the very worst writing, performances and direction in Star Wars history. So much so that I have lost all hope that the final three will be even remotely worthwhile.

We need to talk about the new Disney Plus series Obi Wan Kenobi. I just watched the first three episodes (the only three released thus far) of the six-episode series and holy shit. It isn’t just bad, it’s absolutely, ridiculously, insanely fucking atrocious. It is a gigantic monument to artistic, creative and narrative incompetence.

To set the context of my thoughts it should be noted that I am not a Star Wars fanatic or fanboy. I am not particularly well-versed in Star Wars mythology and lore but I do find it compelling and fascinating. That said, I have seen all the films and live-action tv shows but more out of pop culture duty and/or work obligations than anything else.

My aggravation over Obi Wan Kenobi has nothing to do with some betrayal of Star Wars canon, no my anger is because the writing, casting, directing and acting (save for Ewen McGregor – who, not surprisingly, does solid work in it) is so beyond amateurish as to be offensive. I mean, how can Disney pass this steaming pile of horseshit off on audiences and expect anybody to take it, or them, seriously?

Let’s begin with the basic premise of the show. Set in between The Revenge of the Sith (the third prequel film) and A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie), the series tells the tale of Obi Wan (Ewen McGregor reprising his role from the prequel films) as he watches over young Luke Skywalker, and eventually, young Princess Leia.

As a basic storytelling venture, Obi Wan Kenobi is already at cross-purposes with itself because if you put Obi Wan and Leia in danger in the show, viewers already know they’ll survive since there are mountains of movies in the storyline set after this mini-series that audiences have already seen which proves that point. As a big wig writer in Hollywood recently told me during a discussion about the show, Obi Wan Kenobi is based entirely on “false jeopardy”, which sounds like a direct-to-video Bruce Willis action romp. So, there’s no drama created when Obi Wan and Leia are put in jeopardy in the series because we all know they aren’t really in danger because we’ve followed their storylines for forty years.

Speaking of danger, the action sequences In Obi Wan Kenobi are the worst I can remember in a film or tv series. Deborah Chow directed the entirety of the series and she is so hapless and hopeless in the director’s chair that she should not only be banned from directing ever again for the length of her natural born life, but also, as a punitive measure, be banned from watching any sort of entertainment ever again.

An example of Ms. Chow’s incompetence is a fight in episode three, the details of which I will refrain from sharing for spoiler reasons, that is so visually and viscerally anemic and so devoid of any sort of narrative logic, that it looked and felt like something a mental defective child in a North Korean prison created while playing with straw action figures.

There’s also the absurd and ridiculous sequence where ten-year-old Little Leia runs away from three adult male kidnappers and it looks like parents letting their toddler score a touchdown during a family’s Thanksgiving Day touch football game so as to avoid a tantrum. The men (who are truly dismal at pretending to chase someone) in the scene keep running into fallen trees while pursuing Leia, who is apparently the most unathletic girl in the universe, as she “runs” away from them like she’s running under forty feet of water.

The girl cast as the ten-year-old Leia is nine-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair, who besides running like a midget with polio also happens to portray the most annoying character in the Star Wars universe since Jar Jar Binks. I know Leia grows up to be a hottie in a bikini at the end of Jabba’s leash in Return of the Jedi, but I kept wishing Obi Wan would just pull out his lightsaber and slice this annoying brat in two and put us all out of our misery.

The casting of an annoying nine-year-old who looks (and runs) like a four-year-old to play a ten-year-old, isn’t the only casting atrocity in Obi Wan Kenobi.

Moses Ingram is cast as the villain Reva Sevander and is the worst adult actor to ever appear in a Star Wars film or series, which is saying a lot considering even in Obi Wan Kenobi alone film director-turned-actor Benny Safdie and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea give abysmal performances in supporting roles.

Ingram’s Reva is a critical role, she’s supposed to be the big bad villain but she has all the presence of a tumbleweed. Ingram’s line readings are elementary-school-drama-class-reject level of God-awful and her inability to even remotely conjure some sort of menace is staggering to behold. The character of Reva would’ve had considerably more life to it if they had cast a cigar store wooden Indian in the role instead. The bottom line is that Moses Ingram’s performance is an absolute and utter embarrassment, so much so that, as insane as it sounds, I actually feel bad for her.

Adding to my discomfort for Ms. Ingram is the allegation that she has received racist comments on Instagram from Star Wars fans. If true, that is revolting and reprehensible. But I must say, I have my doubts about the voracity of those claims, not because I have some undying belief in the goodness of humanity…I don’t, but because I don’t trust Disney or its culture warrior minions in the slightest.

In the plethora of articles I’ve read about the alleged racist comments from rabid Star Wars fans, all but one has failed to actually share what any of the racist comments are, so I’ve yet to see them. The one article that did quote them said that Ingram has received “"hundreds" of racist and threatening messages, with one telling her "you're [sic] days are numbered" and another using the N-word.”

I find this less than compelling evidence that there is a cavalcade of racism coming at Ms. Ingram. I’m sorry but someone commenting that “you’re [sic] days are numbered” is not necessarily a racist attack, it could be someone saying that she will be fired for sucking at acting – which she should be because she does in fact suck at it.

The “n-word” comment is obviously repugnant, repulsive, egregious and disgusting, but if those two comments are the worst of the “hundreds” of allegedly awful racist ones – which the article implies that they are, then that seems like Disney and its stenographers in the establishment media and online are making a mountain out of a molehill by conflating criticism with racism.

Now why would Disney conflate criticism and racism and promote the idea that one of their minority actors is being inundated with racist attacks online? Because that helps Disney signal its woke bona fides as a diverse and inclusive company, and also acts as a way to limit any criticism of the show, even non-racist criticism, by creating the paradigm that being negative towards Obi Wan Kenobi is racist and being a supporter of the show is a way to signal anti-racist virtue.  

I, of course, could not care less about the color of Ms. Ingram’s skin, I just care if she can act or not, and the evidence I’ve seen thus far is a very compelling indictment regarding her acting ability, or more specifically, her decided lack of it.

The Moses Ingram story aside, the reality is that Obi Wan Kenobi is an utter creative disaster for Disney and its Star Wars property. If this were a one-off error than you could brush it aside. But Obi Wan Kenobi being bad and boring comes on the heels of the series The Book of Boba Fett being bad and boring. The Mandalorian was a terrific series that I greatly enjoyed, but batting .300 will get you into the hall of fame in baseball, but in the Disney Star Wars universe will get you to the hall of shame…and this doesn’t even factor in the shitty the Star Wars movies of recent years.

The same is true regarding Disney’s Marvel behemoth, which, post Endgame, has been stumbling and staggering around like a barefoot drunk on a frozen lake. The Marvel tv shows have been mostly miss, and even the hits have been mediocrities, and Disney’s Marvel movies since Endgame have been relentlessly egregious misfires.

I could not care less about the health of Disney, but the truth is that they are perilously close to shitting all over themselves and both their Star Wars and Marvel properties, to such a massive degree that they’ll never be able to remove the stink.

If the next batch of Star Wars shows coming out this year, which include Andor and Ashoka, are on the same level of bad as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, then Disney is in deep doo-doo indeed.

That will suck for Disney, but it will suck even more for the legion of Star Wars fans, who, alleged racist assholes aside, deserve considerably better.  

©2022

Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

'The Book of Boba Fett' and the Future of Star Wars

‘The Book of Boba Fett’ may be a warning sign of Star Wars’ creative bankruptcy.

The Disney Plus series was a miserable misfire, as it relied on nostalgia to cover up its incompetent storytelling.

‘The Book of Boba Fett’, the once highly anticipated spin-off series to the stellar Disney Plus show ‘The Mandalorian’, limped to its first season finale on January 9. To say the show went out with a whimper would be a massive understatement.

When the series premiered back in December, I wrote that the show was bursting with potential but got off to a very slow start. Unfortunately, ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ never morphed into a page turner as it got bogged down by atrocious writing, anemic acting, derivative direction, lethargic action sequences and second-rate sets, costumes and special effects.

Boba Fett has long been one of the most mysterious and beloved of Star Wars characters. Despite not appearing in the original film and only having four lines of dialogue in the entire original trilogy, Boba Fett became a fan favorite because he was such a mysterious and intriguing presence.

Boba sparked the imagination of Star Wars fans like few other characters could, but the series dedicated to telling his story has disappointed fans because their imaginations are no doubt more vibrant than the suits at Disney who saw Boba Fett as little more than a vehicle for flaccid fan service and a nostalgia delivery system.

It's an act of creative malpractice that ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ turned the bounty hunter Boba Fett from badass into boring, and considering that the character was the franchise’s most iconic and interesting untapped resource, wasting this storytelling opportunity is an egregious sin.  

The failure of ‘The Book of Boba Fett’, and make no mistake the series is an abysmal failure, could be seen as merely a bump in the road, especially considering the dramatic success of its immediate predecessor ‘The Mandalorian’. But it could also be an ominous sign for the road ahead for the Star Wars franchise as a whole.

Despite hitting some major bumps in the road, like the cringe-worthy prequels and the woke-ified and feminized sequel trilogy, Star Wars has been a consistent cash cow for the 45 years it has been in existence. But you can only hit so many bumps before the wheels fall off the wagon, and in the wake of ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ one wonders if the franchise has an especially bumpy ride ahead.

As of right now Star Wars has no movies lined up to hit the big screens until December of 2023, a full four years after ‘The Rise of Skywalker’, and even that date might be optimistic.

So, the only thing for the Star Wars faithful to watch for the next two years are a bevy of Star Wars tv series which could be awesome or they could be awful.

‘The Mandalorian’ season 3 is set to premier in the second half of 2022, and if it’s anything like the previous two seasons, it should be terrific. Although, one of the most dynamic characters from the series was Cara Dune, who was played by Gina Carano. Carano was fantastic in the role but after she was labelled a heretic by the woke inquisition, Disney kicked her to the curb, and it remains to be seen if the show can adequately replace her and keep its creative momentum.

Also expected to arrive on Disney Plus this year is ‘Andor’, a prequel to the Star Wars film ‘Rogue One’ which tells the backstory of Rebel spy Cassian Andor. The series stars Diego Luna, and the biggest question is if, like Pedro Pascal in ‘The Mandalorian’, Luna can carry a series, or if like Tamuera Morrison in ‘The Book of Boba Fett’, he lacks the required gravitas to captivate audiences for a full series.

After ‘Andor’, the series ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ is scheduled to premiere in the latter half of 2022. The show is set ten years after ‘Revenge of the Sith’ and features Ewan McGregor reprising his role as Obi Wan from the sequel films.

With McGregor starring, ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ has no concerns about whether its lead is compelling, but there are still some concerning red flags. For instance, the series was scheduled to shoot in July of 2020 but Disney put it on hold because the scripts were so bad. Considering the abysmal writing for ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ passed muster at Disney, one can only imagine how god-awful the ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ scripts must have been.

And when you consider that the paper-thin story of Boba Fett could only be stretched out into seven episodes, two of which ignored the lead character, and that ‘Obi Wan Kenobi’ is set to be only six episodes, it’s easy to think that this series might be, like ‘The Book of Boba Fett’, nothing more than empty nostalgia.

Other series without set release dates which may or may not hit Disney Plus before December of 2023 are ‘The Acolyte’, ‘Ahsoka’, ‘Lando’, and ‘A Droid Story’.  

Star Wars has always attracted viewers and always made money, but with Disney exploiting the fans desire for all things Star Wars by expanding the franchise, the very real possibility of overexposure, market saturation, and creative bankruptcy, which will lead to either fan disinterest or outright rebellion, exists.

If Disney goes for quantity over quality with its Star Wars tv shows and movies, eventually the brand will lose its luster and, like an imploded death star, be left a useless, hulking shell of its former self, as well as a stark reminder of the consequences of bad decisions by leadership.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2022

The Book of Boba Fett -Episode One Initial Reaction

‘The Book of Boba Fett’ series is bursting with potential but is off to a very slow start.

The new Disney Plus show can go either way after its uneven first episode is a mixed-bag of flashbacks and mediocre fight sequences.

This article contains minor spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett.

In the wake of the critically and commercially successful Star Wars series The Mandalorian, streaming service Disney Plus has gone back to the well with the new spin-off series, The Book of Boba Fett.

Boba Fett, the bounty hunter who famously bagged Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, is a character that has long been adored by Star Wars fans, and when he made his surprising return in The Mandalorian (surprising because he had seemingly died in Return of the Jedi), it was met with raucous applause from the Star Wars faithful.

Now Boba is no longer a background or supporting player, his name is on the marquee, but after watching the somewhat uneven first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, it’s too soon to tell if the infamous bounty hunter has the star power to hold audience’s attention over the course of a seven-episode series.

The Book of Boba Fett, which stars Temuera Morrison as Fett and Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand, a mercenary and assassin, premiered its first episode on Wednesday December 28, and will release a new episode for the next six Wednesdays, for a total of seven in all.  

The opening episode, written by Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man and creator of The Mandalorian) and directed by Robert Rodriguez, is titled ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’, and it uses flashbacks to show some of Boba Fett’s strange journey after he went into the Sarlacc’s mouth on Tattooine in Return of the Jedi, up to the present day where he is a crime boss sitting on Jabba the Hutt’s old throne.

Fett’s history deeply informs his present, and so the flashbacks make complete narrative sense, but that said, they also slow down the pace of the program, leaving it at times on the precipice of tedium.

Also hampering the show, at least thus far, are some pretty sub-par action sequences. One fight with Boba Fett and Fennec Shand against a group of anonymous ninja assassins on the streets of Mos Espa, is very poorly choreographed and shot, so much so that it looks amateurish.

Although in contrast, there is a solid sand battle between Boba Fett and a very cool looking sand beast in one of the many flashbacks. Hopefully this sequence, and not the predictable and dull fight in Mos Espa, is a preview of the type of action we can expect in the coming episodes.

The visuals of the show also leave something to be desired, as the cinematography of the first episode is painfully rudimentary, and lacks imagination or cinematic flair.

As for the cast, again, thus far it could go either way. Morrison is not a particularly compelling screen presence, and neither is Ming-Na Wen, but there’s always the possibility that they find their sea legs and grow into their characters as the series continues.

As the show moves forward, there are some potentially intriguing storylines. For example, the mayor of Mos Espa refuses to pay tribute to Boba, and his representative even delivers an ominous threat to the crime boss, something which should lead to some fireworks down the road.

Another somewhat intriguing angle in the story is that while Boba Fett is obviously no shrinking violet as a crime lord, he also doesn’t want to be an arrogant and brutal tyrant like Jabba the Hutt.

For instance, Boba demands he walk around “on his own two feet” as he patrols the city of Mos Espa, because unlike Jabba he won’t be “carried around like a useless noble”. He follows that up with, “Jabba ruled with fear. I intend to rule with respect.”

Fett is no Jabba, he’s a working man’s crime boss. And he isn’t the cold-blooded bounty hunter of the past either, he is more forgiving. For example, he pardons two of Jabba’s bodyguards because they were loyal, and by sparing their lives they become loyal to him.

That said, Boba Fett still has the killer instinct when he needs to, like when he gloriously obliterates one of the ninja assassins who ambush him on the streets of Mos Espa in the best shot of the show so far.

This conflict within Boba Fett, and between Boba Fett and the world, has a great deal of dramatic and narrative promise, but the first episode leaves me uncertain as to whether this promise can ever be fulfilled.

I have to say, I felt the same way about The Mandalorian at first too. And the reason I am so cautious in my criticism of The Book of Boba Fett is because The Mandalorian got better and better with each episode, and I ended up absolutely loving the series even though I’m not much of a Star Wars aficionado.

Ultimately, after just one episode The Book of Boba Fett is too much of a mixed-bag and too uneven to make any judgements on whether the overall series will be worthwhile or not. Hopefully, this flawed series opener is the bottom and everything goes up from here.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Dune: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A visual marvel but ultimately a rather barren drama. Readers of the book will follow the action and bask in the film’s staggeringly sumptuous cinematography, but neophytes to the story will be left completely dumbfounded.

Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, has long been deemed “unfilmable”, and depending on your perspective regarding director Denis Villeneuve’s new ambitious big budget adaptation, that label may very well still apply.

Dune is a complex and complicated story of empires and religious mysticism set in a future that is structurally not too different from the medieval past. It’s sort of, but not exactly, a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars…but nowhere near as good as either.

In Dune, the planet Arrakis, a barren and desolate sandscape, is a key piece on the political chessboard because it’s the only place in the universe that has “spice”, which is both a hallucinogenic drug used by the Fremen – the Bedouin’s of Arrakis, but more importantly, a vital element that makes interstellar travel possible. Dune appears to be a loose metaphor for various empires lust for oil in the Middle East over the years.

The machinations that bring the rulers of House Atreidis, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their teenage son Paul (Timothee Chalamet) to Arrakis by imperial decree to replace the brutish House of Harkonnen, which has ruled the planet for generations, are never clearly spelled out in the film.

In fact, much of what happens in the film is not clearly spelled out, which is why the movie is so impenetrable for those who haven’t read the book. Fortunately for me, I’ve read enough of the book to know what was happening, but unfortunately not enough to why it’s happening.

The film is actually just “Part One” of Dune, and one can’t help but wonder if Warner Brothers is waiting to see how well the movie does at the box office before greenlighting further films.

It seems to me that the problem for Dune is that it’s much too esoteric and unexplainable to be able to generate enough of a box-office bonanza to induce funding for a second picture. This is also why the notion of Dune generating Star Wars/Marvel levels of excitement among audiences seems highly unlikely.

An issue with Dune is that, unlike the first Star Wars, it isn’t a stand-alone movie. Star Wars had a very a satisfying ending all its own – the destruction of the death star. The film’s sequels only added to that experience, they didn’t make it. With Dune, the ending of Part One is in no way satisfactory, and it’s relying on future films to elevate audience’s experiences.

In fact, Dune’s climactic scenes are so mundane and dramatically insignificant it feels like the main story hasn’t yet begun when the final credits roll.

What makes the Marvel franchise so successful is that it can be glorious for audience members who know the source material, as well as digestible and entertaining for viewers who’ve never read a comic book in their lives.

The same is not true for Dune. If you haven’t read ‘Dune’, you will, like the U.S. when it rolled into the Middle East thinking it would impose its will over cultures it didn’t know or understand, be overwhelmed by your ignorance and arrogance. The ‘Dune’ illiterate will be bogged down by their own ignorance-induced boredom, as the muck and mire of world building is a maze for which they lack a map. Forever lost amidst the dust and dizzying detritus of Dune, first-timers to the story will feel like foreigners and will quickly check out.

Director Villeneuve is known for making gorgeous looking films, the proof of which lies in the stunning cinematography of Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, and Dune is certainly no exception.

The movie is a visual marvel, and if that’s your cup of tea then I highly recommend you see the movie in theatres as opposed to on HBO Max. It really is impressive to behold. But with that said, Villeneuve’s visual feasts are often vast and stunning, but they can also leave you hungry for drama and humanity, and Dune is a perfect example of that too.

Timothee Chalamet is the film’s lead and to be frank, he has always been a mystery to me. A pretty boy with little substance and no physical presence, he feels like a manifestation of a pre-teen girl’s platonic fantasies.

Chalamet is a whisp of an actor and is devoid of the intensity and magnetism to carry a single movie, never mind a big budget franchise.

I suppose Chalamet is just eye-candy, another weapon in Villeneuve’s prodigiously gorgeous cinematic palette. But like much of Villeneuve’s beautifying flourishes, Chalamet feels entirely empty, like a miniature statue of David, or a high-end department store mannequin.

I enjoyed Dune as a cinematic experience because it’s such a beautifully photographed film, but I also understand that my interest in cinematography is not shared among the general populace. And I readily admit that this movie may very well flop, which is disappointing because as frustrating as it is, I’d still like to see Villeneuve make one or two more Dune films as the sort of high-end alternative to other less visually ambitious franchise movies…like Star Wars and Marvel.

Ultimately, fans who loved the book should see Dune in theatres as they’ll most likely enjoy the movie as they marinate in Villeneuve’s cinematic grandeur. But if you haven’t read the book, Dune is, like Arrakis, a very forbidding and foreboding land that is best avoided.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

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

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Thanks to the Courage of HBO Max, Racism is Now Gone With the Wind...and Frankly My Dear, I DO Give a Damn

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

 HBO Max has deemed Gone With the Wind racist and has pulled it from its service because viewers are apparently too fragile and too stupid to be allowed to watch it.

In recent weeks, as protestors carrying Black Lives Matter signs filled the streets, I have often heard it said that, “racism is a virus”. If that is true, then the new streaming service HBO Max just found the cure.

HBO Max’s simple and brutally effective treatment to eradicate racism from the world is to pull the 1939 classic Gone With the Wind from its service…for now…at least until it can bring the film back “with a discussion of its historical context”. Take that racism!!

Gone With the Wind, which is based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell, won 10 Academy Awards, including, ironically enough, the first ever for an African American – Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress. The movie is also the highest grossing film of all-time (adjusted for inflation) and is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all-time.

The film’s unforgivable sin though is that it is set in the American South during the Civil War and Reconstruction and depicts black slaves as a happy, content and well-treated bunch that adored their benevolent white masters.

Thankfully, HBO Max’s swift action will put an end to that highly popular theory, that seems to be everywhere nowadays, which states that African-Americans were much better off during the happy-go-lucky slavery era than today.

My fervent hope is that the geniuses at HBO Max and across Hollywood will now set their sights on other famous films from the past that cross the line of wokeness and offend the delicate sensibilities of us all.

For instance, all of the Star Wars films need to be tossed onto the woke bonfire immediately for their disgusting homophobia, which manifests itself in the C3PO character, an offensive stereotype of all closeted gay robots.

And how do you think members of the Sasquatch community feel when they see Chewbacca denying his obvious Sasquatch heritage and calling himself a “Wookie”, all while speaking some guttural, primitive language and carrying a laser-shooting crossbow? Won’t someone think of the Sasquatch?

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has got to go too, as while it may be historically accurate that doesn’t matter because you just know that anti-Semites watch that thing like its Nazi porn, which is just gross, and I simply cannot abide anybody enjoying anything for the wrong reasons…or the right reasons for that matter.

While we are on the subject of Nazis, The Sound of Music feels really Nazi friendly to me too, especially since its filled with all those smiling singing white people…so into the delete bin it goes.

As a student of history I can tell you that Dr. Zhivago is about Russia…I think… and the mainstream media and Hollywood have made it clear to me that Russians and Nazis are the same thing…so torch that damn movie!

Speaking of my vast knowledge of history, the 1956 classic, The Ten Commandments, needs to be exorcised from American screens immediately. Have you seen how negatively it portrays Egyptians? That seems really Islamophobic to me!

Titanic needs to be erased, not just because it has only white people in it, but because it sheds a bad light on the cruise ship industry and come on guys, corporations are people too.

Same thing goes for the Terminator franchise, which really slanders the tech industry with its negative portrayal of SkyNet. How do you think the folks in Silicon Valley feel when tech is seen as a malevolent force?

Speaking of the tech industry…in order to spare the feelings of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, if he is even capable of feeling, The Social Network needs to be banned forever and ever.

Boogie Nights really offended me personally because of its negative depiction of people with extremely large appendages, so it has got to go too!

And what about Citizen Kane? Yes, it does highlight the unconventional love between a boy and his sled, but on the other hand it really belittles the media-owning billionaire class (of which HBO Max is a member) and I just can’t abide by that…onto the bonfire it goes!

In fact, I think every film that makes anyone, anywhere, even slightly uncomfortable for any reason at all, needs to be not only banned, but all copies destroyed and the ashes then scattered to the winds. That way all hatred and prejudice of any kind will be permanently eradicated from the universe forever and ever…amen.

As for HBO Max, I think we should all take a knee in honor of their brave decision to save us from our own fragility and stupidity, and from the burden of freedom of choice, by not allowing us to watch Gone With the Wind without “context”.

The bottom line is this: where Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela all failed, HBO Max has gloriously succeeded. Racism is now definitively and irreversibly Gone With the Wind!

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

6th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™ Awards: 2019 Edition

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a 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 years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker - The geniuses at Disney decided it would be a good idea to strip the final film of the Skywalker saga of all dramatic consequences…well done shitbags! A mind numbingly incoherent movie that does away with death…and drama…and interest.

Knives Out - This is less a whodunit than a who-inherits-it. A film so full of white self loathing it should run for the Democratic nomination. It is nice to see director Rian Johnson ruining original films after he ruined his Star Wars movie.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix - One of the cheapest, least consequential and poorly made superhero movies in recent memory. Thankfully it is so flimsy you literally forget it as you watch it.

The Souvenir - This art house poseur is such a vacuous and pretentious piece of garbage it made me want to shoot heroin into my eyes. A truly awful film.

AND THE LOSER IS…Knives Out - If watching terrible over-acting, being completely bored to tears, and hating white people is your thing…then this steaming pile of shit is for you. This mess of a movie is so self-satisfied with its wokeness it is incessantly imbecilic to the point of absurdity. A glorious monument to everything that is currently wrong with Hollywood.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR - Julie Hagerty - Marriage Story : Julie Haggerty is a tour-de-force of awfulness in Marriage Story. Haggerty didn’t light up the screen but made me want to light myself on fire every time she appeared. Haggerty’s forced and strained performance felt like watching someone have a stroke while you are having a stroke.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story - Being Alive : You would be hard pressed to find a worse scene in cinema in recent history than the one in Marriage Story where Adam Driver gets up and sings “Being Alive” by Stephen Sondheim at a karaoke bar. Driver is a shitty actor…and this is a shitty movie…but this scene…which is interminable…is the apex mountain of pretentious shittiness. I have never wished harder for a random act of violence in a movie than I did watching this scene.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story : Establishment critics adore Noah Baumbach for some mysterious reason (I have a theory to explain it called the Elvis Costello Theory!). Marriage Story was Baumbach at his most pretentious and phony…and he brought the sycophantic worst out of his adoring critics. The praise for this movie is utterly baffling as this is an actively awful movie. The performances are dreadful, the writing trite and the direction amateurish…but besides that it was really good.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE - JJ Abrams : Rise of Skywalker - It takes a special kind of asshole to take a gigantic dump on a beloved forty year old movie franchise…;and JJ Abrams is that asshole. Abrams direction on Rise of Skywalker is jaw droppingly atrocious. The decision to remove death from the Star Wars universe basically undermined the entirety of the previous collection of films. His inability to even tell the most rudimentary of stories, or to put together a coherent film…earns JJ Abrams his Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Jeffrey Epstein - Epstein gets his much deserved plaque at the POS Hall of Fame this year for being an insatiable pederast, sexual predator, Israeli spy and for not even having the common decency to kill himself. Epstein is dead of course, but if you think he actually hung himself I have a no-longer-a-Virgin Island to sell you, round-trip Lolita Express transportation included.

Epstein’s fortune, which he used to get close to people in power whom he then compromised by luring them to his underage sex parties, is a complete mirage, no doubt created by Israeli intelligence in order to give him cover as he plied his despicable trade.

Speaking of despicable…Epstein’s client list is a who’s who of scumbags. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, Tony Blair…and even everybody’s favorite douchebag, Alan Dershowitz. No doubt many, if not all, of Epstein’s clients will soon be joining him in the POS Hall of Fame…and with any luck they’ll also be joining him in hell soon too.

If you want to understand the demonic cult at the heart of the ruling elite and powerful in America and across the globe…look closely at the Epstein affair. This is who these people are…and their brazen murder of Epstein, and the media’s allergy to actually taking the story seriously, reveals their depravity and arrogance.

P.O.S. ALL-STARS

Bret Bed Bug Stephens - Stephens has always been a gigantic piece of shit…but he raised his game this year with his chickenshit claims that people pointing out his awfulness were anti-semitic, which was quickly followed by his attempt to get one of said critics who called him a “bed bug” fired. Then Mr. Bed Bug wrote a repugnant piece boasting of his and his fellows Jews’ superiority over other peoples. I look forward to picking Mr. Bed Bug’s teeth out of my knuckles one day.

Chris “Fredo” Cuomo - Chris Cuomo is easily the dumbest person to have ever appeared on television…which is an astounding achievement. Cuomo, who hosts an unwatchable program on CNN, makes the POS All Stars this year by threatening some guy at a party who called him “Fredo”. Cuomo claimed that calling Italians “Fredo” was just like calling black people the “n-word”. Ok Fredo…oops…is it better if I call you a fucking numbnuts dago greaseball guinea wop twat? Or better yet…how bout when i meet you I don’t say anything and just gouge your eyes out and skull fuck you, you useless piece of shit.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!

©2020

Hollywood's Arrogant and Ignorant Pandering to Chinese Audiences

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Hollywood shamelessly panders to China to make money, but they are absolutely terrible at it.

Hollywood thinks that by telling Chinese stories they will woo the Chinese market they so crave…they couldn’t be more wrong, as the failure of The Farewell amply illustrates.

This past weekend The Farewell, a critically adored American film which tells the story of a Chinese-American woman who returns to China to visit her dying grandmother, opened in China.

Due to The Farewell being written and directed by a Chinese American woman, Lulu Wang, and starring Chinese-American, Golden Globe winning actress, Awkwafina, as well as the film’s dialogue being mostly spoken in Mandarin, Hollywood’s expectations were that the movie would be well received in China.

Those expectations proved to be very misguided. The Farewell has been largely ignored by Chinese audiences as evidenced by its embarrassingly dismal take at the Chinese box office of just $580,000.

The Farewell’s failure is reminiscent of the poor showing in China by another Asian themed Hollywood movie, Crazy Rich Asians, which was a break out smash hit in America in 2018, bringing in $174 million at the U.S. box office. American audiences cheered Crazy Rich Asians largely due to its Asian cast, which was deemed a great success for representation and diversity for Hollywood. In contrast, China, which has plenty of its own movies with all-Asian casts, had no such love for the film as proven by its tepid box office receipts.

Crossing the cultural divide and tapping into the Chinese market has long been the Holy Grail of Hollywood, as every studio executive in town is constantly trying to crack the Chinese code in order to fill their coffers. Of course, studio executives are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, so the only plan they’ve been able to come up with thus far is to pander. Not surprisingly, Hollywood’s ham-handed attempts to cater to Chinese audiences have consistently backfired.

Disney thought Asian representation would attract Chinese audiences when they cast Asian-American actress Kelly Marie Tran in a major role in the most recent Star Wars trilogy. The problem was that Ms. Tran (who is of Vietnamese descent) did not conform to classical Chinese standards of beauty and thus Chinese audiences never warmed to her.

Chinese audiences have voiced similar complaints regarding Akwafina, with some Chinese people on social media going so far as to call her “very ugly”, which may be one of the reasons why The Farewell is doing so poorly. And this is before we get to her Mandarin, which was widely considered laughable for a first-generation immigrant, even one who left China early, according to the plot (the actress herself did not speak Chinese fluently before the film).

Another example of this cultural divide is Simu Liu, a Canadian-Chinese actor who was recently cast in the lead of the upcoming Marvel movie Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Liu is considered handsome by Western standards but some Chinese people say he is “not handsome by Chinese standards”, which means Shang-chi might face an uphill battle at the Chinese box office when it comes out. 

Hollywood has had some success in China, for instance, of the top 15 highest grossing films in Chinese box office history, four are Hollywood productions. They are Avengers: Endgame, The Fate of the Furious, Furious 7 and Avengers: Infinity War. It seems Hollywood has not learned the lesson of their Chinese successes though because unlike Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell and even to a certain extent the poorly received latest Star Wars trilogy, the Hollywood films that have found success in China are gigantic franchises telling American stories filled to the brim with spectacle and movie stars…and none of those stars are Chinese.

In 2020 Disney is once again making a major attempt to court the Chinese market by releasing Mulan, a live action adaptation of the 1998 animated film of the same name. While Mulan is based on the Chinese folk story “The Ballad of Mulan” and will boast a very attractive cast of Asian actors, including star Liu Yifei, that is no guarantee of box office success. The 1998 animated Mulan financially flopped in China and one wonders if the live action version is just another culturally tone deaf attempt by Hollywood to try to tell and sell a Chinese story back to the Chinese.

Hollywood’s misguided belief that Chinese audiences want to see Hollywood make Chinese themed-movies with Chinese stars seems to be staggeringly obtuse. China has a thriving film industry all its own and Chinese audiences don’t clamor to see Chinese stories told from Hollywood’s perspective (even if they’re made by Chinese-American artists) anymore than Americans yearn to see American stories told by foreign artists. The bottom line is this…Chinese audiences want to see American movies from America, not Chinese movies from America.

At its best the art form of cinema is a universal language that speaks eloquently across cultural boundaries. For example, American audiences this year have embraced the South Korean film Parasite. Parasite didn’t try to tell an American story with American actors in an attempt to cash in with U.S. audiences, instead it tells a dramatically and artistically profound Korean story about family and class that connects to people of all cultures. Hollywood would be wise to emulate that approach when trying to woo Chinese audiences.

And if it does want to make what it thinks are “Asian” stories, it should be culturally humble enough to know that it’s making them primarily for the art house cinemas in Brooklyn, rather than the multiplexes in Beijing.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast - Rise of Skywalker

The second episode of my new podcast Looking California and Feeling Minnesota with filmmaker and cinematographer Barry Andersson is now available.

In this episode we break down the fundamental failures of the final film in the current Star Wars saga - Rise of Skywalker. Be forewarned, there are some spoilers involved! Also, technically this is the first podcast we recorded, but due to technical issues it is the second one we are posting.

These podcasts are a work in progress and I appreciate you giving them a listen!

©2020

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker - A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an awful and incoherent film that gets the most simple of storytelling basics wrong. A frustrating and irritating way to end the iconic Skywalker Saga.

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, written and directed by J.J. Abrams, is the story of Jedi Warrior Rey as she leads the resistance against Kylo Ren and the First Order. Rise of Skywalker is not only the third film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy that began in 2015, but also the final film in the nine part Skywalker Saga that began all the way back in 1977. The film stars Daisy Ridley as Rey with supporting turns from John Boyega, Adam Driver, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fischer, Mark Hamill and Billy Dee Williams.

While I am not a Star Wars fanatic, I have seen all of the films and thoroughly enjoyed the first three when I was a kid, and even managed to like some of the Lucas helmed prequel trilogy. My feelings about the Star Wars films post-Disney 2012 takeover has been decidedly lukewarm at best.

What appealed to me about the first movies and even the prequels was the mythology and theology at the heart of the story. Lucas is well-known to be a disciple of Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung’s ideology regarding myth and heroes, as am I. The Lucas controlled Star Wars universe had a mythological and religious underpinning to it that gave the rather flimsy characters and narrative arcs a profundity that elevated the material.

After Lucas sold Star Wars franchise to Disney, in 2012, the corporate behemoth unabashedly stripped the story of all its mythological and religious power and reduced it a a rather vapid, nostalgia-inducing money making machine devoid of spirit and a soul.

Disney failed to grasp why the Star Wars franchise was so successful in the first place. The franchise succeeded with audiences because its mythological and theological foundation resonated with people on both a conscious and unconscious level. The conscious level was all the cool stuff…like a lovable Bigfoot character, cool light sabers, a rockin’ villain and all of that. The unconscious level was all of the mythological stuff, like Luke’s hero journey, Han’s reluctant hero journey, and the Skywalker family dynamics.

What is so striking about Disney’s failure with Star Wars is that it only more greatly illuminates their success with Marvel. With the just concluded Marvel series of films, Disney stuck to the source material and all of the sacrifices that went with it, and the film’s flourished. I am assuming that a great deal of the credit for Marvel’s success lies with producer Kevin Feige, who navigated the treacherous franchise and corporate waters to successfully bring the Marvel ship to harbor with the ridiculously successful films Infinity War and Endgame.

The Rise of Skywalker’s failure…and it is a massive failure…only elevates Endgame and Feige’s accomplishment all the more. Rise of Skywalker is a perfect embodiment of everything that has gone wrong with the Star Wars franchise over the years, most notably since Mickey Mouse took the reigns.

The film is absolutely dramatically and narratively incoherent. The direction is listless and lazy, and the script is an outright abomination. The most basic fundamentals of storytelling are thrown out the window for this film which ends up being little more than a two hour and twenty minute commercial for itself.

It is difficult to discuss the problems of the film without talking spoilers, so I will add a spoiler section after my review, but suffice it to say that this is a dreadful film that denigrates the entire franchise and could very well scuttle the brand name for years to come.

As stated, the directing and writing are awful, so the cast don’t have much to work with. That said, they do not do much with what they are given.

I have been trying to figure out Daisy Ridley for three films now and I just can’t do it. I mean, I am sure she is a nice person, but she is so lacking in charisma and magnetism it is sort of shocking that she has the lead role in as billion dollar franchise. I will be astounded if Ridley has any success in her career outside of Star Wars as she seems to bring absolutely nothing to the table whatsoever.

To emphasize how charisma free Ridley is, one need look no further than Keri Russell, who plays Zori Bliss, a fringe criminal character in Rise of Skywalker. Russell never shows her face in her performance except to flash her eyes for a brief moment, but even with a mask and helmet covering her she has a palpable magnetism about her that is undeniable. The fact that even with her face covered the whole time she outshines Daisy Ridley is much more an indictment of Ridley than and endorsement of Russell, who is a fine actress but not exactly Meryl Streep.

The men of Rise of Skywalker fare no better. John Boyega consistently underwhelms as Finn, a character so thinly developed he’s nearly transparent. Oscar Isaac proves that he is officially definitely not a good actor once again with his flaccid Poe, which is a second rate Han Solo, which makes Isaac a third rate Harrison Ford. Yikes.

Adam Driver plays bad guy Kylo Ren. Driver is another great mystery of life. For some reason I cannot quite grasp, Driver has become the “it” guy in Hollywood. People think he is amazing. I do not think he is amazing. In fact, I think he is an actively shitty actor. The Driver adoration reminds me of another quirky, weird looking actor who everyone in the late 80’s and 90’s thought was astonishing but who I always thought was a poseur and clown. That actor was Nicholas Cage. Cage won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas and everyone thought I was proven wrong…but I was playing the long game…and in the end cinema history has proven me right about Cage and I think I’ll be proven right about Driver too.

As for the action and all of that…I found none of it compelling in the least. The action sequences seemed derivative and contrived and like the storytelling, painfully boring and redundant.

Obviously, I found Rise of Skywalker to be a frustrating and irritating mess and major disappointment. There is no reason, even for huge Star Wars fans, to ever see this movie as it doesn’t wrap up the Skywalker Saga so much as to cancel it due to lack of interest. Of course, most everyone will go see it because Disney controls the universe, but if you do go see it realize that you will never think of it again after the leaving the theatre. Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, was so bad it made me desperately want to commit light saber supukku while watching it. Seeing J.J. Abrams and Mickey Mouse take a dump on George Lucas’s creative vision simply is not entertaining in the least.

SPOILERS!!

Out of narrative incompetence and an impotent attempt at fan service, Rise of Skywalker does away with death. I know that sounds weird but it is true. The movie opens with the signature scroll to get us up to date on the happenings in Star Wars world and it tells us that for some reason Emperor Palpatine, who was supposed to have died in Return of the Jedi, is back and is the main plot point in Rise of Skywalker.

Palpatine’s resurrection is absurd, but the film continues this theme throughout. Chewbacca is killed right before our eyes…and then in the very next scene, there he is alive and well. C3PO goes through a similar “death” when his memory is wiped clean but then miraculously his memory is restored by R2D2.

The whole gang, Rey, Poe, Finn and company get sucked under into quicksand…which usually results in death but for them it results in falling into a cave that hides the exact thing for which they are looking. (The physics of quicksand that sucks people in but empties them out into a cave is dubious at best, but that is the least of the logic issues in this movie)

Luke died in The Last Jedi but his “force ghost” shows up in Rise of Skywalker and he isn’t just placidly looking on from the heavens, he is actively helping Rey by grabbing light sabers and raising x-wing fighters out of the ocean.

Han Solo died in The Force Awakens but his ghost/presence also makes an appearance in Rise of Skywalker to chat with Kylo Ren.

Carrie Fischer actually did die during the making of The Last Jedi, but she is resurrected by editors with some terrible scenes deservedly left on the cutting room floor a few years ago. Fischer was a terrible actress when alive…dead she fares considerably worse. In Rise of Skywalker Leia does die…but then she too returns as force ghost to wink and nod her approval.

Ben/Kylo is thrown into a crevasse and could have died but not surprisingly he doesn’t die either.

And finally, Rey dies too…but only for a few seconds. And then she wakes up and kisses Ben/Kylo Ren…and all is well…until Ben drops dead for some reason.

Here is the basic problem…when death does not exist, then neither does drama. Death, be it in the movies or in real life, raises the stakes of everything it goes near. If there is no death then there is no life. If there is no death there is no drama. By raising Palpatine, Luke, Han, Leia, Chewy and C3Po from the dead, Rise of Skywalker removes all stakes from the movie and thus everything is reduced to simple play acting. Nothing matters at all. Death does not exist and therefore the world the film exists in is fraudluent as the characters are never in peril and are always and every time safe. When Rey dies at the end it means nothing because death doesn’t exist…and same with Ben/Kylo.

Contrast this with Avengers Endgame…Iron Man fucking dies in that movie. Iron Man…the heart and soul of the franchise…drops dead. Yes…the deaths in Infinity War were reversed…but Endgame didn’t just say, “hey, just kidding”, they went about unraveling those deaths and atoning for them…and part of the penance for bringing those characters back was killing Iron Man and getting rid of Captain America. Iron Man and Captain America are payment for the narrative twist of reversing the deaths in Infinity War.

In Rise of Skywalker…they literally do not give a shit as they never earn Palpatine’s return..which opens the movie. Nor do they earn Chewie’s fake death, or C3PO’s, or Luke’s, or Leia’s or Han’s or Rey’s.

Anyway…the bottom line is that Rise of Skywalker makes such egregious errors in its storytelling that it is simply stunning. For the franchise to do this in this “last chapter” is a cinematic crime of epic proportions.

©2019

Undead Army of the Woke Will Make Sure Game of Thrones is the Last Show of Its Kind

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 04 seconds

****WARNING: This article contains some information about Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame that might be considered minor spoilers if you haven’t watched the series or seen the movie yet. You’ve been warned.****

The surge of political correctness in recent years all but assures that in the future, edgy shows like Game of Thrones will be strangled in their creative cradle.

In 2011, Game of Thrones premiered on HBO as an exceedingly well-acted and beautifully photographed fantasy-drama of swords and sex, chock full of palace intrigue, familial rivalry and violent conquest. The show flouted Hollywood storytelling conventions and quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Sadly, we will never be able to enjoy anything like Game of Thrones ever again.

The reason that we’ll never see anything like Game of Thrones again is because in the eight years since the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels first hit the small screen, much has changed, and not just in the mythical land of Westeros. In the real world, and the unreal one of social media, political correctness has taken the throne and vanquished all contenders, leaving the bloody head of rational thought on the end of a spike as a warning to anyone who dare speak up against the zeitgeist of neo-feminism, inclusivity and a coddling sensitivity.

In the past few years, movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo have dramatically changed the landscape of Hollywood by weaponizing diversity and victimhood and using them to bludgeon opponents and silence dissent. The “woke”, whom Merriam-Websters defines as those being “aware of and actively attentive to…issues of racial and social justice”, have taken over the entertainment industry. Just like the Night King’s Army of the Dead broke through The Northern Wall to attempt to destroy all of humanity in Westeros, the Army of the Woke now march on our popular culture intent on obliterating all worthwhile entertainment.

A wonderful example of the vacuity of wokeness came in the form of a Game of Thrones outrage tweet from actress and high-priestess of political correctness, Jessica Chastain, where she slammed the show for the character Sansa’s claim that having survived a plethora of traumas, including rape, transformed her into a strong woman.

Chastain tweeted,

“Rape is not a tool to make a character stronger. A woman doesn’t need to be victimized in order to become a butterfly. The #littlebird was always a Phoenix. Her prevailing strength is solely because of her. And her alone.”

Chastain’s tweet is not only an advertisement for her intellectual dwarfism, not to be confused with the intellect of a dwarf, which Tyrion proves can be formidable, but also an actual advertisement. “Phoenix” is a reference to Chastain’s new X-Men movie, Dark Phoenix, which also happens to star Sophie Turner who plays Sansa on Game of Thrones. It appears Jessica Chastain’s superpowers include self-promotion and shamelessness.

Like Chastain, the pc brigade turns everything, including popular entertainment, into a referendum on social justice issues and their own self-worth. The woke spend their time not enjoying arts and entertainment but rather policing them in search of offense or wrong-think in the hopes that they will get the joyous opportunity to vent their self-righteous rage.

Evidence of this is found in articles from major publications with headlines such as, “Game of Thrones Treatment of Women Will Tarnish Its Legacy”, “On Game of Thrones Daenerys Targaryen faces a sexist double bind – like so many women leaders”, “Game of Thrones Keeps Killing Off Entire Immigrant Populations, And It’s a Problem”, “’There are no black people on Game of Thrones’: why is fantasy TV so white?”, “Racist or just bad writing? What Game of Thrones latest shocking death says about the show”, “Game of Thrones: too much racism and sexism – so I stopped watching”, and finally “My Feminist Opinions Ruined Game of Thrones for My Boyfriend”. These stories are emblematic of the fact that the woke are social media Savanarolas perpetually in search of works of art or entertainment to throw onto their bonfire of the vanities. These people don’t just want their politically correct opinions to “ruin Game of Thrones for their boyfriend”, but to ruin all of popular culture for everybody.

The feminist criticisms of Game of Thrones are particularly vapid because they are so demonstrably wrong, as women are the most pivotal and powerful characters on the show. The most formidable and effective rulers on Game of Thrones have been Queen Cersei and her nemesis Daenerys, Mother of Dragons. Arya Stark has gone from a little girl to the deadliest warrior in all of Westeros, who became a legend when she killed the Night King. Ser Brienne of Tarth, the first women to ever become a knight, is the most noble and honorable knight in all the Seven Kingdoms. And last but not least is Sansa Stark, who has suffered brutally but whose resilience has allowed her to become the ruler of the North and, who knows, maybe even sit on the Iron Throne when all is said and done.

All of these women have faced great difficulties and horrendous challenges, but they have prevailed not only in spite of them but because of them. In Game of Thrones as in life, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger, but the woke warriors either lack the interest or ability to interpret the show in any other way than to see women and minorities as victims.

If you want to see the future of popular entertainment in the wake of Game of Thrones, look no further than the corporate behemoth Disney and their Marvel and Star Wars franchises. The first phase of the twenty-two film Marvel Cinematic Universe just concluded with Avengers: Endgame, and the woke contingent’s victory is obvious with Captain America now a black man and Iron Man replaced as the center of the story by an all-powerful female character, Captain Marvel.

The Star Wars films too have devolved into a politically correct mess where diversity and inclusivity trump narrative cohesion and dramatic coherence. And if you publicly voice displeasure about the direction of Marvel or Star Wars…you are labeled a misogynist and racist troll.

Game of Thrones warned us for years that “Winter is Coming”…well, winter is now here, and hordes of woke zombies have descended upon us to suffocate all but the most sterile of entertainment. Just like Varys and The Unsullied were castrated on Game of Thrones, so our popular entertainment is being neutered, except this time with the dull blade of politically correct utopianism.

A version of this article was originally published on May 17, 2019 at RT.com.

©2019