The Wonder: A Review - If You Hate the Irish, You'll Love This Film

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Some solid performances and beautiful cinematography are tainted by the film’s Hollywood narrative and truly ugly anti-Irish ideology.

The Wonder, directed by Sebastian Lelio and written by Alice Birch and Emma Donoghue based on Donoghue’s novel of the same name, is a new Netflix film that tells the story of an English nurse sent to a rural Irish town in 1862 to investigate the supposed miracle of a young girl who hasn’t eaten in four months.

The nurse, Elizabeth “Lib” Wright (Florence Pugh), must struggle against patriarchal forces, local custom, and deeply-ingrained religious belief to try and find the truth about what exactly is happening to Anna O’Donnell (Kila Lord Kassidy), the allegedly miraculous young girl.

The Wonder has a lot of things going for it in attempting to keep me interested. First of all, the film stars Florence Pugh, an actress of great talent and skill who thus far has never failed to impress me. Even in the recent cinematic disaster that was Don’t Worry Darling, Pugh delivered a worthy performance. No small feat in such a bad movie.

Secondly, my grandfather grew up in an impossibly tiny, rural village in County Mayo in the West of Ireland which was very close to the town of Knock. Knock, for those who don’t know, is a religious shrine and place of pilgrimage because in 1879 apparitions of the Virgin Mary, St. Joseph and St. John the Baptist all appeared to a group of villagers.

The Catholic Church has long since put its stamp of approval on the Knock incident and such notables as Pope John Paul II, Pope Francis, Mother Teresa and arguably the most Holy and most notable Catholic of all, me, have visited the shrine.

The Wonder reminds of the mystery at Knock because of the question of religious validity at the heart of its narrative as well as the rural and somewhat foreboding and forbidding nature of the setting.

All of this is to say that The Wonder had me intrigued simply from its premise, but unfortunately it makes certain choices, some odd, some predictable, some rather vicious and ignorant, that greatly diminishes its value.

For example, the film opens with the shot of a movie soundstage accompanied by a voice-over telling viewers “This is the beginning of a film called The Wonder. The people you are about to meet, the characters, believe in their stories with complete devotion. We are nothing without stories. And so we invite you to believe in this one.”

The camera then turns its attention to a movie set populated by actors, and through voice-over the narrator sets the scene telling us that its 1862 and English nurse Elizabeth Wright is headed to Ireland and the story begins…but not without a small comment that speaks volumes about the film’s ugly ideology – but more on that later.

I found this attempt at an unorthodox artistic opening to be painfully patronizing and distracting as it needlessly creates a hurdle to suspending disbelief while speaking down to its audience. The detached narrator later resurfaces in the film but not enough for it to be profound or to make any sort of narrative or artistic sense.

Once the actual story begins, we are treated to two positive things, firstly, Florence Pugh once again proves her worth as she gives a very solid performance as the lead “Lib”.

The rest of the cast all do solid work as well, with Brian F. O’Byrne, Ciaran Hinds, and Toby Jones doing dutiful work in supporting roles. Kila Lord Cassidy is also good as the young girl in question, Anna.

In addition to the acting, the film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Ari Wegner, who makes the most of the Irish setting and the candlelit era. Wegner scored an Oscar nomination for her work on The Power of the Dog last year and I wouldn’t be surprised if she snags another this year with The Wonder.

The problem though is that the window dressing of Wegner’s crisp and luscious cinematography and Pugh’s pointed performance are overshadowed by the smug, deplorable politics of the film and the pedestrian nature of its narrative, which ultimately spirals into preposterousness and banality.  

I’ll refrain from going too much further into the plot of The Wonder so as to avoid spoilers and conserve the viewing experience for those interested, but I will say that the Hollywood nature of the narrative ultimately fails to live up to the artistry of Pugh and Wegner.

The surface politics of the film are predictably trite with the usual misandry and anti-religious (more accurately anti-Catholic) sentiments of our vacuous era front and center. Pugh’s “Lib”, like every female protagonist nowadays, struggles against the all-powerful patriarchy which infects the entirety of the world with its singular evil. Yawn.

To give an indication of the film’s intellectual vapidity and political crudeness, “Lib” is the female “liberator” – how subtle - trying to free a young woman, Anna, from the grips of backwards Irish-Catholicism and bring her to a progressive utopia. Eye roll.

As formulaic as the ‘patriarchy as villain’ storyline is, the thing that really repulses is the unabashed anti-Irishness of the film.

Now for that small but revealing voice-over comment I referred to earlier. It was made by the narrator at the tail end of the unorthodox opening to the film. The narrator explains that “Lib” is an Englishwoman traveling to Ireland while the potato famine of the previous decade is tapering off, and then we are told with a seemingly straight face that “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation.” Ummm…No shit. “The Irish hold the English responsible for that devastation” BECAUSE THE ENGLISH WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT DEVASTATION!

What makes it even worse is that the narrative of the film is such that it doesn’t just minimize The Great Hunger, which killed a million Irish and displaced twice as many, its sub-text is that the famine was the fault of the Irish – to the point of being their choice. I mean, this is a story about a girl who doesn’t eat – and thus may be starving herself for ulterior motives. That’s pretty explicitly saying the Irish are liars responsible for their own starvation – which is obviously historically wholly inaccurate.

Imagine if a film about Jews in Europe in 1948 opened with a voice-over stating that in regards to the Holocaust “Jews hold Nazis responsible for that devastation” and then dramatized how Jews were actually the ones who caused the Holocaust, and the protagonist is a Nazi sent to liberate a Jew from other Jews. Or a film about former slaves in the American South in the wake of the Civil War describing slavery with “blacks hold white southerners responsible for that devastation”, and then dramatized that blacks were actually responsible for slavery and a white Southerner is the intelligent protagonist trying to free a black man from stupid and backward black people.

People in our current culture of outrage would be apoplectic at such an insidious and insipid twisting of history being imposed on those two groups that are officially-approved as victims. But with the Irish no one bats an eye at their attempted extermination first being downplayed and then actually blamed on them.

The Netflix show The Crown is currently getting some heat because Queen Elizabeth II recently died and they aren’t being adequately respectful to her or something, but The Wonder minimizes and Brit-washes the genocide of the Irish, and then blames the Irish for it, and no one says a word. Yes, let’s respect the Queen, symbol of British colonialism that murdered millions not just in Ireland but across the globe, and let’s portray these victims of the British Empire, like the Irish, as the true brutal monsters who brought the horrors upon themselves. Insane.

The Wonder maintains this aggressive anti-Irish attitude throughout, portraying the Irish as a cruel, backwards, barbaric and utterly savage people with Lib being the English voice of reason/saviour.

The film, not surprisingly, does the same with Catholicism. Of course, audiences are so conditioned to hate the Catholic Church in modern film (and culture) that I doubt anyone will care. And to be clear, it’s not like the Catholic Church over the years hasn’t dutifully earned the scorn it receives. It’s just that singling out a specific religion as an abominable institution, while whitewashing the evils of the British Empire, is a bit much and feels ever so slightly hypocritical.

Director Sebastian Lelio, a Chilean, may very well be ignorant of the history of Ireland, the British responsibility for the genocide of The Great Hunger and for centuries of violence and oppression across the globe. But if you’re going to make a movie about Ireland you might want to read up a bit on the place and the people. Lelio’s ignorance is on him. And if it isn’t ignorance, and if he really thinks this way, then that says more about his moral and ethical depravity than it does about the Irish and Catholicism.

The film’s co-writer Emma Donoghue, who authored the book it’s based upon, is an Irish woman. Her take on Ireland, the Great Hunger, and the relationship with the English is stunning for its imbecility. Donoghue’s Irish self-loathing is no doubt fueled by her having grown up a lesbian in Ireland, which at the time was a robust Catholic country. I assume that wasn’t easy, but hating Catholicism for its sins is still no excuse to ignore history and reflexively lick English boots.

It's fascinating to see Lelio and Donoghue’s hierarchy of beliefs play out in real time in their movie. I’ve no doubt both are devout liberals and believe they are profoundly expressing those beliefs with this story. But their blind spot is that they’ve placed anti-Catholicism, and by extension anti-Irishness, higher on their hierarchy than anti-British colonialism, which is both astonishing and revealing. This choice speaks to the current tortured state of the bourgeois, capitalism-addicted liberal mind and its accompanying depraved and trans-actional morals and ethics.

Despite the rancid ideology of the film, The Wonder is bursting with cinematic possibilities, but unfortunately the potential complexity of the premise is scuttled on the rocks of simplicity due to acute artistic vacuity and story-telling conventionality.

To the film’s credit, it did keep me captivated for a good portion of its 103-minute run time, but ultimately left me deeply dramatically and narratively unsatisfied at the end. In addition, it’s aggressive anti-Irishness left me aggravated and agitated.

The Irish have been through a lot through the years, from conquest to occupation to subjugation to discrimination to genocide to civil war to terrorism and all the rest. We’ve survived it all, and goodness knows we’ll survive some rather forgettable anti-Irish movie streaming on Netflix too.

©2022

My Policeman: A Review - Welcome to Blokeback

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A poorly acted and executed, knock-off Brokeback Mountain for Brits.

My Policeman, directed by Michael Grandage with a screenplay written by Ron Nyswaner based on the 2012 book of the same name by Bethan Roberts, tells the story two gay men, their forbidden love and the woman stuck between them in 1950’s Brighton, England.

The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, stars Brit-pop superstar Harry Styles as the aforementioned gay policeman, as well as Emma Corrin, David Dawson, Linus Roache, Gina McKee and, since it’s a gay British movie, Rupert Everett is legally required to appear…and he dutifully does.

My Policeman is not a good movie for a variety of reasons, the first of which is that it’s so painfully derivative – it’s basically Brokeback Mountain for Brits but without the cinematic skill or quality acting.

In fact, My Policeman was such a dull slog I spent much of my time watching it thinking of cheeky British tabloid headlines to describe it. The best I could come up with was “BUM-LOVING BRITISH BOBBIE GOES FULL BLOKEBACK!” Yes, I agree…I AM clever.

Back in the early 90’s Kurt Cobain sang the lyric “what else can I say? Everyone is gay!”, and if you watch tv and movies nowadays you’d think he was right. It seems every tv show and movie now prominently features a gay character, and every commercial has either an interracial couple, a gay couple or an interracial gay couple.

Despite gays and lesbians being roughly 5% of the population, gayness is so omnipresent in our culture that last week I was watching a hockey game and a commercial for some HIV drug that featured a cavalcade of gay men in various forms of homosexual embrace ran approximately a dozen times. I couldn’t help but think of another song when I saw this ad, which was “Everyone has AIDS” from Team America: World Police. This begs the question…who exactly do they think is watching hockey nowadays?

The reality is that you can’t take two steps in our culture without tripping over some movie, tv show or commercial that is all about gayness. For example, just last week I reviewed the new Jennifer Lawrence movie Causeway, and in it, for no explicable reason whatsoever, Lawrence’s character was a lesbian. The thing that made this character choice so odd was that her lesbianism actually worked to defuse the drama, rather than heighten it. Oh well.

Just recently there was a much-hyped gay rom-com, Bros, and even kid-friendly pop culture fair like Star Wars and Marvel movies now feature gay characters. Hell, there was even gayness in the most recent Toy Story movie…you’ll be glad to know I’ll be refraining from making any Woody jokes.

This is all to say that in our aggressively progressive culture that in the last forty years in general and last ten years in particular, has changed at hyper-speed, being gay is no longer a big deal. Nobody in our very modern times cares if, to quote Spartacus, you prefer to “eat oysters or snails”. Which is why it’s so bizarre that while gays sit comfortably on the throne of pop-culture they’re so adamant to wear the crown of victimhood as they do so.

The recurring theme of popular gay films and tv shows in recent years, from The Imitation Game to Call Me by Your Name to My Policeman and of course the granddaddy of them all, Brokeback Mountain, is oppression. Another thing these films all share is that they must go back in time to find said gay oppression because it doesn’t exist in the modern Western world.

This recurring theme, a sort of sad-sack, woe-is-me, self-pitying, martyr-making view of homosexuality by homosexuals, is a sign of deep-seated insecurity from a gay community that is reflexively uncomfortable with its astounding cultural success, and has, in my mind, become a very tired trope used to avoid seeking deeper meaning and purpose, not to mention artistry, in gay film and tv.

Brokeback Mountain was a stunning piece of cinema, but what made it so astonishing is that it basically obliterated the need for this gay oppression storyline to ever be examined again, as it did it to perfection.

Unfortunately, My Policeman shamelessly mimics Brokeback Mountain. It even, rather blatantly, references Brokeback twice. Once when young Patrick Hazelwood (played by David Dawson) mentions that men often go on “fishing trips” together, wink-wink, and also when he recounts how his gay lover was beaten to death by thugs, which is exactly how Jack Twist came to his demise in Brokeback Mountain.

Patrick Hazelwood is the Brit Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) of My Policeman, as he’s the “gayer” of the two men and the one who is unable to control his “urges” which society deems depraved. Harry Styles and Linus Roache play young and old Tom Burgess respectively, and Tom is to My Policeman what Heath Ledger’s Ennis is to Brokeback Mountain.

The similarities don’t stop there as Emma Corrin plays young Marion Taylor, and Gina McKee plays the older version of the character, and Marion is basically a more educated version of Michelle Williams’ Alma character from Brokeback Mountain.

You get the point, My Policeman is literally a very, very cheap British rip-off of Brokeback Mountain.  

Unfortunately, Harry Styles is no Heath Ledger. I am sad to report, since I was so sure it was going to happen for him, but movie stardom is not in the cards for Harry Styles. Styles is a wooden, dead-eyed actor who brings absolutely nothing to the screen. It seems as though Styles has either gotten too little or too much acting coaching at this point as he’s lost whatever charisma he had in the first place.

Yes, he does have his legion of loyal teen girl fans, and no doubt a bevy of gay male fans too, and they all might appreciate handsome and hunky Harry’s homosexual hump-fest in My Policeman, but his acting is, pardon the pun, hard to take.

Emma Corrin does decent work with a pitifully under-written character, Marion. Corrin was brilliant in The Crown as Princess Diana and here she shows the same dexterity and commitment. She certainly has the makings of a solid actress and one can only hope she gets better material to work with next time.

David Dawson is supposed to be some sort of irresistible gay Svengali in the film but he lacks the presence of…ironically…a young Rupert Everett, to pull it off. This leads to Dawson and Styles seeming mismatched as a gay couple due to their decided lack of chemistry.

The older versions of the characters, Gina McKee as Marion, Linus Roache as Tom and Rupert Everett as Patrick, appear lost in another movie entirely. The “older” storyline is almost entirely incomprehensible and illogical. These characters behave in completely nonsensical ways and the entire premise of the venture seems lost in some sort of dementia fog.

Director Michael Grandage, comes from the theatre and it shows, as the film lacks any and all visual style and is utterly incapable of showing instead of telling.

I’ve not read the book My Policeman, and it will come as no surprise that I never intend to, but I can only assume it’s as trite and cliché-ridden as the screenplay for this movie by Ron Nyswaner. Nyswaner, it will not shock you in the least, also wrote the screenplay for Philadelphia…which reminds me again, “Everybody has AIDS!”

The bottom line is that My Policeman, and frankly most gay-themed movies, are stuck in a rut of unoriginality where vapid cultural messaging is more important than profundity or dramatic meaning.

At the moment it seems that gay culture bursting out of the closet in recent decades has stripped it of its dramatic and artistic power…and My Policeman is damning evidence of that.

©2022

House of the Dragon (HBO): Thoughts and Musings on Episode One

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

It’s surprising that Game of Thrones came to its rather ignominious end just three years ago, as those chaotic three years have felt like decades if not centuries. The way the once-glorious, must-see series badly stumbled at its conclusion seemed to make it disappear from the collective consciousness almost overnight. With stunning speed and alacrity viewers went from vociferously declaring “Winter is coming!”, to petulantly asking, “what’s next?”

Such is the nature of our current culture, where there’s a plethora of entertainment choices (notice I didn’t say “entertaining choices”) and virtually every movie or series ends up in the trash heap of forgettable fiction the moment it stops playing before our eyes.

2019 was a year of major endings, and not just for Game of Thrones. That same year Marvel’s miraculous narrative run from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) came to a smashing conclusion. So, the biggest tv series and the biggest movie franchise, both of which dominated popular culture for a decade, came to an end in 2019 and ever since, pop culture has been struggling and staggering to find a center, be it cinematic or on television, around which to orient itself.

Marvel has tried to keep its brand at the forefront of the culture by expanding to tv as well as extending its cinematic universe, and for the most part the results have been dismal. Marvel movies and TV series are no longer cultural landmarks but instead, little but fodder for tedious culture wars.

Which brings us to House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones series which premiered on HBO on Sunday, August 21st. The series is a prequel set 172 years before the events of Game of Thrones that tells the story of the rule of the dragon-blooded Targaryens.

The series is undoubtedly attempting to re-create the culturally dominating experience of its predecessor. After watching the first episode of House of the Dragon, which broke viewing records at HBO and overloaded the servers at HBO Max, I’m still reticent to declare that “Westeros is back, baby!”

Game of Thrones‘ fatally flawed ending left a putrid taste in a great deal of viewer’s mouths, my own included, so it’s just about impossible that House of the Dragon will be a similar smash hit. Audiences may well be wary of giving it the time it needs to grow, and after the calamity that was Game of Thrones’ final season, with good reason.

It’s too soon to tell whether House of the Dragon will find the magic that Game of Thrones did, but it’s early yet. The first episode was fine. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful. It just was. Some of the CGI was terrific, some of it wasn’t. Some of the characters were compelling, some of them weren’t.

I remember watching season one of GOT and liking it but not really thinking it was anything remarkable until episode nine (out of ten) of season one.

In that episode, Ned Stark is set to be executed and I kept wondering how they were going to save him. I mean, you can’t execute Ned Stark as he’s played by Sean Bean, the biggest star on the show. But then in episode nine…they cut Ned’s goddamn head off. I remember yelling out from my couch when it happened because it was so viscerally shocking to see a tv show completely upend the conventions of its medium.

House of the Dragon will not be able to do such a thing because it’s already been done. Audiences are harder to shock a second and third time around…and considering that Game of Thrones continued to shock throughout its run (think the Red Wedding – holy shit!), House of the Dragon has an uphill climb.

I don’t know if it’s a help or hindrance that I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I haven’t. On the plus side in terms of Game of Thrones, I had no idea what was coming, on the downside in terms of House of the Dragon, I don’t really know who anybody is or really care about them at the start.

In a real sense, I had almost no clue what was going on in Game of Thrones most of the time but enjoyed it because the acting was superb, the writing crisp, the production (sets, costumes, cinematography, sound) glorious and the world building brilliant. It also helped a great deal that there were a plethora of my three favorite things…nudity, strong sexual content and violence. You basically can never go too wrong with that combination.

With House of the Dragon, that same formula may be watered down in order to appease the social media Savanorolas who simply cannot tolerate anyone enjoying anything. Episode one of House of the Dragon had some violence and some sexual content and nudity, but not nearly enough for my voracious appetite, and certainly nothing up to the standards of Game of Thrones in its debauched heyday.

House of the Dragon does boast some fine performances thus far, most notably Matt Smith as rogue prince Daemon. Smith was last seen in The Crown playing a young Prince Philip (talk about a rogue prince – he’s the father of pedo prince Andrew…the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), and he’s a terrific actor. As Daemon he believably transforms into a villainous and oddly charming brute.

Daemon’s brother, King Viserys, is played by the wondrous Paddy Considine, who brings to the role a palpable sense of fragility that augers trouble for the king.

Also excellent is Rhys Ifans as Ser Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King. Ifans, like so many of the actors from the original series and now its prequel, is just a damn good British actor who brings a formidable amount of craft and skill to his role and elevates the series in the process.

That said, there’s a much smaller cast in House of the Dragon as compared to Game of Thrones, there’s also fewer interesting characters. Daemon, King Viserys and Hightower are decent characters, but nothing spectacular. If they were in Game of Thrones they’d be C or D level, fringe characters, not the main attraction.

Speaking of main attractions, Viserys’ daughter Rhaenyra, played as a teen in the first episode by Milly Alcock – and played by Emma D’Arcy in later episodes as a grown woman, thus far isn’t the least bit interesting. Like Arya Stark, she shuns the lady-life and bristles at the restrictions of the patriarchy, but she is also a deluxe dullard of the highest order. Maybe that will change going forward…hopefully it will change going forward.

Equally dull is Alicent Hightower, Otto Hightower’s daughter and Rhaenyra’s best friend, played by Emily Carey as a young woman and later in the series by Olivia Cooke as an adult. Alicent is paper thin as a character in episode one, and given that she had a potentially blockbuster scene with the King at one crucial point, that is disappointing if not devastating.

Again, the series just started and has the potential to grow into greatness, but it must be said that episode one is a bit middling. Part of the reason for that is that the production lacks the crispness and visual lushness of Game of Thrones, including in the CGI department.

Not surprisingly, dragons play a big role in the story of House of the Dragon, and the dragons themselves look as good as ever, but when placed into settings the scenes look uncomfortably cheap…like a quick cut and paste job.

The sets and costumes also look to be downgraded in terms of quality on House of the Dragon, as do the costumes, both of which may be a result of some cost cutting in the wake of Game of Thrones ever expanding budget.  

Also notably sub-par was the sound design, which left much of the dialogue muddled under ambient noise or music.

House of the Dragon, which is NOT produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, is apparently the first in a collection of Game of Thrones I.P. that HBO will be sending our way. The recent financial struggles at Discovery, which took on a massive amount of debt to purchase WarnerMedia (which includes HBO) could spell trouble for such pricey projects going forward though.

If belt tightening at Discovery/Warner leads to lesser quality in the Game of Thrones spin-offs, then they’d be better off not doing them at all. Of course, I’m only saying that from an artistic/fan perspective, as quality is my number one concern.

Speaking of fan perspective, House of the Dragon is chock full of fan service and Game of Thrones Easter eggs. No doubt fans of the original series will love that, but if House of the Dragon doesn’t improve in quality and catch dramatic fire sooner rather than later, fans will turn on it and HBO will be left with a bloody mess on their hands. Only time will tell.

I’ll check back in midway through season one of House of the Dragon with another review to see if things in Westeros are headed in the right direction.

©2022

Royal Family Documentary: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 our of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Pieces of a Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. After the first thirty minutes the film isn’t very good but Vanessa Kirby is very good in it.

Pieces of a Woman is a story of forgiveness… so why is Netflix so keen to cancel its star, Shia LaBeouf?

Pieces of a Woman, the new arthouse film starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf that is garnering some Oscar buzz, premiered on Netflix on January 7.

The film, written by Kata Wéber and directed by Kornél Mundruczó tells the story of a Boston couple who suffer a traumatic home birth of their daughter. 

The film’s theme is the power of forgiveness, even for the most egregious of injuries. This would seem a prescient and poignant lesson in our current age of relentless cancel culture and shameless embrace of victimhood. Unfortunately, while that is a theme we need right now, this muddled misfire of a movie is not an adequate delivery system.

Pieces of a Woman starts off spectacularly, with a masterfully executed, compelling and captivating opening thirty minutes. But after that it quickly deteriorates into a maudlin, melodramatic exercise chock full of every dramatic cliché imaginable.

On the bright side, the film is an actor’s showcase and the luminous Vanessa Kirby makes the very most of the opportunity. Kirby, best known for her work on Netflix’s The Crown, gloriously transcends the mundane script and middling direction by giving a subtle, specific, dynamic and magnetic performance as the grieving yet resilient Martha.

Netflix is pushing for Kirby, already a Best Actress winner at the Venice Film Festival, to get a much-deserved Oscar nomination.

Netflix is also promoting the rest of the cast to get awards consideration… well, almost all of the rest of the cast. Every cast member is featured on Netflix’s “For Your Awards Consideration” webpage, except for Shia LaBeouf.

Why has LaBeouf, the main supporting actor in the movie who some critics – not me – claim is “remarkable”, been excluded from Netflix’s awards consideration material?

The answer is that LaBeouf’s former girlfriend, singer FKA Twigs, filed suit against him in December of 2020 for past sexual, physical and emotional abuse. In the wake of this lawsuit other women, including singer Sia, have come forward making varying claims of mistreatment.

In response LaBeouf wrote to the New York Times, “I’m not in any position to tell anyone how my behavior made them feel. I have no excuses for my alcoholism or aggression, only rationalizations. I have been abusive to myself and everyone around me for years…I have a history of hurting the people closest to me. I'm ashamed of that history and am sorry to those I hurt."

He later stated that many of the allegations were not true but that he owed the women “the opportunity to air their statements publicly and accept accountability for those things I have done.”

He added that he was “a sober member of a 12-step program” and in therapy. “I am not cured of my PTSD and alcoholism, but I am committed to doing what I need to do to recover, and I will forever be sorry to the people that I may have harmed along the way.”

So, in a surreal twist, LaBeouf’s character in Pieces of a Woman is an at-times abusive alcoholic and in real life the actor is now accused of being an abusive alcoholic.

This is obviously a complex situation, one that requires a foregoing of our culture’s compulsive and muscular Manichaeism. But it would seem Netflix has not absorbed the nuanced message of forgiveness highlighted in Pieces of a Woman and are, ironically, purging LaBeouf from promotional material for a film about the power of radical forgiveness.

LaBeouf is not alone in being tossed into the memory hole by Netflix over allegations of past misdeeds. Johnny Depp recently lost a libel case against The Sun whom he sued for calling him a “wife beater”. In response, Netflix removed all of Depp’s films from its service.

It’s important to note that neither LaBeouf nor Depp have been proven to have committed any crime, they’ve only been accused. And yet Netflix didn’t hesitate to swiftly punish them anyway.

It’s also curious that Depp’s former wife and alleged victim, Amber Heard, has also been accused of abuse (by Depp) but has faced no public consequences from Netflix or anyone else.

Another indicator of our culture’s victimhood bias is in nearly every internet article I’ve read detailing FKA Twigs’ lawsuit against LaBeouf and Netflix’s punitive actions, there was a notice informing readers of specific resources available to them if they ever “experience domestic violence”.

This is a commendable public service, but it’s striking that despite these articles also referencing LaBeouf’s alcoholism and mental health issues, none of them ever direct readers suffering from those conditions to equally helpful resources.

The reality is that these notices and Netflix’s punitive disappearing of LaBeouf and Depp are simply exercises in virtue signaling and pandering to the online outrage mob.

LaBeouf and Depp may be terrible people who’ve done terrible things, but dispensing punishment and condemnation before accusations are proven is unwise and unhealthy. Even after findings of guilt, we should attempt the difficult but imperative task of foregoing vengeance and victimhood in favor of cultivating repentance and forgiveness, which would have longer lasting effects and be a path to a more decent, kind and compassionate culture.

In conclusion, Pieces of a Woman doesn’t live up to the stellar work Vanessa Kirby does in it, just like Netflix doesn’t live up to the enlightened principle of forgiveness at the heart of the film.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Netflix's The Crown is a Mirror of American Politics

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

Netflix’s acclaimed drama on the British royal family is back, but it feels eerily reminiscent of the trials and tribulations of the ruling class aristocrats running and ruining America.

The Crown, Netflix’s smash hit royal drama, premiered its much anticipated fourth season last week and I dutifully binged watched the whole thing.

The high-quality historical drama, which follows the travails of Queen Elizabeth II and the rest of the royals, is exquisitely produced, for the most part gloriously acted, reliably entertaining and somewhat perversely addictive.

But maybe I am suffering from presidential election PTSD, but as I watched The Crown I couldn’t help but be triggered into thinking about the horror show that is American politics….most notably because I simply had no one for which to root.

The Crown, like American politics, is populated almost entirely with villains…wicked, corrupt, cold-hearted, duplicitous, self-serving villains.

On one side we have the royal family, which reminds me of the Democrats. The show, like the establishment media here in the U.S., works hard to humanize these entitled elitists but it is a Herculean task for me to empathize with such a bunch of spoiled, self-absorbed, raging mediocrities.

This collection of modern royals is, like the decrepit and deceitful Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, well past their sell-by date.

The Queen, similar to our soon-to-be-crowned commander-in-chief Sleepy Joe Biden, is an empty vessel completely oblivious to reality, who becomes aggressively indignant when confronted with it.

The rest of the royal clan, the abrasive Prince Philip, the boozy Princess Margaret, the bitter Princess Anne and the depraved Prince Andrew, like the greedy harlots in the halls of American power, are arrogant and entitled knobs born on third base acting like they hit a triple.

Princess Diana (masterfully played by the luminous Emma Corrin), is similar to the Democratic firebrand Alexandra Ocassio-Cortez, as she is a young, pretty, dynamic breath of fresh air injected into the stuffy and stilted establishment.

As Ocassio-Cortez is thrown into the deep end of public life she will face the same existential threat as Princess Diana before her…either bend to the establishment’s will or be broken by it. The Crown shows us that Diana was broken by it, but AOC seems to be leaning more toward bending the knee, betraying her principles and kissing the right backside.

Then there is that silver-spooned sad-sack Prince Charles, who, like woke Democrats, mopes around his completely unearned luxurious lifestyle because he can’t be with the horse-faced women he loves, Camilla Parker-Bowles, but instead has to settle for the stunningly beautiful Diana. If ever there was a man who needed a punch in the face and a swift kick in the ass, it is Prince Charles.

As the indignant and self-pitying Charles gets all fussy over his love life like a baby in a wet nappy, I couldn’t help but think of Don Corleone in The Godfather slapping his weepy nephew Johnny Fontaine and telling him to “act like a man!”, something I’ve wanted to do to the whiny Democrats for the last four years.

On the other side of the ledger, at least this season, is the Iron Lady herself, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson – who is a disappointment in the role), who ruled Britannia from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher perfectly reflects the mindless, malignant and mendacious modern-day Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence.

Thatcher, and her American counterpart Ronald Reagan, were loathsome and diabolical creatures who used flag waving and soaring rhetoric to deceive the masses and lead a conservative revolution that brought about the destruction of the two things it claimed it wanted to conserve – the nation and the family unit.

Most of our major problems of today can be directly traced back to Thatcher and Reagan’s revolution, which unleashed a tsunami of financialization, free trade and muscular militarization that destroyed unions and devastated the working class.

It is symbolically significant that both Thatcher and Reagan later in life suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease, as their demented approach to governing was fueled by a rapacious myopia, historical illiteracy, selective memory and a relentless lack of any foresight or consideration of consequences.

Republicans (and corporate/Clinton/Obama Democrats) still suffer from Reagan’s dementia, as they are completely incapable of coming up with a bold, new idea or any idea at all. Even Trump, who won in 2016 running against the economic globalism and neo-conservative foreign policy of establishment Republicans, suffered Reagan’s dementia as he unimaginatively governed like the swamp creature he promised to abolish.

Season four of The Crown shows that the royals despised Thatcher, who they thought uncouth and beneath them, just as much as Thatcher despised the poor men that she gleefully sends to war, as well as the working class union men she economically castrates.

The same is true in American politics, as both the Democrats and Republicans claim to be for the workingman but do everything in their power to crush the working class in favor of the investor class.

Even though The Crown triggered my election PTSD, it is a high-quality show I thoroughly enjoyed watching. The thing I liked most about The Crown was that I had the power to turn it off whenever I wanted…unlike American politics, where I am entirely powerless to put an end to the never-ending nightmare.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Crown Just Cast an Australian to Play Princess Diana and I am in a Woke-Fueled Rage!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 39 seconds

If wokeness is going to survive, the scourge of actors portraying characters that are in any way different from themselves must end now.

I consider myself a devout crusader for the Church of Wokeness, a brave Knight of the Woke Table if you will.

Whenever an injustice is committed here in Hollywood I am the one who fiercely follows the crowd and does the most courageous thing imaginable…write a scathingly pithy article about it.

My specialty is scouring the trade papers searching for violations of the new woke Hollywood commandment that “Actors shall not portray characters that aren’t exactly identical to them in real life”. I call this the “No Acting Allowed” rule.

This noble calling of mine isn’t an easy one, there are so many micro-aggressions and so little time to cancel all who commit them, but still I soldier on.

The newest and most heinous of injustices that I unearthed occurred the other day and was so horrifying it literally left me shaking.

*Trigger Warning for the sensitive – a story of brutal casting violence follows.

The injustice of which I speak is that Netflix just announced that on their hit show The Crown, Princess Diana – the most iconic of British Royals, will be played by Elizabeth Debicki who is…gasp…Australian!

I know, I know, it is an awful and tone-deaf maneuver, especially considering the history of it all. I mean, Australia really only exists because the British wanted their riff raff out of sight and mind, and they certainly didn’t want them portraying their most beloved of royals on some binge-worthy tabloid drama. An Australian portraying Princess Diana only highlights how far the once mighty British Empire has fallen.

Think of it this way…imagine if you will, an Aussie women worthy of having a tv show or movie made about them…I know it is far-fetched but just try…and then imagine a non-Australian actress playing that woman…talk about a dingo stealing your baby!

Now, some people may be thinking that since Elizabeth Debicki is a gloriously gifted actress blessed with exquisite skill and talent that it is just fine for her, despite the black mark of her Aussie background, to play Princess Diana. That is blasphemy…wokeness never considers ability!

Oscar winning actress Octavia Spencer concurs as she recently declared in regards to casting, “Nothing can replace lived experience and authentic representation…it’s imperative that we cast the appropriate actor for the appropriate role…”

What Spencer was actually talking about was the woke sin of able-bodied actors playing disabled characters, but if we follow her ideology to its logical conclusion, we end up crucifying the Aussie interloper Debecki for daring to play the very English Princess Diana. 

I wish there was a woke time machine so we could see who Octavia Spencer would cast instead of Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot and Oscar-nominee Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.

Those able-bodied bastards are acting abominations. Their crimes are almost as bad as cis-gendered actors playing trans characters.

Halle Berry recently said she was contemplating playing a trans character but after being shouted down by my woke comrades, Halle apologized, and the world was once again made safe from acting.

I wish someone stopped Felicity Huffman from playing a trans character and scoring an Oscar nomination for her work in the dreadful 2005 movie Transamerica.

Thankfully we woke got revenge on Huffman when she was sent to prison for that blasphemy! She actually went to prison for trying to bribe a college into admitting her daughter…but that’s beside the point…the important thing is she was ultimately punished! I don’t think that punishment went far enough though. If it were up to me Felicity Huffman would have the scarlet letter of a penis sewn onto her forehead, so that with every step she took her forehead penis would swing before her eyes and forcefully remind her of the unforgivable trans-phobic sin she committed.

Another transgressor of woke trans dogma is Scarlett Johansson. ScarJo was set to play a trans man in the film Rub and Tug, but woke warriors fired up the outrage machine and forced her to back out.

In addition, the monstrously white ScarJo had previously earned woke ire when she starred in Ghost in the Shell as a character that was Asian in the original source material. Oh the humanity!

Of course, even if an actor is the same race or ethnicity as a character they aren’t safe from the righteous sword of wokeness.

Zoe Saldana thought she could play Nina Simone in a bio-pic about the legendary singer. Not without woke outrage she couldn’t! Saldana’s crime was that she is light-skinned and Simone was dark-skinned…in other words Zoe Saldana wasn’t black enough. Saldana has since apologized for her heinous hate crime.

A similar thing happened with Ruby Rose, a lesbian actress cast in the role of lesbian superhero Batwoman. Rose was excoriated by the woke brigade on social media because apparently she wasn’t lesbian enough.

To avoid this woke backlash and the cancel culture mob, white actresses Jenny Slate and Kristen Bell quit their roles voicing black characters on cartoons.

Slate stated, “black characters should be played by black people” and that her portrayal was “an act of erasure of black people.”

Bell said, “ This is a time to acknowledge our acts of complicity.”

If only that Aussie Elizabeth Debicki would do her part and acknowledge that playing Princess Diana on The Crown makes her complicit in the erasure of English people and declare that English characters should only be portrayed by English people, then we could be one step closer to eradicating the art of acting and finally living in the glorious utopia of talentlessness we woke are obviously so desperate to manifest.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

2018 Mid-Term Elections

Ever since Trump was elected president in 2016, the media have declared that he would face a comeuppance in the form of vast Democrat victories, or as they call it, a “blue wave”, come the 2018 mid-term elections. While I would like to think that would happen…I don’t think that will happen.

As long time readers know, I was one of “those people” who, in the face of a cavalcade of opposite opinion in the media and in my social circles, accurately predicted Trump’s victory in 2016. As I said in my writing from that time, I didn’t want Trump to win (nor was I a Hillary supporter), I just thought he would. I ended up being right and we have all had to suffer through the never ending reality show that is Trump TV ever since.

The formula I used to predict Trump’s 2016 victory is my McCaffrey Wave Theory, which again, I am sure long-time readers are sick of hearing about…but what can you do? My wave theory uses, among other things, popular culture, most specifically, at least currently, film and television, as indicators of the mood in the collective unconscious. The formula of the McCaffrey Wave Theory is actually very complex and complicated, and takes into account numerous cultural and historical “waves” or “cycles” that are all simultaneously in motion.

Interpreting the data from these waves/cycles and measuring their relationship to one another is how the McCaffrey Wave Theory is able to “predict” certain turn of events. And to be clear, this is not about being Nostradamus and saying planes will fly into buildings on 9-11, but rather about understanding the ebbs and flows of the collective unconscious and knowing when both big and small shifts will occur when portions of the collective unconscious become conscious.

The key elements of the McCaffrey Wave Theory are the archetypes, narratives and sub-texts prominent in films/tv along with their color scheme and visual/cinematic tendencies. These data points are how my wave/cycle theory is able to discern which films and/or television shows are leading indicators and which are lagging indicators of the collective unconscious. Leading indicator films are the ones that express the unconscious desires/fears of the collective, while lagging indicator films are the ones that express conscious fears or desires of the collective.

Some examples of leading indicator film and tv were pretty obvious in 2017 when HULU’s A Handmaid’s Tale (its narrative and vibrant red and green color scheme) and the DC film Wonder Woman (its narrative and red and blue color scheme) jumped to the fore of our culture in the early summer. These two successful projects accurately foretold of the coming feminist outcry and the rise of the #MeToo movement in the wake of the Weinstein revelations that came out in October of 2017.

A good example of a lagging indicator film was in 2017 as well, when Steven Spielberg rushed into production his thinly veiled anti-Trump/pro-Hillary film, The Post, that underwhelmed both at the box office and come awards time. The Post failed both artistically and financially because it was little more than wish fulfillment that attempted to give the audience what it wanted, not what the collective sub-conscious needed.

In the years leading up to the rise of Trump in 2016, there were numerous films and television shows that were ominous signs of a very dark impulse coming to the fore in American life and across the globe.

Two glaring examples were HBO’s Game of Thrones with its marketing campaign which for years was warning us all with their ice-blue billboards proclaiming that “Winter is Coming”. The other was Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle, a show about what America would be like if the Nazi’s and Japanese won World War II, which hit the airwaves in 2015 accompanied by a prodigious marketing campaign which had the Nazi Eagle on the American flag and the Imperial Japanese flag plastered all over the New York subway and elsewhere. Both of those shows resonated within the culture because they accurately gave voice to what was lurking in our collective unconscious. On some level we knew what was coming…a horrible “winter” and the Nazi’s/Not Sees…and these shows knew it before we were even conscious of it. (and don’t kid yourself, the Nazi/Not See impulse is not solely of the right, the left has a strong Not See impulse too).

In 2015 there were many films that were also giving us warning signs of big trouble ahead. The Martian, The Hateful Eight, The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were all through their narratives, color schemes (Martian - Red, Hateful 8 - Blue, Revenant - Blue, Star Wars - Red and Blue) and cinematic visuals (shots of foreboding vast expanses) the equivalent of a flashing red sign that a gigantic storm was coming.

In 2016 things got even clearer, as the blockbusters Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and even La La Land all revealed through their narratives (internecine warfare), sub-text and color schemes (all of them with vibrant clashes of red and blue) that our cultural train was headed off the track if not the cliff.

As I have previously written, last year cinema gave us some signs of what to expect going forward. The big archetype of the year in 2017 was Winston Churchill…with the films Dunkirk, Darkest Hour and the Netflix show The Crown. The Churchill archetype can be interpreted in numerous ways, but when seen in conjunction with other wave/cycles, it strikes me that the Churchill archetype is manifesting in the Trump’s of the world…in other words…it is actually the Churchill shadow archetype that is taking center stage.

Which brings us to this year and the mid-terms. As I said, there has been incessant talk of a blue wave and in its jubilant wake the possibility of a Democratic House and maybe even Senate where, like a scene out of The Godfather where Michael settles all family business, liberals exact revenge by impeaching not only of Trump but Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. As entertaining as that liberal porn may be…I don’t think it is going to happen.

According to my wave theory, there will be no blue wave. Not only will the Democrats not win the Senate, I don’t think they will win the House either, and if they do it will be by the skin of their teeth. Now…before you stick your head in the oven…to be very, very clear…I could certainly be wrong about this, God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. For starters, I have never used my wave theory to predict a mid-term before, and it could be I am interpreting the data entirely incorrectly, this is a distinct possibility. But with that said, ever since last June, when I wrote a piece for CounterPunch on the topic, along with a follow up posting on this blog in July, I have thought that this blue wave was a mirage.

As I stated in my CounterPunch piece, the big warning signs for me were the prominence and success of both Deadpool 2 and Avengers: Infinity War, both of which had narratives, sub-text and color scheme that spoke clearly of the failure of the opposition to Trump to succeed in toppling him.

Other films, such as A Quiet Place, Hereditary and even A Star is Born, that have all resonated deeply within the culture this year, are also leading indicators of a Democratic failure come the mid-terms because of their narratives and sub-text. Believe it or not, A Star is Born is remarkably insightful sub-textually and that sub-text very clearly (once you crack the code of it) states that if not Trump, then at least Trumpism, is here to stay as a replacement for the old paradigm, as indicated by the song in the film “Maybe it’s time we let the old ways die”. (I hope to have a full analysis of A Star is Born done soon).

Just as importantly, there are lagging indicator films that are, just like Spielberg’s The Post in 2017, falling flat, which highlight what isn’t resonating in the collective unconscious. Films with similar narratives, like the “aggrieved and under-appreciated genius wife/power behind the throne” stories of The Wife and Colette, or the “police shooting/racism” films The Hate U Give, Monsters and Men and Blindspotting, have all fallen flat in the broader culture. Even the colossal failure of the cinematic celebration of multi-culturalism and female empowerment, A Wrinkle in Time, is telling us what is going on in our collective unconscious, and it isn’t good news.

Now…maybe I am dead wrong about all this…maybe I am misreading and misinterpreting the data, that is a distinct possibility. Maybe the Democrats win a huge majority in the House and even get one in the Senate…but neither of those things will lead to a return to “normal”…only an escalation of the clash for civilization that is currently taking place.

Even if Democrats win, the intensity of the political turmoil here in America will not recede but proceed at an even quicker pace. Two more years of impeachment talk and congressional hearings will only heighten the tensions that are already near a boil. If you thought Trump was awful these last two years, wait until he faces an existential threat to his presidency from a Democratically controlled House and possibly Senate.

On the other hand, if, as I have been predicting since June, there is not blue wave, don’t expect tensions to lessen. If Democrats fail to gain the House, Trump will turn his obnoxiousness up to 11 and liberals and the media will ratchet up the crazy to unseen heights. And on top of that, if Mueller ends his investigation with no bombshells or smoking gun of “Russian collusion”, the liberal and Democratic meltdown will make Chernobyl look like a cookout.

In other words…no matter the outcome on November 6th, the conflagration that is American politics will only grow bigger, hotter and much more dangerous.

The reality is that there is no stopping the collapse of the institutions of western civilizations. Trust me, we have a very, very bumpy road ahead. That means more authoritarianism across the globe (Bolsonaro will win in Brazil) and more shocks to the system, like economic earthquakes, natural disasters and war.

The good news is that this current wave/cycle of collapse and destruction will not last forever. Eventually, after maybe a decade or so (or God help us a decade or two), this collapse and destruction wave/cycle will transform into a more optimistic wave/cycle of growth, stability, relative peace and prosperity. Remember, destruction is the first act of creation, and we will create, hopefully, a more just, localized, thoughtful and sustainable civilization in the crater where this one once stood.

As for the bad news…we are still in the destruction phase…and come November 7th there are going to be a lot of really pissed off Democrats, liberals and anti-Trumpers, who will still have no power in Washington with which to vent their rage. And if you thought things have been bad the last two years, what ‘til you get a load of what comes next because you ain’t seen nothing yet.

©2018

Lady MacBeth : A Review

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

My Rating : 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation : SKIP IT.

Lady MacBeth, written by Alice Berch and directed by William Oldroyd, is the story of Katherine, a young woman in 1860's rural England, stuck in a stifling marriage and a suffocating culture. The film stars Florence Pugh as Katherine, along with Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton and Naomi Ackie in supporting roles. 

Lady MacBeth has all the trappings of an art house gem, an exquisite period setting and costumes, a breakout performance from a talented young actress and a political sub-text of female empowerment in the face of a controlling patriarchy. Sadly, Lady MacBeth is not the sum of its parts and winds up being little more than a pretender to the art house crown. 

The biggest problem with Lady MacBeth is that it tries to do too much, too fast and goes too far. The reason period pieces like this work is because they set up constraints upon the characters in the form of cultural customs and traditions, and they force the characters to struggle against or break free of them. The cinematic drama is born and bred in that struggle. That is why people loved Downton Abbey for example, or Netflix's recent hit The Crown, those shows put the restraints of tradition upon human emotions and yearnings and we all watched to see the characters resist against them. The problem with Lady MacBeth is that those traditional and cultural obstacles are too easily discarded, ignored and overcome, rendering the struggle against them dramatically impotent and entirely moot. 

The first third of the film is very compelling because those cultural hindrances are front and center and are a cross that seems unbearable for Katherine. Her confinement to her husband's house is palpably stultifying. Director Oldroyd makes the interesting choice to shoot all of the indoor scenes as static shots to effectively enhance the rigid sense of emotional suffocation. Oldroyd also wisely contrasts this static indoor approach with hand held shots when Katherine finally goes outside, indicating her sense of freedom and abandon.

But then the train goes off the rails in the latter two thirds of the film when the narrative unravels as the traditional reins upon Katherine aren't simply loosened, they disappear completely. The film rapidly deteriorates from there when all of the tension and drama those constraints brought with them dissipates entirely. The art house ship is scuttled at that point and a rather predictable and conventional film takes its place.

The one bright spot in the whole endeavor is the discovery of Florence Pugh. Pugh, who is vaguely reminiscent of a young Kate Winslet, has stardom written all over her. She is a beautiful woman, but her beauty never overshadows her talent. She is blessed with the skill of being able to convey her character's intentions and vivid inner life with the slightest of glances. Pugh is a charismatic and powerful screen presence who exudes an intelligence and strength that few young actresses possess. I am willing to bet that she has a most stellar career in front of her.

The rest of the cast are all eclipsed by the supernova that is Ms. Pugh. Cosmo Jarvis plays the love interest but is entirely of no interest. Naomi Ackie is given a rather thankless job of having to portray a character that is so poorly written it is difficult to reconcile. And Paul Hilton's Alexander is so terribly one-dimensional he might as well be twirling his mustache whenever he's on screen.

I was ready to go all in on the ride of Lady MacBeth, but the film made the fatal error of not grounding it's story in a consistent reality, and thus the entire exercise seemed a rather empty and fruitless endeavor that became harder and harder to buy into. I was very disappointed with the film, but on the bright side found solace in Ms. Pugh's sublime performance despite it all. 

My recommendation is to skip Lady MacBeth entirely. Even watching it for free on Netflix or cable would be a waste of time as the film neither reveals nor illuminates anything of worth or substance. It's a shame, for if the filmmaker had screwed their courage to the sticking place, maybe the film could have been elevated to the art house throne. Instead, Lady MacBeth took the easy and cowardly route of the ordinary and won its hard earned exile from artistic relevancy. 

©2017