The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An unforgettable true story turned into a completely forgettable motion picture.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever is the amazing, nearly unbelievable, true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, a seemingly dim-witted, ne’er do well merchant mariner from Inwood in New York City, who decides to show his support by traveling to Vietnam in 1968 to deliver beer to his neighborhood buddies serving in the war.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever, which is written and directed by Peter Farrelly and stars Zac Efron and is currently streaming on Apple TV +, is a really great story…but unfortunately, it’s a bad movie.

Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) won a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar four years ago for Green Book, his much-maligned movie on race relations, which was also set in New York City in the 1960’s and dealt with a conservative seeing the light and embracing a more progressive vision.

Green Book wasn’t as bad as the interminably aggrieved victimhood brigade would have you believe, but it also definitely wasn’t Best Picture material (although with the laughable CODA winning the award last year who the hell knows what a Best Picture worthy movie is anymore). Green Book was basically a well-crafted, well-acted, rather simple-minded movie about hope for humanity, no wonder it was so hated in our current awful age.

With The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Farrelly seems to, in the wake of the Green Book criticisms, be trying to either bolster his much tarnished liberal bona fides or give a mea culpa for his perceived sins against the new woke religion. Whatever he’s trying to do…he fails miserably.

Green Book, for all its shortcomings, worked as a piece of middlebrow entertainment masquerading as upper middle-class art, because it featured two really terrific actors, Viggo Mortenson and Mahershala Ali (who won a Best Supporting Actor for his work). The Greatest Beer Run Ever is not so blessed, as it stars poor Zac Efron.

Efron seems like a nice guy, and I have absolutely no animus towards him whatsoever and wish him nothing but success. But the truth is he’s an extremely limited actor and those limitations are laid bare in this film.

Efron’s Chickie is like a more handsome, street-smart Forest Gump who stumbles through history oblivious to his own buffoonery. As one Sergeant says upon meeting Chickie in a war zone, “don’t worry about him, some people are just too stupid to get killed.”

As for Efron, he’s a good-looking kid (“kid” – he’s 34!) but he’s utterly devoid of charisma and magnetism. He almost seems to be trying to hide in front of the camera. Emotionally he’s a black hole from which no life or light escapes. And his dismal New Yawk accent is come and go for the first third of the film and then disappears completely for no apparent reason.

To be clear, Efron isn’t the only bad actor in the movie. The entire supporting cast, with two notable exceptions, are simply dreadful.  The egregiously amateurish cast are either over-the-top caricatures or underwhelming to the point of invisibility.

In particular, Chickie’s group of friends in New York are portrayed by a collection of the worst actors I can remember seeing in a mainstream movie and their accents are less New York than they are a rancid stew of Providence, Boston and Maine. I won’t name any of them out of some twisted sense of compassion, but holy shit they are embarrassingly bad.

The two notable exceptions regarding the abysmal acting are Bill Murray as The Colonel, a World War II vet who runs the local bar, and Russell Crowe, as a journalist in Vietnam. Murray and Crowe are not particularly exceptional in their roles, but whenever they are on-screen a sense of relief comes over the viewer as they know at least they’re in the hands of professionals. Murray and Crowe feel at home on the screen, whereas everyone else, most notably Zac Efron, does not.

To be fair to Efron, Farelly’s script and his direction are no help either as they’re utterly atrocious.

There are major plot points and dramatic moments throughout the movie that need to be earned but simply never are, like when Chickie makes the decision to go to Vietnam, it just sort of happens…and everything, particularly the crucial emotional beats, are as vacuous as that.

Another grating thing about the movie is that a major plot point is Chickie must carry a bevy of beers (Pabst Blue Ribbon cans) in a duffle bag across the ocean and all over Vietnam. Beers are heavy, but Chickie’s wondrous bag always seems nearly weightless and empty, but he continuously pulls beer after beer after beer out of it like it’s a magic hat.

If that bag were realistic, and Chickie had to lug it around and decide between dumping out beers or staying true to his mission, then the story and his burden would take on great meaning. The duffle bag literally could’ve been Chickie’s (and America’s) cross to bear across the globe for the sin of the Vietnam war…but instead it’s just a ticky-tack prop that draws viewers out of the reality of this astounding true story.

Another major issue is that Farrelly’s tone through much of the movie is whimsical, and it undermines the horror of the war we see unfolding before us and it all feels…unseemly. There’s a scene like this at the front lines in Vietnam which is so poorly choreographed and directed, and tonally off-kilter, that I found it repulsive.

What’s so grating about The Greatest Beer Run Ever is that it really could have, and should have, been great.

As I watched I kept thinking of how amazing this film would’ve been if it were made in the 1970’s, when the topic, a conservative ‘Road to Damascus’ moment regarding the crime and calamity that was the Vietnam war, would have more cultural resonance, meaning and impact. Imagine a movie like that directed by someone like Hal Ashby and starring Jack Nicholson, I mean God-damn…THAT would’ve been worth seeing!

But instead, we get this rather pathetic modern-day effort from Farrelly and Efron that feels almost instantaneously forgettable.  

To be fair, there are a few sequences that I thought were well done, most notably when Chickie runs into a little Vietnamese girl in a field and tries to interact with her. The scene is shot without sound with music playing over it and it’s easily the best and most profound scene in the film. Another interesting visual is what I will call “the falling-man” shot…which was very reminiscent of 9-11 and therefore was loaded with uncomfortable but insightful symbolism.

What is most interesting to me about the rather uninteresting The Greatest Beer Run Ever though, is that Farrelly was attempting to make somewhat of an anti-war movie in an age when anti-war movies are so rare as to be extinct. The reason for this is two-fold…first, the Pentagon and intelligence community control Hollywood and the messages about the military and war that it produces – and anti-war sentiment is not on their agenda. This manifests in movies and tv shows like Top Gun: Maverick and Seal Team getting made and movies like Oliver Stone’s long planned project on the My Lai massacre not finding funding. Secondly, the anti-war movement in America, along with Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party and the rest of the populist movements of both left and right, have been successfully co-opted and crushed by the establishment, resulting in the anti-war movement being virtually non-existent today.  

Anti-war sentiment is now anathema in America, as liberals – long the vanguard in anti-war movements, have been so easily conditioned to demand blood lust, most notably against Russia. The same liberals I marched with against the Iraq war in 2003 are now ignoring the War in Yemen and demanding all-out war in Ukraine – up to and including nuclear war, and unthinkingly regurgitate vapid establishment propaganda like children reciting their A-B-C’s.

If you apply logic and dare to question establishment propaganda, like the obvious inanities of the Ghost of Kiev, or the Snake Island buffoonery, or the less obvious but equally dubious claims of the Bucha massacre, or the supposed Russian rape camps, or you speak out against the U.S. escalating the war by sending billions upon billions of dollars to Ukraine (in the form of weaponry) and sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines, you’ll be reflexively tarred and feathered as a shill or stooge for Putin.

People have become deathly allergic to context (and thinking), so if you point out the fact that the U.S. instigated the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014 ,and later broke the Minsk Peace agreements, and point out the fact that Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians (who were Ukrainian citizens) in the Donbas in the eight years after the coup, and that the Ukrainian government is riddled with fascists who banned the Russian language and shut down media outlets and opposing political parties, you’re just a useful idiot on Putin’s payroll.

This sort of shallow, simple-minded, historically illiterate, Manichean, knee-jerk jackassery used to be what liberals called out on the right and righteously fought against, but now liberals act exactly like flag-waving, McCarthy-ite right-wingers demanding all those with opposing views slavishly obey the establishment line or be branded a traitor or Russian sympathizer, or both. These empty-headed, emotionalist liberal fools are afflicted with the same disease they used to fight against, and are completely blind to their reactionist Russo-phobic conditioning.

The co-opting of the anti-war left by neo-con war mongers and neo-liberal corporatists is a calamity and will be catastrophic for the health of our nation, and may well lead to another world war and all of us to a fiery death.

On that less than pleasant note, let’s return to an equally unpleasant but much less important topic…The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

In more skilled and gifted-hands The Greatest Beer Run Ever could have made salient points on these weighty and vital issues and held a mirror up to reveal the madness that has engulfed America and its anti-anti-war discourse and actions. But unfortunately, Peter Farrelly lacks the needed craft, talent and courage to make such a meaningful movie, and instead churns out this flaccid, flimsy, D-level nonsense that will come and go with no one noticing.

The bottom line is that The Greatest Beer Run ever is a missed opportunity, and you would be wise to miss it too.

©2022

False Flags and Memory Holes

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

On Thursday June 13th, 2019, there was an “attack” on two commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman. This “attack” is the second on ships in the last two months, as four commercial ships were similarly targeted off of the Gulf of Oman on May 12th of this year. The U.S. claims that the “attacks” were perpetrated by Iranian forces, and say they have the evidence to “prove” it, resulting in tensions in the region ratcheting up considerably with rumors swirling of a U.S. strike against Iran in retaliation.

Of course, just because the U.S. claims it was Iran who committed these acts, doesn’t mean it actually was Iran. The evidence put forward, including a grainy video, thus far has been laughable at best and contradicted by eye witnesses such as the crew of one of the tankers. Pictures released by the U.S. alleging to show damage from Limpit mines have holes visible on the ships well above the water line, which indicates something besides a mine created them. Another oddity about the entire episode is that none of the ships that were attacked were American, but that hasn’t stopped the U.S. from blustering on about holding Iran accountable.

A false flag is defined as “a covert operation designed to deceive; the deception creates the appearance of a particular party, group, or nation being responsible for some activity, disguising the actual source of responsibility.” If one is even remotely historically literate and has a functioning mind complete with a critical thinking reflex, these recent attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman seem to clearly be false flag attacks.

False flags have played a pivotal role in instigating many U.S. military actions over the years. Remember the Maine! That was the rallying cry of the media to drum up the Spanish-American War back in 1898 when the U.S.S. Maine sank in Havana harbor. The truth was that the Maine sank due to an accidental explosion, but the Hearst media empire turned it into a terrorist attack and thus pushed America into war.

As the Pentagon papers showed, The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a charade, a notorious false flag operation used to justify the U.S. fully committing to war in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin was the inciting incident which directly led to the deaths of millions of people in the region, including over 58,000 U.S. servicemembers.

In Syria in 2012, rebel forces used a false flag kidnapping of NBC News reporter Richard Engel to drum up American media anger against Assad and support for the rebels. Later in the conflict these same forces used false flag chemical weapons attacks on Syrian civilians, aided in part by the duplicitous White Helmets, in order to goad the U.S. to commit more military forces to the war and later to launch missiles into the country.

Prefabricated lies have always been an essential tool to deceive the American populace into supporting a war. Consider the case of Iraq, where the U.S. not only concocted lies about babies dragged from incubators to start the 1991 Gulf War, but also the WMD lie just over a decade later to start the calamitous Iraq war in 2003.

All of these past false flags and manufactured lies have been disappeared, lost down our cultural memory hole, because they are evidence of a very inconvenient truth, but a truth none the less…and that truth is that not only are we often not the good guys, but most of the time we are actually the bad guys.

In the case of the attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman, you might ask who would do such a thing? Well the answer is…the usual suspects. First on the suspect list is Israel and their American neo-con contingent that acts as a duplicitous fifth column in the U.S.. Israel, once again, wants the U.S. to fight its wars for it and so yearns for America to start military action with their regional nemesis Iran. A good indicator of this being the case is that the Israel-firsters in the media have jumped on these stories to pontificate in support of attacks on Iran. Bret Stephens of the New York Times is a perfect example of one of these types who is incapable of any complex thought or even contemplating other culprits besides Iran.

Stephens gives the deception game away in his op-ed titled, “The Pirates of Tehran”. Stephens opens the piece describing how in 1988 the U.S.S. Samuel B. Roberts hit an Iranian mine while sailing in the Persian Gulf. Stephens then proudly proclaims that ten days later the “U.S. Navy destroyed half of the Iranian fleet in a matter of hours. Iran did not molest the Navy or international shipping for many years thereafter.”

The revealing thing about Stephens jaunt down memory lane regarding America’s glorious smack down of Iran is that he completely ignores the most important part of the story. That part is that just a few months after the sinking of half of the Iranian fleet, the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 in Iranian air space with a surface-to-air missile, killing 290 civilians, including 66 children. The U.S. never apologized for the incident and in fact gave medals to the crew of the Vincennes for their work. The senseless slaughter of innocent men, women and children is sort of a consequential detail to skip over when imploring the U.S. military to once again aggressively act against Iran.

Stephens second deceptive tell is a doozy, as he makes the case for Iranian guilt in regards to the most recent Gulf of Oman attacks. Stephens writes, “it would require a large dose of self-deception (or conspiracy theorizing) to pretend that Iran isn’t the likely culprit”.

Stephens reveals himself to be well-acquainted with self-deception when he writes about the authenticity of claims that Iran is responsible for the attacks, “Trump might be a liar, but the U.S. military isn’t.” Someone should buy Bret Stephens a pair of testicles and a history book, hopefully one with a robust section on the Gulf of Tonkin and the Pentagon Papers.

The thing that really stood out to me in Stephens’ piece though was the charge of “conspiracy theorizing”. See, according to Bret Stephens if you don’t accept the tenuous “official story” that Iran did it, then you are the most ludicrous thing a person can be…a conspiracy theorist! Of course Bret Stephens believes in conspiracy theories too, he is a Russian collusion Truther and accepts the official 9-11 story as fact, both of which are, in fact, theories of conspiracy, but for establishmentarians like Stephens, only other people are capable of being “conspiracy theorists”.

Is it an outlandish conspiracy theory notion that Israel would be behind false flag attacks? Not exactly. A conspiracy fact is that from 1979 to 1983 Israeli intelligence agencies carried out a massive false flag car bombing campaign in Lebanon that killed hundreds in order to sow chaos and to “push the PLO to use terrorism to provide Israel with the justification for an invasion of Lebanon”? Of course this may be an inconvenient truth for the anti-conspiracy theory crowd, but it is the truth.

The one good thing about the recent spate of accusations in the media against Iran regarding these ship attacks is that most people aren’t buying it. Yes, Bret Stephens and the Israel shills in the media are pushing Iranian guilt on the public, but the public is reticent to buy into it. Go read the comments accompanying Stephens New York Times piece to see the overwhelming skepticism on display.

Who knows how long the dam of skepticism will hold though as the anti-Iranian media pressure is relentless. A perfect example of which is how the media frames Iran’s decision to increase its uranium stockpile. The mainstream media declares that Iran by doing this Iran is breaking the Nuclear Deal…which is absurd as the U.S. BROKE THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL ALREADY BY WITHDRAWING FROM IT! There is no nuclear deal with Iran…it is null and void once the U.S. broke the agreement. But that didn’t stop the New York Times from stating in its headline, “Trump Adds Troops After Iran Says It Will Breach Nuclear Deal”. CNN’s deceptive headline reads, “Iran says it will break uranium stockpile under nuclear deal in 10 days”. To listen to the U.S. press, Iran is supposed to abide by an agreement from which the benevolent Americans “withdrew”. (notice how American’s “withdraw” from an agreement but nefarious Iranians “breach” a non-agreement…ridiculous.)

Reading the establishment press coverage on Iran is like seeing Chomsky’s thesis from Manufacturing Consent come to life before your eyes. I wholly encourage every single person on the planet to go read that book in order to see through the tsunami of horseshit that the establishment media constantly throws at us.

Israel is not the only suspect on the list….there is also Saudi Arabia. The Saudi’s are a loathsome lot and they would do anything to get the U.S. to take out their arch-rival the Iranians. The neo-cons, always a beacon of morality and ethics, are not only shills for Israel but for the tyrannical despots in the House of Saud too. Trump is enamored with both the Israelis and the Saudis, flattery and money will apparently get you everywhere when it comes to the Orange King of Queens.

The third suspect is the military industrial complex and its intelligence agency wing in the CIA, DIA and NSA. As Smedley Butler warned us, War is a Racket, and the U.S. profits mightily from that racket. By engaging in covert false flag attacks the U.S., or elements of the U.S. government and business community, can get a war with Iran that will make them trillions.

And the final suspect is an “all of the above” combination of the first three. It is very possible that the Israeli, Saudi and U.S. intelligence agencies are working together on these false flags and in stirring up trouble in the region. Considering the strangle hold the Israelis and Saudis have on our government and politics, and the vile miscreants populating our intel agencies, this scenario may be the most likely.

The bottom line in regards to Iran is this…we have no business going to war with Iran. War is a beast that once awakened, is uncontrollable. While the U.S. may think this will be a cakewalk comprised sinking of Iranian ships or missile strikes, things rarely, if ever, go as planned. In 1988, it was 290 Iranian civilians who paid the ultimate price for American aggression, maybe this time it will be American service members who needlessly die.

Iran is no Iraq, and the Iranian government won’t fall by U.S. military action…especially without invasion. And if invasion is on the table, that is absolutely insane because both Russia and China will gladly rush to covertly supply Iran’s military and irregular forces to turn the country into a quicksand which will become the American Empire’s, and maybe even America’s grave.

Hopefully tensions with diminish in the region and this fever breaks. I certainly hope that blowhards like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and the Israel puppets in the media are overruled by the American people who are weary or war and leery of lies.

But with that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if we are on the precipice of the war with Iran of which the neo-cons, Israel and Saudi Arabia have long dreamt. If that dream becomes reality, it will be a nightmare for us all.

©2019