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

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

Being the Ricardos: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a sub-mediocre, made-for-tv type of movie that is at times, insufferable.

Being the Ricardos, the Aaron Sorkin written and directed bio-pic that attempts to tell the tale of a very tumultuous week in the life of iconic comedienne Lucille Ball and her husband Desi Arnaz Jr., has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

The film itself, which made its streaming premiere on Amazon on Tuesday December 21st, is a rather pedestrian affair that suffers from an unsound narrative structure, tonal inconsistencies and a painfully poor script.

Sorkin’s writing style, which can best be describes as ‘walking, talking and exposition’, is an acquired taste, one which I have yet to acquire. I find his dialogue to be insufferable and his storytelling ability flaccid.

Making matters worse is that Sorkin’s quirky writing desperately needs a master craftsman director to make it work, like David Fincher on The Social Network, but Sorkin is a hack behind the camera and thus Being the Ricardos falls flat on its phony face.

The movie feels like a very special episode of a bad sitcom about a good sitcom. Adding to the lack of genuine drama is the fact that every sentient being with half a brain in their heads with a minimal relationship to the history of television knows exactly how the story ends. All of the drama is therefore devoid of any power.

But the reason Being the Ricardos is making headlines is not because it’s a mindless and middling affair. No, the film is getting attention because it’s mired in the most manufactured of controversies.  

Apparently the film committed the most unforgivable of sins by casting Oscar winning actor Javier Bardem as Arnaz opposite Oscar winning actress Nicole Kidman as Lucy. Why is Bardem playing Desi Arnaz a problem? Well, Bardem is a Spaniard and Arnaz a Cuban, which somehow violates some sacred woke law of diversity, inclusion and representation. To quote Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, “The Horror. The Horror.”

One know-nothing guardian of the grievance culture complained that Bardem was, like his Spanish ancestors, being a “colonizer” by playing the Cuban Arnaz.

“They (the Spanish) came in and erased who we (Latinos) were, and I can’t help but feel the same way when Bardem gets roles meant to share the Latinx experience.”

That bit of hysterical hyperbole overlooks the fact that many Hispanic and Latino families proudly identify not just with their national origins but with their distant Spanish roots out of class-consciousness, and that Desi’s wealthy, upper-class Cuban family most likely did too.

Director Sorkin tried to defend his casting of Bardem, saying, “it’s heartbreaking and a little chilling to see members of the artistic community resegregating ourselves.”

Considering Sorkin’s long-time, mealy-mouthed complicity with Hollywood’s diversity-obsessed woke warriors more interested in ‘representation’ than in artistry or quality, that statement is the equivalent of someone who made it rain outside complaining about the weather.

Another amusing thing about this contrived controversy is that no one is making a stink about Nicole Kidman, an Aussie non-comedienne, playing the most iconic American comedienne of all time, Lucille Ball. OK, Kidman may have technically been born in Hawaii, but to Australian parents only there on student visas. I’ve heard her ‘g’day mate’ accent and I bet she likes cricket, wombats, and ‘Men at Work’ too. She’s not a real American.

No one ever cares when British or Australian actors play Americans, and do so with their tone deaf, nasally attempts at an American accent. For instance, why isn’t there an uproar over Brit Tom Holland playing all-American hero Spider-Man, whose friendly neighborhood is Queens, New York? Are there no actors from Queens available?

These woke fools bitching about Bardem’s Spanish ancestry also rarely care when British actors of color, like Daniel Kaluuya, play African-Americans, like he did in Get Out and Judas and the Black Messiah.

The truth is, American actors of all colors and ethnicities miss out when British, Irish, Canadian and Australian actors play American roles. This injustice must be stopped!

Obviously, I’m joking. When casting, focusing on the specificity of an actor’s national background rather than their talent and skill is irrational and imbecilic and runs completely counter to the art and craft of acting.

As the ever-eloquent Bardem astutely pointed out in a Hollywood Reporter article,

“I’m an actor, and that’s what I do for a living: try to be people that I’m not. What do we do with Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone? What do we do with Margaret Thatcher played by Meryl Streep? Daniel Day-Lewis playing Lincoln?...if we want to open that can of worms, let’s open it for everyone…we should all start not allowing anybody to play Hamlet unless they were born in Denmark.”

Bardem is a great actor, as evidenced by his Best Actor Oscar nominated performance as, ironically enough, gay Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in the Julian Schnabel’s As Night Falls (2000).

His being attacked for his improper ethnic or national background is, unfortunately, something that is becoming common place in Hollywood when it comes to casting Latino roles.

For example, In the Heights shamelessly marketed itself as a celebration of diversity as its Asian director (John Chu), Latino writer (Lin Manuel-Miranda) and mostly Latino cast told the story of a Latino neighborhood in New York City. But the movie came under fire from the woke brigade for its lack of “Afro-Latinx” representation.

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story was sold as the righting of a historical wrong as, unlike the 1961 original movie, it cast only Latinos in Latino roles. Some still complained though that the lead role, Maria, was played by a woman of Columbian descent instead of a Puerto Rican.

The funny thing about this Being the Ricardos casting controversy is that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, despite not being Cuban or American respectively, and despite the vacuous script and dreadful direction guiding them, are the two best things in this awful movie.

Thankfully, neither actor tries to do an impersonation of their famous character. Instead they attempt to create actual human beings and not caricatures. Unfortunately, Sorkin’s script does not support them in this endeavor, but Kidman and Bardem should at least be recognized for their honest attempt, no matter how far they fall short.

The lessons that needs to be learned from Being the Ricardos and the surrounding casting contrvoersy are that, one - Aaron Sorkin is a truly terrible director. And two, within reason, we just need to let actors actually, you know, act…and we should leave the social justice preening for the college campus and the New York Times. Hollywood, its movies, its audiences, and the art of acting, would be much better served if we did.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

'And Just Like That...' - I Threw Up in My Mouth.

Old HBO warhorse Sex in the City is back with the new show ‘And Just Like That…’, which is devoutly committed to “inclusivity” and also apparently to being dreadful.  

The new show claims it eschews tokenism as it tries to make amends for its original sin of whiteness, ‘And Just Like That…’ I threw up in my mouth.

The comedy/drama Sex and the City, which told the tale of Carrie Bradshaw and her three friends Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as they navigated life, love and lust in New York City, was one of HBO’s most iconic shows when it ran from 1998 to 2004.

Now, seventeen years after the original went off the air, and after two abysmal feature films, Sex and the City (2008) and Sex and the City 2 (2010), the sassy strumpets are back with a new series on HBO titled, And Just Like That…

Sex and the City was wildly popular with a very particular brand of oblivious, feminist, upper-middle class aspiring white women.

The four whores of the apocalypse, the bright and allegedly beautiful Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the over-sexed Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the feminist firebrand Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and the uptight Charlotte (Kristen Davis), became the archetypes that these clueless white women latched on to and desperately tried to emulate.

I disliked Sex and the City first and foremost because of its egregious writing, decrepit direction and deplorable acting. But what made the show truly insidious as a pop culture phenomenon was that it inspired a whole generation of Karens-in-waiting to embrace narcissistic feminism and vapid consumerism. It was unadulterated capitalism porn meant to deceive gullible women into craving clothes they didn’t need at prices they couldn’t afford in order to purchase a false feeling of fulfillment and freedom. It was the feminist tv version of “slavery is freedom”.

And despite ostensibly being a comedy, it was never even remotely funny. It was basically an absurd and philosophically obscene soap opera about four homely, horny harlots who had more money than sense, and when the show faded from the spotlight the world was better for it.

Although Sex and the City was never funny, a funny thing happened to it after it finished its run, namely that the woke court of political correctness deemed it to be “problematic” for its relentless whiteness and lack of diversity.

The stars of the show don’t even contest this charge, as Cynthia Nixon said that the lack of diversity on Sex and the City was “the Achilles heel of the show…”

It was in this spirit of self-flagellating that And Just Like That…was born. The show’s sole purpose being to wash away Sex and the City’s sin of whiteness by embracing “inclusivity”…and also to make everybody involved lots of money.

Star and producer Sarah Jessica Parker said she is committed to And Just Like That… being ‘inclusive’, but without resorting to “tokenism”. Yeah, sure.

After watching the first two episodes which premiered on HBO Max on Thursday, I can report that And Just Like That… is such a brazen testament to tokenism, and strains so hard to be vacuously diverse, it nearly soils its lacy undergarments.

And Just Like That… returns all of the Sex and the City regulars…all except for Samantha, as Kim Cattrall basically declared there’s no amount of money that would make her work with Sarah Jessica Parker ever again. Respect.

But in order to appease the woke gods of inclusivity, tokens are dispersed throughout to check boxes and darken the show’s color palette.

The tokens thus far are, Lisa Todd Wexley, a fabulous black mom and friend to Charlotte. Dr. Nya Wallace, a black college professor who Miranda befriends. And finally, Che Diaz, who is a non-binary, queer, Latinx comedian who hosts a podcast with Carrie.

These one-dimensional minorities are such obvious tokens you could use them to pay for a ride on the 4 train to Union Square to take part in a Black Lives Matter protest or to buy a custom-made pussy hat.

And Just Like That… is also a monument to the ravages of age. Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte are no longer sexy and sassy, but are now a trio of taut-faced, time-worn tarts. As they say down on the farm, these botoxed brauds look ‘rode hard and put up wet’.

Father Time is undefeated and proof of that is that Carrie now looks like one of the high-priced leather hand bags that she hoards, Miranda looks like she wandered in from the set of The Night of the Living Dead and Charlotte’s face is so medically altered she bears a striking resemblance to the Joker.

There’s also not a single laugh to be found in this shameless money grab, as the writing is as stale as a month-old bagel and the performances as wooden as a cigar store Indian.

The one thing I did find amusing though is how these allegedly strong female characters have become such spineless, eager to please, groveling cowards.

In the 90’s they all strutted their stuff and didn’t care what people thought. Now, these supposedly free-thinking, free-spirited feminist characters (and the actors who play them) are so fearful they might offend, they reflexively comply and conform, instinctively never challenging but rather genuflecting to the suffocating and irrational restrictions placed upon them by woke culture.

In this way, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte perfectly reflect their now middle-aged, Hillary and Kamala loving, upper-middle class female fans who are just as compliant, just as conformist and just as cowardly, and who, no doubt, are waiting to be told if And Just Like That… is woke enough and if they’re allowed to like it.

I don’t know if the show is woke-approved, but I do know it’s devoid of anything even mildly interesting or entertaining and has absolutely no redeeming qualities to it. Same as it ever was.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

Amazon Studio's Playbook to Ruin Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Amazon Studio’s new “playbook” makes it official, diversity, not talent, skill or merit, is the only thing that matters anymore in the entertainment industry

The stunning document is shameless in its disdain for artistry and individuality, and its aggressive worship of all things woke.

The entertainment industry and the art of cinema took a gargantuan step on their relentless death march into the hellscape of the woke Mordor recently when Jeff Bezos, the Sauron of Amazon Studios, released his new “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) playbook”.

Following in the footsteps of the Academy Awards, which implemented new diversity and inclusion mandates into awards eligibility criteria, and Disney, which has turned the happiest place on earth into the People’s Republic of Wokestan, Amazon Studios, the new home of James Bond and Rocky, has, like a suicide note, put in writing its demand that film and TV ignore talent, skill and merit when hiring in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion.

It’s now clear that the corporate human resources junta has successfully transformed Hollywood into nothing more than the propaganda arm for the woke Savonarolas who burn art and entertainment on the bonfire of inanities that is DEI.

Among many things Amazon’s “playbook” demands are creative roles on productions being 50% women and underrepresented racial/ethnic groups by 2024, and documentation and reporting of these diversity quotas is required both pre and post production. Unfortunately, the exact skin tone and percentage of “racial/ethnic” blood needed to qualify as belonging to an underrepresented group, and the papers you’ll need to show to the DEI gestapo to prove it, are not made clear.

The insidious “playbook” also declares its commitment to “authentic portrayals” and its intention to cast “actors in a role whose identity aligns with the identity of the character they will be playing (by gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability) and in particular when the character is a member of an underrepresented group/identity.”

In other words, Amazon appears to be outlawing the art of acting as only disabled actors can play disabled characters and only LGBTQ actors can play LGBTQ roles. This is what happens when human resources deplorables take over the creative process.

One wonders how exactly Amazon will check if an actor up for a lesbian, gay or bisexual role is the real deal or not? Will actors be forced to “prove’ their lesbian, gay or bisexual bona fides by performing a sex act with an appropriately aligned producer? Maybe the casting couch can get a public relations facelift if it’s used to help Hollywood achieve the woke nirvana of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Of course, from an artistic perspective, the absurdity of Amazon’s totalitarian woke decrees is only topped by its power to suffocate and stultify creativity.

Consider this, some of the greatest performances we’ve seen in recent years would be wiped out by Amazon’s DEI manifesto, and it wouldn’t be surprising if eventually they’re retroactively cancelled for not being aligned with the new mandates.

For example, Daniel Day-Lewis is one of the greatest actors we’ve ever had, but despite not being disabled he won an Oscar for playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot, and won two Oscars for playing Americans in There Will Be Blood and Lincoln, despite being British and Irish.

In addition, Sean Penn isn’t gay but won an Oscar for playing Harvey Milk, Eddie Redmayne is able bodied but won for playing Stephen Hawking, Colin Firth won for playing King George VI but didn’t have a royal stutter and Jamie Foxx won for playing Ray Charles despite not being blind.

Even last year’s crop of movies would be affected by Amazon’s woke encyclical. Anthony Hopkins doesn’t have dementia but won the Best Actor Oscar playing a man suffering from that malady, Daniel Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor Oscar is British but won for playing an African-American, and in Amazon Studio’s own Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed was Oscar nominated for playing a deaf character but has perfect hearing.

Two of Amazon’s big hits from last year, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Coming 2 America violate this new woke law too as Brit Sacha Baron Cohen played a Kazahkstani, and New Yorker Eddie Murphy is played an African King. The horror!

Amazon’s decree is so specific it even states “But if the character has a distinct ethnic background, make sure that the actor’s ethnic background doesn’t conflict with this portrayal”, using as an example of a bad approach “are you casting a person of Puerto Rican heritage to play a character who is Colombian?” Under this edict Benicio del Toro’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a Mexican in Traffic wouldn’t happen because he is Puerto Rican.

Amazon’s “playbook” blatantly declares its repulsion at talent, skill and merit as a casting-criteria when it states that casting directors need to avoid “Relying on your “gut” or seeking “the best person for the job” as that’s an “inherently biased processes that may skew your decision making.”

If this relentless focus on hiring actors, creatives and even crew based on their gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and nationality all sounds legally dubious if not outright discriminatory, Amazon agrees, as they throw in this playbook disclaimer to cover their backsides, “While this Playbook provides a general overview, it is not intended to provide legal advice, so it’s crucial to discuss these issues with your attorney.”

As a cinephile and lover of quality art and entertainment in movies and tv, I’m looking forward to the day when the despicable woke totalitarian philistines currently running and ruining Hollywood learn the hard way, at the box office and in the courtroom, that “get woke, go broke” is a universal law that supersedes their self-righteous, anti-merit, DEI declarations of blatant discrimination. They deserve nothing less.

 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

The Academy Awards New Diversity and Inclusion Rules do not do Enough to Purge Hollywood of the Evil of Straight White Men

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 13 seconds

If Hollywood wants to become a true woke utopia, it should follow my guidelines to rid itself of the plague of white men.

The Academy Awards have set stringent new diversity guidelines to which all films must adhere by 2024 if they want to be considered for the prestigious Best Picture award.

The new guidelines require films to meet on screen representation standards where at least one of the lead actors or a significant supporting actor must be either Asian, Hispanic, black, Indigenous, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.

Cinephiles can sleep well knowing that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s movies will still be eligible for Best Picture.

If a film doesn’t meet the actor requirement then it can still pass the test by having representation from those same minority groups along with women, LGBTQ and people with cognitive or physical disabilities or who are deaf or hard of hearing represented in acceptable numbers behind the scenes on the crew, in apprenticeships or internships or in executive positions.

The bottom line is basically if you are a straight white guy in Hollywood you’ve just been served notice that your skill and talents are only needed for as long as it takes to train your female or minority replacement.

As someone who has long felt that hiring people based on their talent and skill was a devout evil, I for one welcome our new diversity and inclusion overlords and want to let them know that as a straight white male I could be useful in sniffing out other straight white men in Hollywood trying to scheme their way into being considered a worthy minority.

La La Land being La La Land I’m sure there are a plethora of desperados already strategizing on how to circumvent these new rules that will make Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug look like pikers.

As of right now the Academy is saying that the new standards will be enforced by “spot checks” on set….but I am deeply concerned that those “spot checks” won’t be strenuous enough to rid the movie industry of the damned straight white male menace that plagues it.

I have a few proposals to help strengthen inclusion enforcement and assure diversity compliance.

1. I think Academy Gestapo, oops, I mean enforcement officers, should be armed with a standard color chart where they can hold up the color card next to a person and see if their skin color matches the “right” (aka non-white) tone to be allowed to work on a movie. If someone is too light skinned they can immediately be escorted off of the set and counselors can be brought in to soothe the traumatized left in the white male devil’s wake.

2. In order to ensure that no white men ever slip through the cracks, I also propose a partnership between the DNA testing company 23 and Me and the Academy Awards. Everyone working on every movie must be forced to give a DNA test in order to prove their ethnic or racial heritage.

And let’s be clear, we want pure minorities…none of this “my mother is black and Latina and my father is Asian and white” business because that still means the curse of whiteness is coursing through their veins. Any drop of white blood in a person should be unacceptable in Hollywood.

It will also be L.A. law that everyone must carry their DNA papers with them at all times. Failure to have your papers will result in immediate expulsion from the movie industry.

The 23 and Me results could actually become a fun part of Oscar night where an envelop is opened on stage revealing the film with the most diversity, which is then declared Best Picture. I think we can all agree this is how Best Picture should always be determined, not by the antiquated measure of artistic quality and worth.

3. One troubling diversity and inclusion loophole is that some deplorable straight white male could claim to be gay, thus qualifying as a minority. Let it be known throughout Hollywood that just using unorthodox pronouns like They/Them or Ze/Zir will not be enough to prove minority status!

I am sure there is some enterprising young man or selfless older male studio executive out here in Tinsel Town who’d be willing to advance his standing in the Academy by doing special intimacy examinations, preferably on camera, to see if these white men are “gay enough” to be allowed to work.

Obviously the Academy should hire me as a turncoat consultant, but if they don’t I’m already getting deviously entrepreneurial by hoarding hearing aids that I can rent out on the white market for $200/a day to other straight white men so that they can claim to be “hard of hearing” just to keep their grueling gigs as gaffers.

My sincere wish is that Hollywood succeeds in curing itself of its straight white male pandemic. Straight white men, be they Martin Scorsese, Daniel Day-Lewis or regular working Joes, have stained cinema with their straight white maleness for long enough.

Somewhere there is a deaf, transgender Indigenous actor signing the phrase, “Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up!” Let’s hope these new diversity and inclusion rules make They/Them into the biggest star in the universe and the dream of a woke Hollywood utopia relentlessly churning out cinematic mediocrity into a reality.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020