Poor Things: A Review - A Funny and Fantastic Feminist Frankenstein

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An original and brilliantly eviscerating black comedy that features the best performance by an actress in recent memory.

Poor Things, the new film from director Yorgos Lanthimos and writer Tony McNamara, is a bizarre and beautiful, weird and wonderful, gruesome and glorious piece of cinema, and is among the very best movies of the year.

The film is a surreal, absurdist, feminist take on the Frankenstein myth, which stars Emma Stone as Bella, a beautiful and horny Frankenstein monster who is raised by her creator God (short for Godfrey – played by Willem Dafoe), and then goes on an odyssey of personal, sexual and ideological discovery when adolescence hits.

On her journey Bella is armed with a powerful naivete, an aggressive resistance to social customs, a sharp scientific mind and an insatiable sexual appetite…all of which lead to a plethora of comedy.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are definitely an acquired taste…and I have certainly acquired it. The first Lanthimos film I saw was 2015’s The Lobster, which starred Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz. The film is an absurdist romantic black comedy, a true arthouse gem, and I adored it. But when I talked it over with friends of mine, they hated it with a visceral passion. I guess they didn’t get it…or worse they did get it.

Lanthimos’ follow-up film, 2017’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, was another strange arthouse psychological thriller starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman, but which I thoroughly enjoyed. I’ve yet to meet anyone else who saw the film never mind felt the same way.

Lanthimos’ next film, 2018’s The Favourite, was a period black comedy which starred Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman, and garnered a lot of attention and Oscar nominations. This was easily Lanthimos’ most mainstream and successful film, it too was funny but also very, very dark. Not surprisingly, I loved it.

Poor Things is more in line with The Favourite than with The Lobster, as it’s a bitter and black comedy, but it’s also broad enough to appeal to slightly wider audiences than just the arthouse…although to be clear, at its heart the movie is an oddball arthouse affair.

What is so interesting about Poor Things coming out this year is that it is an elegant and searing indictment against this summer’s blockbuster event Barbie, and is the coup de grace in the case against the overwrought argument that Barbie is quality cinema.

Poor Things is everything the banal Barbie and its simpleton sycophants claim it to be but isn’t. Poor Things is original, funny, smart, clever and unabashedly and undeniably subversive. Where Barbie is insipid, Poor Things is inspired. Where Barbie is trite, Poor Things is treacherous.

Like Barbie, Poor Things is fueled by feminism but it isn’t the insipid, Human Resources approved, freshman year gender studies feminism of Greta Gerwig’s billion-dollar, two-hour Mattel commercial.

Barbie’s feminism was nothing more than a blunt instrument used to bash men and raise a self-pitying pink flag of victimhood for women. Poor Things’ feminism is a pitiless, merciless wildfire that scorches everything in its path, be it men or women, capitalism or socialism.  

Everything about Poor Things is superior to Barbie, from the directing to the writing to the cinematography to the acting.

The script, written by Tony McNamara, is razor sharp, cutting and insightful. McNamara, who also wrote The Favourite and is the creator of the fantastic tv series The Great, writes with a wonderfully incisive wit and maintains a consistent pace and tone.

The beneficiaries of McNamara’s phenomenal script are the cast.

Emma Stone gives the greatest performance by an actress seen this century. Stone, who already has a Best Actress Oscar for La La Land, is far and away the best actress in movies (or anywhere else) this year…this of course doesn’t mean she’ll win the Academy Award again, just that she should.

Stone dives into the Bella character with copious amounts of bravado and skill. She bares her body and devours scenes with equal aplomb. Watching Stone expertly act like a toddler, then like a horny teenager and then a wide-eyed whore, is glorious to behold.

As cliché as it is to say, Emma Stone gives a masterclass in acting in this film without ever making you feel like you’re watching her act. The dance scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Willem Dafoe too does extraordinary work as the mutilated mutilator Godfrey. Dafoe, beneath a bevy of prosthetics, gives Godfrey a humanity – in all its glories and failures, that never rings hollow.

The few missteps in the cast come from Mark Ruffalo, who plays Duncan Wedderburn, a cad who becomes enamored with Bella, and Jerrod Carmicheal as harry, an intellectual.

Ruffalo is miscast, and gives a very mannered performance that is at times uncomfortable to watch. Ruffalo is trying to be funny and it is this desire that suffocates the humor of his character.

Ruffalo also tries to speak in a very specific way and his mouth seems unwilling or incapable of cooperating with his brain’s instructions. The result is a muddled, mush-mouth performance that the film must fight to overcome…and thankfully, successfully does.

Carmichael, who is a comedian by trade, just seems to be a bad actor as he loiters in every scene he barely inhabits. He never adequately grasps the dialogue he is tasked with speaking and feels entirely out of place in the film.

Poor Things is, unlike its summertime counterpart Barbie, beautifully shot. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan is given a lot to play with and he makes the most of it. His use of black and white, and then a glorious cornucopia and dream like colors, is exquisite, and is substantially better than the flat visuals of Barbieland.

The production design, costume design and hair and make-up are all also extraordinarily well-done, and Robbie Ryan’s photography only accentuates the brilliance of the artists who created all of it.  

Poor Things is nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay (McNamara), Best Actress (Stone), Best Supporting Actor (Ruffalo) and Best Cinematographer (Ryan). How many, if any, it will win remains to be seen but I will say this, if it wins them all I certainly won’t be angry about it.

That said, Poor Things is not for everyone. It’s a decidedly dark comedy and it features a plethora of nudity and sex…so if you have a puritan or Victorian taste and those things make you uncomfortable then I recommend you stay away. But if you have a cynical sense of humor and you can at least tolerate the nudity and sex and the arthouse weirdness of it all, then Poor Things is definitely worth a try as it’s an exquisite piece of cinema.

Follow me on Twitter: MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 114 - Academy Award Nominations

On this episode Barry and I talk snubs and surprises and everything else regarding the Academy Award nominations. Topics discussed include Greta and the Angry Barbies. Is Emma Stone's victory set in stone? And is Oppenheimer inevitable?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 114 - Academy Award Nominations

Thanks for listening!

©2024

Revisiting Killers of the Flower Moon - Thoughts on a Second Viewing

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

As you may or may not remember, I wrote a review of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, back in November after having watched it in the theatre.

I found the film to be pretty middling and said as much in my review - I gave it 2.5 stars out of 5, but with a giant caveat. The caveat was this…the theatre in which I saw the film, an RC theatre here in flyover country, is just dreadful. The digital projectors are awful, the sound muddled and for some inane reason they refuse to turn the lights all the way off, which makes it seem like you’re watching a movie at a drive-in during the day.

In my review, I said I’d have to hold off with my final evaluation until I saw the film in a better environment, namely at home. Well…Killers of the Flower Moon is now available to stream on Apple TV+, and I watched it again, this time in darkness with decent sound.

Here are a few things that jump out at me upon further review.

First…I liked Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance much more the second time around than the first. I still don’t think it’s award worthy or great, just that it isn’t as mannered and empty as I found it to be on my initial watch.

In contrast, I was less impressed by Lily Gladstone’s performance. I don’t think she’s bad at all, it’s just a bit less impressive on second watch. The most notable thing about her performance is that she is able to unflinchingly share the screen with DiCaprio…which is no small thing…but beyond that the performance thins substantially the more you see it.

On the other hand, Robert DeNiro’s performance is even more impressive on second viewing. As William “King” Hale, DeNiro gives a remarkably skillful performance. It is invigorating to see this acting icon bring his formidable, yet subtle, “A” game, something which has been sorely lacking in the last few decades of his career, to the film. It is no surprise that it's his old collaborator Scorsese that is the director who has coaxed the two very best DeNiro performances of the latter stage of his career with The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon in totality, I still, unfortunately, found it to be greatly lacking.

A second viewing should make the sprawling narrative more coherent since you know the players and the story arc, but it still feels very unfocused and discombobulated.

The length isn’t a problem (at least for me), but the lack of narrative and dramatic focus is. There’s an emotional and theatrical incoherence to the film that, much to my chagrin, does not disappear upon second viewing.

I’ve watched The Irishman, Scorsese’s previous film, which also ran well over three hours, numerous times in the past few years, but The Irishman, despite its long run time, is a taut piece of filmmaking that never loses its drive or its focus.

The truth is that Killers of the Flower Moon doesn’t lose its narrative drive and dramatic focus either, but that’s only because it never has them to begin with.

While I am disappointed in Killers of the Flower Moon, the movie is now on Apple TV +, so if you have the streaming service and haven’t seen the movie, why not give it a watch and decide for yourself? It’ll only cost you three-and-a-half hours and the usual Apple TV+ subscription rate.

If you don’t have Apple TV+ but want to give Killers of the Flower Moon a shot, here’s my advice. Sign up for a month or try and get a free month…but wait until February to do so. Then you can watch both Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which should be available for free on the service mid-February. I’ve not seen Napoleon yet so I’m not recommending it, just that if you’re going to dip your toe into the Apple TV + pool, might as well get as much as you can out of it, because frankly, there’s not a whole lot over there that’s worthwhile.

As for Killers of the Flower Moon, I really wished I liked it, as its subject matter is near and dear to my heart and Martin Scorsese is among my Mount Rushmore of filmmakers. But unfortunately, the film just doesn’t work, and feels like a missed opportunity.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Anatomy of a Fall: A Review - Unnerving Legal Drama Hits Dizzying Heights

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A well-made and well-acted legal/family drama that succeeds by leaving you with more questions than answers.

Anatomy of a Fall, which is currently available on Video on Demand (I paid $6.99), is one of those movies that lingers with you, tormenting and teasing you for days after you watch it.

The film, directed and co-written by Justine Triet, chronicles the investigation and trial of a woman whose husband falls to his death while renovating their isolated mountain chalet.

On its surface, Anatomy of a Fall is a standard court room procedural and family/relationship drama, but it percolates with a dramatic intensity and genuine humanity that is exquisite and rare in the genre and which elevates it into a superb cinematic experience.  

The film, which is in English and French (with English Subtitles), stars a mesmerizing Sandra Huller as Sandra Voyter, a successful writer living in a remote location in the French Alps with her husband and young son Daniel, who is blind.

Sandra’s life is turned upside down when her husband Samuel dies and the legal authorities aggressively examine his death and pick apart every minute detail of Sandra’s life - including the state of her relationship with Samuel.

What is so unnerving about Anatomy of a Fall is that it lays bare the notion that anyone’s life, examined closely enough, could reveal them as being capable of, not so much of a crime, but of being found guilty of a crime…whether they committed one or not.

In a way Anatomy of a Fall feels like some sort of horror film, with the legal system playing the role of the insatiable monster relentlessly chasing their wide-eyed prey.

What makes the film so intriguing is that at no point, even days after viewing, are you certain, one way or the other, as to whether Sandra is innocent or guilty of murdering Samuel.

And yet, while we can be swayed by the case against Sandra, we also are drawn in, through Huller’s exquisite performance, into sympathizing and empathizing with her. She may be a criminal, but unlike the vicious prosecutor unleashed upon her, she is also all too human. She is fragile, vulnerable and flawed, which makes her an easy target for the machinery of the legal system, and also someone easy to relate to for viewers.

Huller’s Sandra is a character thoroughly lived-in. She is a normal middle-aged woman, tired and worn down from the grind of her life raising her son, working (she’s a writer), and maintaining her marriage…the usual stuff.  Huller’s Sandra is barely able to keep herself, and her family, together amidst the carnage of the accusations against her. Huller has Sandra in a constant state of unraveling through the ordeal of her dizzying descent into the labyrinthian legal system, but never chooses to have her unravel all at once, and it is captivating to behold.

Also captivating is Mile Machado Graner as Sandra’s blind son Daniel. Without giving anything away I will say that Daniel is caught in the middle of the legal battle and Graner plays this torment expertly. Like Huller, Graner never falls into the trap of over-acting, or over-reacting, and simply embodies his character and imbues it with a humanity that is both touching and terrifying in context.

Director Justine Triet, who co-wrote the script with her husband Arthur Harari, is a calm, cool and steady hand behind the camera. She never falls prey to the usual traps associated with legal dramas, namely choosing a side and revealing sympathies.

Triet also never lets her film turn cold and into a stale procedural. Instead, Triet populates her film with genuine, real people, and shows them, flaws and all, being stripped emotionally bare and subjected to the grueling meat grinder that is the legal system.

One can’t help but wonder if an American filmmaker would have the confidence, and maybe more importantly, the studio acceptance, to make such a subtle yet dramatically complex legal drama.  

Which also brings up the question as to whether American audiences can get on board with Anatomy of a Fall. At first glance I would think that most American viewers, raised on the exceedingly vapid, insipid and seemingly inexhaustible tv franchises Law and Order and CSI, would struggle to get on board with a story as subtle, nuanced and dramatically complex as Anatomy of a Fall.

But then as the film lingered with me in the days after my watching it, I began to think that it was exactly those Law and Order and CSI audiences that could potentially get the most out of Anatomy of a Fall, as it would, with its deft and cinematically skilled touch, shake them out of their comfort zone by subverting their expectations.

Add in the high-quality acting and I think that Anatomy of a Fall could resonate with wider audiences here in America. That’s not to say wide audiences, it is a French film with subtitles after all, just slightly wider audiences than usual for such arthouse fare.

Anatomy of a Fall is currently available on VOD, and I’m not sure when it’ll come to a streaming service here in the U.S., but I think it will get a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards this year, so that will generate interest to see it and a streaming service will no doubt soon follow.

My recommendation is to fork over the money and see it on VOD for $6.99. If not, then wait for it to hit a streaming service in the coming months. Regardless of how you see it, you should see it. You won’t regret it, and you’ll be mulling it over in your head for days after your viewing…just like me.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Maestro: A Review - Lifeless Leonard Bernstein Biopic is Out of Tune

****THIS IS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS ABOUT LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S LIFE!! THIS IS TECHNICALLY NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!***

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This movie just doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. But it’s on Netflix so if you’re so inclined watch it and see for yourself.

Maestro, the new Netflix biopic directed by and starring Bradley Cooper, chronicles the life of renowned musical genius Leonard Bernstein.

I readily admit that prior to seeing Maestro I knew little about Leonard Bernstein, the iconic conductor and composer who dominated the classical music scene in America for nearly fifty years in the 20th Century. After watching Bradley Cooper’s two-hour and nine-minute dramatization of Bernstein’s life I still know next to nothing about the man.

The film is essentially about Bernstein’s relationship with his wife Felicia (Carey Mulligan). The decision to focus on this aspect of Bernstein’s life is a poor one as the marriage is a dramatically flaccid affair. To boil it down, the plot of the film is that Leonard Bernstein, a gay man, marries Felicia, who knows full-well he is gay and readily accepts it…but then later on she gets mad that he’s gay for some reason. Not exactly compelling stuff, which is why it’s such an odd choice to focus on Bernstein’s marriage and not his music.

Even the most grotesque of philistines, like me, knows that Leonard Bernstein was a once in a lifetime type of talent, of that there is no doubt, but unfortunately Maestro is just a run of the mill movie devoid of even the most remote of insights into the great man it depicts.

Bernstein was an iconic public figure, but Cooper is incapable, as an actor and as a director, to get beyond the façade of Bernstein’s public persona and reveal the actual human being beneath it all.

Cooper’s great failings on Maestro are that he is overly ambitious while being relentlessly safe, and also egregiously indulgent.

His ambition as a director vastly exceeds his talent and skill, and so the massive scope and scale of Bernstein’s epic life, as well as his artistry and humanity, is unconscionably diminished.

Cooper the director uses a plethora of filmmaking tricks to try and make a compelling drama, for example, in the first act of the film he often transitions from one scene to the next with a time and space jump but without a cut, but these techniques ring hollow because the drama they surround is so shallow.

Cooper’s ambition as an actor is, on some level, admirable, but there too he is well out of his depth. His mimicry of Bernstein is consistent and, at times, impressive (and in the character’s later years aided by Kazu Hiro’s superb prosthetics), as he’s obviously closely studied the man’s mannerisms and voice. But Cooper’s portrayal ultimately misses the mark because, despite its showiness – or maybe because of it, it never rises to anything more than genuflection in the form of imitation.

Cooper’s indulgence as both director and actor is another albatross around the neck of the film. He directs the movie like an actor, reflexively indulging the worst of actor’s impulses. For example, he consistently holds scenes for a few beats too long – no doubt in the hope of some magic appearing, at the cost of scuttled dramatic tempo and pace.

Another example is that the acting style across the board in the film is incessantly ‘actory’ – meaning indulgent to actor’s narcissistic whims. The acting on display is all style and no substance. No characters come across as actual human beings and no scenes feel grounded, genuine or real. This is most evident in Carey Mulligan’s portrayal of Felicia, Bernstein’s wife, an awful Sarah Silverman as Shirley, Bernstein’s sister, and in Cooper himself playing Bernstein.

The only moment in the film that feels grounded, and as a result is moving, is a scene where Bernstein introduces his new girlfriend, Felicia, to David, a man with whom he has had a long running sexual relationship. David is played by Matt Bomer, and he absolutely crushes this scene. Bomer expresses David’s cavalcade of emotions with a simple and subtle series of looks. Cooper and Mulligan and the rest never approach this level of simplicity and mastery at any point in the picture.

Ironically, as ambitious as Cooper is as a director, the reality is that he has made a suffocatingly safe film. According to reports, the Bernstein family cooperated with the film and fully supported it, and it shows. Cooper’s movie never dares to challenge the Bernstein myth, but instead hews closer to hagiography, a common pitfall for films about real people with interested parties deeply invested in maintaining an image looking over the filmmaker’s shoulder.

Cooper also plays it safe himself. Yes, he is playing a gay man, but twenty years after Brokeback Mountain feels a bit less brave than it used to. But he plays it safe even there, as we never actually see Cooper’s Bernstein kiss another man…it is only implied or shown from the back and at a distance. It seems Cooper wanted to be a “brave” actor by playing a gay man but at the same time didn’t want to tarnish his movie star brand…and brand management won out.

There’s another oddity about the homosexual angle of Bernstein’s story that is mishandled, and that occurs during a scene on the street in New York City in the 1950s. Bernstein and David, his lover/former lover, walk down Central Park West and then stop and have a tender moment together in broad daylight. David caresses Bernstein’s face and kisses him on the forehead. These two men are obviously in love with each other and showing it….and no one says anything. Neither David nor Bernstein is afraid. Extras walk past them and don’t do a double take or express outrage. Bernstein says that people across the street recognize him…but he isn’t worried that they’ll see he’s gay, just that he’s famous.

This entire sequence is bizarre beyond belief. First off, just as a matter of fact, being openly gay in New York City (or just about anywhere) in the 1950s wasn’t just frowned upon…it was illegal. So, Leonard Bernstein, ambitious conductor and composer, would be scared to death to be outed because he would not only lose his job but be arrested and potentially go to jail.

Secondly, removing the stigma from Bernstein’s homosexuality, removes an obstacle for the character which existed in real life. Obstacles create drama…think of Brokeback Mountain…the two gay cowboys in that movie knew they had to hide their love because if it got-out they could be killed. Now that’s an obstacle.

An easy, and subtle, way to express this obstacle and show how constricting the culture was to a gay man like Bernstein in the 1950s, would have been to have those extras who walked by look back in disgust and horror at the two men being affectionate. And Bernstein could have struggled to hide himself or end the interaction in order to avoid detection and thus exposing himself, and his career, to peril. But no, we get none of that and all of that potential drama is neutered.

Making a movie about an artistic genius is difficult. Making one about an artistic genius who for the most part is conjuring up brilliance in his mind, is even more difficult…which is why movies about writers are notoriously hard to pull off.

Bernstein’s brilliance is both in writing and in performing – as a conductor…but we only get a scant few scenes of seeing him display his genius in front of an orchestra. The one scene that stands out as the most dynamic in the film is when Bernstein conducts an orchestra in a legendary performance in England in the early 1970s. Cooper is very good in this scene, as both an actor and director, but the success of this magnetic scene only accentuates the lifelessness of the rest of the movie.

As an actor and also as a director, Bradley Cooper is, above all else, exceedingly desperate to be good. He often reeks of desperation to such a degree, especially come award season, that it is uncomfortable to witness. But as is often the case, his level of desperation is inversely proportionate to his level of talent and skill.

Cooper’s first foray into directing was in 2018 with the fourth version of A Star is Born to hit the big screens. I found this film, which starred Lady Gaga opposite Cooper, to be cloying and mawkish, but it did have an impressive box office run and garnered a bevy of Oscar nominations but came up short in all the major categories.

I’ll say this about Maestro, I think it is much better than A Star is Born, and I think it is a much more worthy and meaningful cinematic attempt, even if it does end in failure, than Cooper’s directorial debut.

I’ll also say this…if Maestro were made twenty-five years ago, the Oscars would go bananas for it and throw every award it could grab at it because it would be considered epic yet also edgy and brave. But it’s not twenty-five years ago…and Maestro isn’t edgy and brave…it’s really rather blasé. So, I don’t think the Oscars, or anyone else, is going to be bestowing awards upon this movie.

Ultimately, Maestro as a cinematic and dramatic venture just doesn’t work, and its failure can be chalked up to Bradley Cooper’s directorial and acting ambitions being bigger than his limited talent and skill.

Tar (2022), another ambitious movie about an icon in the classical music world (albeit a fictional one), was a flawed film too but featured superior acting (it starred Cate Blanchett) and direction (directed by Todd Field) than Maestro. Neither film worked, but both are somewhat noble and worthy attempts to make a serious, adult drama with a somewhat moderate budget. We need as many of these types of films as we can get, so, while I didn’t like Maestro, I do like that this movie exists, I just wish it were much better made.

At the end of the day, I cannot recommend Maestro, but since it’s streaming on Netflix, I feel it’s appropriate to tell people to check it out for themselves and see if they like it. If you do, good for you. If you don’t, that’s okay too, because I didn’t either.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Rebel Moon Part One: A Review - In a Dull and Derivative Galaxy...

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

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My recommendation: SKIP IT. Oh boy…this thing is garbage.

Rebel Moon, the new Zack Snyder directed sci-fi film on Netflix, tells the story of Kora, a young woman living on a remote planet in a galaxy ruled by an evil empire, who…you guessed it...rebels against her evil overlords.

Rebel Moon was originally a spec script written by Zack Snyder which he pitched to Lucasfiilm in 2012 as a Star Wars movie. Lucasfilm passed but Snyder kept the idea and took out the lightsabers and replaced them with fiery hot swords and now eleven years later he has made his non-Star Wars/Star Wars movie and it hit Netflix on December 21, 2023.

Having sat through the interminable two-hours and fifteen minutes of Rebel Moon, I can, for the first time in the last twenty-five years, not only understand Lucasfilm’s thinking, but respect it.

As frustratingly sub-par as the last bunch of Star Wars films have been, and boy oh boy have they been sub-par, they seem like Citizen Kane and The Godfather combined compared to the shitshow that is Rebel Moon.

This movie is an amalgam of every sci-fi and fantasy movie trope imaginable, thrown into an insipid and rancid stew of derivative dullness. The end result is one of the most suffocatingly boring and instantly forgettable films in recent cinema history.

I’d get into the plot of Rebel Moon but…what’s the point? You’ve seen everything in Rebel Moon in other, better movies.  

Zack Snyder is a very polarizing filmmaker. Surprisingly, I have, for the most part, been on Snyder’s side in the battles over his abilities over the years. I always appreciated his distinct visual style and I thought both 300 and Watchmen were good. Hell, I even enjoyed the director’s cut and SnyderCut of Batman v Superman and Justice League respectively.  

The cold hard reality is that I really wanted Rebel Moon to be good and was…God help me…looking forward to it…but unfortunately and unquestionably, Rebel Moon is Snyder at his absolute worst.

The script is a gigantic, steaming pile of excrement. The dialogue is painfully cliched and the story is jam packed full of the most tired and lazy sci-fi tropes imaginable. There’s stuff blatantly stolen from Star Wars, Avatar, and even The Lord of the Rings, among many others.

The film has Snyder’s signature visual style but just not as well executed. Everything is matted and hidden under a layer of washed-out gray. Slow-motion is used over and over and over again in action sequences to negative affect. There’s not a single memorable or noteworthy shot in the entire film despite Snyder’s ham-fisted attempts to create one.

Speaking of nothing being noteworthy, the cast of Rebel Moon are egregiously bad.

Sofia Boutella plays the tough girl lead Kora, and she is so devoid of charisma, magnetism or any semblance of acting skill, it felt like I was watching a corpse laying-in-wait for its autopsy to begin. How Boutella, a dancer who has been in some films but never been good in any of them, ever got cast in this thing is beyond me.

As bad as Boutella is, and boy is she bad, Michiel Huisman, who plays Gunnar, is maybe the worst actor to have ever been captured on film. This guy, who somehow was on Game of Thrones, is to acting what Stephen Hawking was to tap dancing.

Charlie Hunham, an actor I usually like, plays a mercenary named Kai. Kai is an awful and annoyingly inane character, but thankfully Hunham’s performance is so dreadful you almost forget the character he plays is ridiculously written. To add diarrhea atop the shit cake, Hunham busts out an Irish accent that would make Dick Van Dyke blush.

The two most horrifying things about Rebel Moon are, number one, that Anthony Hopkins is a voice actor in the film who plays a robot with a heart of gold. Hopkins is 86 years-old and it horrifies me to think there’s a decent chance this is the last movie he makes before he goes off to his eternal reward. I guess I can console myself with the idea that acting in Rebel Moon, even if it is just in voice-over, is a serious form of penance and thus Hopkins sins will be washed away and he’ll be ushered quickly into heaven upon his departure from this cruel earth.

The other horrifying thing is that Rebel Moon is actually titled, Rebel Moon PART ONE…which means, God help us…there is going to be a Rebel Moon PART TWO.

Part Two is supposed to hit Netflix in April of 2024, so every sorry son of a bitch like me who watched Part One has a few months to prepare themselves to skip Part Two entirely, up to and including gouging our own eyes out.

Not to go even darker, but the word on the street is that Snyder is working on the script for Part Three at this very moment…which…holy fuck…I can’t even begin to comprehend the scope and scale of mental illness ravaging the executive suites over at Netflix right now for them to green light more of this garbage.

In conclusion, it is difficult to put into words how truly atrocious Rebel Moon is. Just know that you never, ever, ever have to ever watch this really stupid and relentlessly, endlessly boring movie, because I already did. You’re welcome.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

On this episode, Barry and I pour ourselves some bathwater cocktails and dance around our mansion in the nude as we discuss Emerald Fennell's new controversial film Saltburn. Topics discussed include the weirdness of Barry Keoghan, Emerald Fennell's major third act issues, and the cinematic skill of Linus Sandgren.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 113 - Saltburn

Thanks for listening!

©2024

The Holdovers: A Review - A Happy Humbug for the Holidays

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Not a great film, but a good enough one. It’s an exceedingly safe movie that boasts quality performances from a terrific cast.

The Holdovers, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Paul Giamatti, tells the story of a teacher, student and cook who are stuck together at a tony New England prep school over the Christmas holiday break in 1970.

I consider myself a marginal fan of director Alexander Payne. I’ve loved some of his movies, like About Schmidt and Nebraska. I’ve liked some of his movies, like Sideways and Election. And I’ve loathed some of his movies, like Downsizing and The Descendants.

The Holdovers, Payne’s first film since the box office and critical bomb Downsizing in 2017, was in theatres at the end of October and is now streaming on Peacock.

The film, set at the fictional prep school Barton, tells the story of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a stern and curmudgeonly academic who attended the school in his youth and has taught there for the vast majority of his adulthood.

Hunham is just like Robin Williams’ iconic character John Keating in Dead Poets Society…if Keating had a wall-eye, bad body odor and was despised by both students and colleagues alike. Hunham’s students would only stand and recite “O Captain! My Captain!” if they were about to frag him.

Hunham is, much to his chagrin, tasked with taking care of a rag tag group of students who, for a variety of reasons, have nowhere to go over the Christmas break. One of these students, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), is abandoned at the lasty minute by his mother and step-father for the holidays.

After a twist and turn of events, the only people left at Barton for holiday break are the sad-sack trio of Hunham, Tully, and the school’s head chef Mary Lamb (DaVine Joy Randolph). The one thing these three all have in common though is that they’re all in various stages of grief, such as denial, anger and depression.

The tone throughout The Holdovers is one of melancholy mixed with a cloying sentimentality. Yes, there are some amusing bits and sequences, and Giamatti’s Harvard educated Hunham has a quick, erudite and eviscerating wit, but for the most part this is a straight forward, throw-back, adult dramedy.

The Holdovers is a return to scale if not entirely to form for Alexander Payne. I thought the film was…fine. It isn’t great. But it is good…enough. It is proficiently made, well-acted, and entertaining. But what it lacks is…well…some sense of profundity, as it is incessantly safe above all else.

This is the type of film that would be perfect to sit down with extended family during the holidays and watch without anyone getting offended or upset or even all that excited. It is, as I said, above all else - safe…but it’s also entertaining and kept me captivated for its full two-hour-and-thirteen-minute running time.

The performances from the three main characters are all noteworthy. Giamatti, one of our better actors, is terrific as Hunham. The dialogue for Hunham is very well-written by screenwriter David Hemingson and is expertly delivered by Giamatti. Giamatti is very comfortable in the discomfort felt by the irascible egghead with the literal googly-eyes who smells like fish. He trudges through Hunham’s dramatic odyssey with his usual aplomb.

Dominic Sessa is a discovery as Angus Tully. This is Sessa’s first movie and while he is a bit rough-around-the-edges he brings a vitality and adolescent angst that is impossible to fake.

The big revelation though is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb. Randolph’s character Mary is the least well-written, but she fills the spaces with a weight that speaks volumes. What impressed me the most about Randolph though is that she absolutely, but subtly, nails her Boston accent, which is something that such luminaries as Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson and Julianne Moore have embarrassingly butchered (Hanks on multiple occasions).

When I have loved Alexander Payne’s films, like About Schmidt and Nebraska, it’s because they have had an acerbic and wickedly cutting and subversive nature to them. It also helps that those films star Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern respectively, giving some of the best performances of their careers.

When Payne loses me is when sentimentality and shtick come to the fore, like in The Descendants and Downsizing. (I also thought George Clooney and Matt Damon, respectively, were actively awful in both of those movies)

The Holdovers has a mix of both the best and the worst of Payne. It’s filled with sentimentality, but also features a great actor, Giamatti, swimming in a thick sea of acerbity (much like he did in Sideways).

It also has some shticky moments that disappoint and irritate. Like when Hunham chases Tully through the school, which was very reminiscent of a dreadfully bad sequence in The Descendants where George Clooney goofily runs up and down a long winding road.

But despite those contrived moments and disappointing bits, I found myself buying in to The Holdovers almost entirely because this type of movie – a smart, adult dramedy, which used to be so common in the 1970’s, is so rare nowadays.

Well-written, well-acted small comedy-dramas made by quality directors featuring skilled performers, are unfortunately few and far between in today’s Hollywood. Which is maybe why The Holdovers is being so well-received by critics and audiences alike.

If you have Peacock, I definitely recommend you watch The Holdovers, and if you don’t have Peacock, they’re always having one-week free trials so sign up for a free week and watch the movie and then cancel.

Ultimately, I enjoyed The Holdovers despite its various shortcomings and lack of artistic ambition, and frankly, I think you will too. It’s a safe movie and it definitely won’t change your life…but it also won’t disappoint.

 Follow me on twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 112 - Rebel Moon Part One

On this episode, Barry and I enter the Star Wars adjacent Snyder-verse of the new Netflix science-fiction movie Rebel Moon directed by Zack Snyder...and want to escape that hellhole as quickly as possible. Topics discussed include the plague of unoriginal thinking, how truly dreadful everything about this movie is, and cinematic guilty pleasures. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 112 - Rebel Moon Part One

Thanks for listening.

©2024

Saltburn: A Review - This Shit Sandwich Needs More Salt, Less Burn

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

My Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an abomination. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a lobotomy.

In the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day I had the great misfortune of having watched Saltburn, the new movie from filmmaker Emerald Fennell, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

I decided not to write my review of Saltburn until after the New Year so as to not leave 2023, or enter 2024, with such a vile taste in my mouth, and to not subject you, my dear readers, to such potent negativity during what I hope was a joyous holiday season.

Well, now that I’ve officially published a positive review to open 2024 (of Michael Mann’s Ferrari), it’s time to get back and do the dirty work of sifting through the mountains of excrement that Hollywood shats upon us. At the bottom of that shit pile is the rancid turd known as Saltburn.

Saltburn is written and directed by Emerald Fennell. This is her second feature film as writer/director, the first being 2020’s Promising Young Woman, for which she won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Promising Young Woman was a movie about rape and fighting the patriarchy created during the height of the #MeToo mania and released in the wake of the 2020 election.

It was one of those movies that critics were afraid to criticize because its politics were “righteous”, namely that it was made by a woman and was a polemic against the patriarchy. Much to my embarrassment, even I succumbed to the moment and was muted in my criticisms of the film, and even went so far as to consider Promising Young Woman to be the first film for a promising young director (or not so young as the case may be).

To be clear, I liked the performances of Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in Promising Young Woman, but I did find the film’s third act to be so egregiously amateurish as to be catastrophic.

Upon rewatching Promising Young Woman in anticipation of seeing Saltburn, I came to clearly see that Fennell as a filmmaker is deeply, deeply flawed, and the trajectory of her career would only become clear once I’d seen her second feature.

And then I watched her second feature Saltburn…

Saltburn is the worst movie I’ve seen in maybe the last decade or more. It’s not satire, or parody, it’s simply an inane and inept attempt at drama, and it fails so miserably as to be astonishing, and frankly, embarrassing.

Saltburn is so bad I’ve been sorely tempted to encourage people to watch it just so I can commiserate with them about how awful it is.

The basics of Saltburn are thus…the film tells the tale of Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a poor boy thrown to the uber-wealthy wolves at Oxford University in the Fall of 2006. Oliver is smart but a social outcast. He becomes infatuated with an impossibly handsome classmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), who happens to be the member of an affluent and influential family.

Oliver then goes to great lengths to ingratiate himself into Felix’s life, and succeeds as he gets invited to Felix’s expansive family estate, Saltburn, for the Summer. Oliver then has to navigate the perilous minefield which is Felix’s wealthy family and friends.

I will stop there in describing the plot so as to avoid any spoilers in case you really, really hate yourself enough to want to watch this piece of shit.

All I’ll say is that the twists and turns in the plot are so ham-fisted it feels like it was written by a self-loathing, spoiled-rich, thirteen-year-old girl pouting in her mansion as she plays with Barbies, who is writing a story to try and stroke her fragile ego and to distract herself from the dull, pulsating pain and emotional roller-coaster of her first menstruation.

The film features some of the more ludicrous and repugnant “sex” type scenes you’ll ever see, one of which involves the previously mentioned menstruation…oh…and it also features enough shots of Barry Keoghan’s floppy phallus to last a lifetime.

The acting in Saltburn is rather rudimentary. Barry Keoghan, a talented actor, gives a rather rote performance as the creepy little weird guy, something he has played far too often in his short career.

Jacob Elordi is impossibly handsome as…the impossibly handsome Felix, but beyond that there’s not much going on there.

The only performance of note is Rosamund Pike as Felix’s mother, Elspeth. Pike sinks her teeth so deep into the bone of this painfully thin caricature, and is able, through sheer force of will and talent, to find life deep, deep in the marrow. Pike’s performance is so razor sharp it makes me wish she got a chance to play this role in a different, and much better, movie.

Just as with Promising Young Woman, the third act of Saltburn is apocalyptically awful. The film veers so far off the rails in the last forty-five minutes it is hard to even remotely comprehend the scope and scale of its failure.

Also difficult to comprehend is how anyone, be it producers, executives or actors, could read this script from start to finish and think, “yeah, this is a great idea!” The characters are all caricatures, the plot is absurd beyond belief, and the political/cultural sub-text is so tone-deaf and brain-dead it should be euthanized, or at a bare minimum, institutionalized.

The thing that became excruciatingly clear while watching the grueling two-hour-and-ten-minute Saltburn, particularly its egregious third act, is that Emerald Fennell is, like so many of the actresses-turned-directors who’ve been given a leg up in Hollywood in recent years - like Olivia Wilde and Elizabeth Banks, absolute fool’s gold.

Fennell has no idea what she is doing. She is an unserious, unskilled and untalented filmmaker, and no amount of wishful thinking or affirmative action Academy Awards will ever change that fact.

After watching Saltburn the trajectory of Emerald Fennell’s career has become exceedingly clear…odds are, simply because Hollywood is desperate for female directors, she’ll get another shot or two at a feature film, but in five years or so she’ll only be directing television…and in ten years she’ll only be directing commercials…and in fifteen years, she’ll be lucky to be directing traffic.

In conclusion, Saltburn is an absolute and utter mess of a movie. I watched this piece of shit so you don’t have to…and trust me when I tell, you really don’t have to.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Ferrari: A Review - Despite a Bad Driver, Ferrari Wins the Race

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

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A solid biopic that features some subpar acting but also some fantastic racing sequences.

Ferrari, directed by Michael Mann and starring Adam Driver, is a biopic that tells the story of iconic Italian industrialist and race car manufacturer, Enzo Ferrari, as he navigates a series of tumultuous business and personal events in 1957.

Ferrari, which is written by Troy Kennedy Martin and is based on the book Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates, is a strange film. The reason for this strangeness is that sometimes the sum of a film is never as good as the quality of its parts, but that is not the case in regards to Ferrari, which is somehow able to be considerably better than the individual pieces that make up its whole.

For example, you’d think for a biopic about a hard-charging, iconic Italian race car impresario you’d have to have a strong performance from the lead actor in the title role in order for the film to work. In the case of Ferrari, which stars Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari, the film works despite its lead actor, not because of him.

Driver is a mysterious actor in that it is an utter mystery to me why this insipid clod ever gets work, never mind works with great directors like Michael Mann and Martin Scorsese. As Enzo, a man juggling essentially two families, one with his wife and one with his girlfriend, and who is aggressively trying to have the greatest racing team in the world and maintain his auto business, the empty Driver feels like a kid playing dress up in his grandfather’s much too big suits. His ungodly awful, clownish Italian accent comes and goes like an engine missing the requisite sparkplugs, just like it did when Driver stumbled through the embarrassing Ridley Scott soap opera House of Gucci as another Italian titan of industry…Maurizio Gucci. Considering Driver’s artistic vacuity and acting vapidity, as well as his wandering parmesan cheese of an accent, and his insidiously shallow interpretations of characters, it seems to me the only iconic Italian he should ever be allowed to play is Chef Boyardee.

Another acting issue is Shailene Woodley, who is egregiously miscast as Lina Lardi, who is less Enzo’s gumar than she is his second wife and mother to his bastard son. Woodley gives a distractingly stilted and ineffective performance as Lina as she feels like she belongs in Malibu and not Molena.

The one saving grace regarding the acting is Penelope Cruz, who is absolutely brilliant as Enzo’s wife and business partner, Laura. There’s a scene early in the film where Laura visits her son’s grave and in the span of maybe thirty seconds Cruz, in close up, tells a wondrous and expansive story without saying a word. It’s a captivating and powerful piece of acting, and one that is heightened because Driver’s Enzo has a similar scene just prior to it that is nothing but verbosity filled with vacant histrionics.

Cruz is an actress that I rarely, if ever, think of, but her performance in Ferrari is yet another reminder for absent-minded dopes like me that she is among the most talented and skilled actresses in the world today.

Despite two of the three main performances being subpar, Ferrari pulls off the minor miracle of managing to be not just watchable but relentlessly compelling. A major reason for this is that the racing and driving scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Every racing scene is visceral, vital and undeniably electrifying. Mann and his cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt shoot the racing from innumerable ingenious angles with energetic camera movements that capture the dynamic thrill of the sport, and master editor Pietro Scalia splices it all together for the absolute maximum potency and power.

That said, some of the racing sequences can be a bit confusing, as the racing teams from Ferrari and Maserati have similar looks and coloring. But beyond that the racing is superb, and contrary to some reports I’ve read, I did not find the CGI to be distracting or second rate at all.

Michael Mann is an often-overlooked filmmaker who boasts a robust filmography which features a bevy of good and sometimes great movies. In recent years Mann’s output has slowed and diminished in quality, with Ferrari being his first film since 2015’s dismal Blackhat.

Mann’s films are inhabited by a particular type of tormented masculinity, where the protagonist is insatiably driven and must overcome the numerous obstacles placed in front of him as well as the internal burdens which haunt him .

Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider and Collateral are all top notch pieces of cinema that capture Mann’s storytelling and slick visual style across different genres….. but it is his 1995 masterpiece, Heat, which is the absolute apex of his filmmaking career. Heat is one of the best films of the last thirty years as it features the greatest bank robbery and shootout scene captured in the history of cinema, which is an astonishing accomplishment.

Ferrari is nowhere near the level of film as Heat, but it does represent a somewhat more mature piece of storytelling from Mann, that is not to say that Mann’s earlier work was adolescent, but to say that Ferrari captures a man (and Mann) growing old and dealing with the precipitous burdens of his age and station.

 It must also be said that Ferrari is also not as good as James Mangold’s brilliant 2019 film Ford v Ferrari, which Michael Mann Executive Produced. Ford v Ferrari is a better film across the board and features better racing sequences, but Ferrari is no slouch and is a quality piece of cinema in its own right. In fact, Ferrari would make a perfect companion piece to Mangold’s auto-racing masterpiece.

The bottom-line regarding Ferrari is that I was very pleasantly surprised to find it a thoroughly solid, utterly compelling, if flawed, piece of cinema despite the often-lackluster acting. I wholly encourage you to check it out in the theatre if possible, or on streaming when the time comes.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2024

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

On this rip-roaring episode, Barry and I don kimonos and talk all things Godzilla Minus One, the fantastic new Godzilla movie from Toho Studios. Topics discussed include Godzilla Minus One as companion piece to Oppenheimer, Jaws and other influences, and the skill and craftsmanship evident in the film that are sorely lacking in Hollywood. Bonus content - Barry and I have a hilarious discussion about the worst Christmas specials they've ever endured.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 111 - Godzilla Minus One

Thanks for listening!

©2023

Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix): TV Review - A Sharp Blade Skillfully Wielded

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastic animated series…but be forewarned, it has lots of nudity, sex and violence.

Blue Eye Samurai is a new adult animated series on Netflix that tells the story of Mizo, a half-white, half-Japanese samurai who sets out to exact revenge in 17th century Japan.

The series, which is created by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and directed by Jane Wu, stars the voice talents of Maya Erskine, George Takei, Brenda Song, Randall Park and Kenneth Branagh.

I had never heard of Blue Eye Samurai until Netflix, and its AI’s infinite wisdom, used their algorithm to throw a trailer at me the second I logged onto their service. I watched the trailer and thought, “Hey, maybe this is something my 8-yr-old son and I could watch together!”

Then I watched the first episode…and holy shit this is not something my son…or any child under the age of maybe 16, should be watching at all. It is chock full of ultra-violence, sex…including some very, very weird sex, and nudity…including a cavalcade of animated cocks and balls flopping around like it’s a sausage and grapes stir fry gone awry. When this series says it is “adult”, you better believe it.

But just because the show isn’t good for kids, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. In fact, Blue Eye Samurai is terrific and one of the best series I’ve seen all year.

It is difficult to avoid ALL spoilers in a review of this show, but it’s also best to watch the show without knowing any of the spoilers. So, if you want to avoid any spoilers go watch the series now as I highly recommend it for anyone who loves samurai films and top-notch adult (R-rated) animation.

If you want to dip your toe in the water with a review containing one spoiler (which is widely known), then continue reading.

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Blue Eye Samurai follows the journey of Miza, who is deadly samurai, but is also a young woman passing as a man. That’s the big spoiler that is revealed pretty early on in the 8-episode first season, and it is a main plot point as the season develops.

She is on a mission to kill the four white men who illegally remain in Japan after the Shogun has closed the country’s borders to outsiders, one of whom, she knows not which, is her father.

The storytelling on Blue Eye Samurai is exceedingly well-done as it seamlessly jumps back and forth between Miza’s tormented past and her violent, revenge-filled present.

Each character comes to the screen fully developed, there are no caricatures or cardboard cutouts here. Whether it be Miza’s sidekick Ringo, or her samurai opponent Taigen, or Taigen’s fiancé Princess Akemi, or Akemi’s tutor Seki, or any other of the myriad of characters they are all fully formed and believable human beings.

The fight sequences in Blue Eye Samurai are both fantastic and gruesomely realistic. Main characters suffer grievous wounds, and there are multiple savage slayings that are as good as anything you’ll ever see. That all of this is captured by animation only makes it all the cooler.

The plot of Blue Eye Samurai jumps back and forth between not only Miza’s past and present, but also Miza’s story and the story of Princess Akimi’s struggle for freedom in a male dominated Japanese culture.

The animating (no pun intended) principle of the series is a common one in our current cultural moment, namely feminism in the form of the girl power narrative.

I usually find the egregious girl power garbage in modern movies and tv to be absolutely embarrassing because it’s so often just trite and vapid pandering or blatant virtue signaling.

But Blue Eye Samurai is none of those things. It tells a compelling girl power narrative by splitting the female archetype into two. First is Mazi, the female heroine using her physical prowess on the male hero’s journey. Then there is Princess Akimi, the traditional female heroine using her feminine wiles to gain advantage in a male dominated society. That Mazi has a side-journey into traditional femininity, and Akimi one into warrior-dom, makes the characters and their archetypal narratives all the more intriguing and potent.

Both female protagonists are also deeply flawed, physically fragile and vulnerable, and make numerous errors on their journeys, which gives the story and characters a power that eludes the plethora of recent female protagonists in film and tv that are both invulnerable and perfect.

Now, to be fair, there is the usual man-hating stuff littered throughout the series, but considering the times presented and the times we live in, it is relatively benign.

As someone who is almost instinctually repulsed by girl power narratives due to their relentless ignorance regarding the power and purpose of archetypes, it is so refreshing and invigorating to see creatives get it right, which is why I loved this series.

There is a second, and maybe more, seasons coming of Blue Eye Samurai and to be frank, I am concerned…as it felt to me the first season should have been stand alone. And from what I can gather and/or project, it would seem following seasons are even more vulnerable to the cultural politics which season one exquisitely and successfully navigated. I’ll keep my fingers crossed the series doesn’t devolve into what it avoided in the first place.

One final thought, and that is that as someone who has long loved Japanese cinema, it’s a goddamn great time to be alive. Godzilla Minus One is kicking ass across the globe and here in America. Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastic film The Boy and the Heron is garnering critical and audience appreciation (and possibly Academy Awards recognition as well). And now Blue Eye Samurai is telling a kick-ass, modernized animated version of a Kurosawa film. I feel like I’m in heaven.

The bottom line is if you love high-quality animation, Samurai stories and Kurosawa films, and can either tolerate or get titillated by animated sex/nudity, then Blue Eye Samurai is for you…it sure as hell was for me…but it’s most definitely not for my young son…not for another decade or so.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

May December (Netflix): A Review - A Comedy Wrapped in a Social Commentary Inside a Melodrama

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This movie, like its subject, is elusive, but if you look at it through the proper lens, it often becomes fascinating.

May December, starring Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, is a dramatic reimagining of the salacious story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a school teacher who fell in love with her 13-year-old student back in the 1990s causing a huge scandal.

The film, which premiered on Netflix December 1st, is directed by esteemed auteur Todd Haynes and written by Samy Burch.

May December follows the story of Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous actress cast to star in a tv movie as Gracie, the woman who had a scandalous affair with her 13-year-old student Joe. Gracie went to prison for the rape/sexual misconduct with a minor, but when released resumed her relationship with the then-of-age Joe and later married him and had two children with him.

Elizabeth comes to Savannah, Georgia and integrates herself into Gracie’s life in order to better understand the character she will be playing in the tv movie. She observes Gracie and her family and community, and each night goes back to her hotel room and tries to capture Gracie’s essence by mimicking and imitating her.

But as time goes on the truth about Gracie and Joe, and even about Elizabeth, becomes more and more murky, and more and more elusive.

Director Todd Haynes is a unique filmmaker. I remember the first film of his that I ever saw was Safe (1995), which also starred Julianne Moore. That film was a very tense, deliberate, psycho-drama that was masterfully assembled.

Since then, I’ve found myself less enamored with Haynes’ work. His acclaimed films Far from Heaven and Carol felt decidedly flaccid and his more off-kilter attempts, like Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There fell flat.

May December though feels a bit different in that as a straight drama, it’s a colossal misfire, but as a sneaky comedy, melodramatic parody/satire, it works incredibly well. The question, of course, is whether Haynes is intentionally trying to be funny or if all of the comedy is purely unintentional.

One hint that Haynes is shooting for comedy is the recurring, and hilariously bad, music cues. The soundtrack for this movie is laugh out loud awful…and absolutely perfect for a cheesy, exploitationist, made-for-tv movie…just like the one Elizabeth is making regarding Gracie’s fall from grace.

There’s a scene in May December where Gracie’s adult son from her first marriage, Georgie, who is an absolute trainwreck of a human being, attempts to blackmail Elizabeth into getting him the job of “music supervisor” on the tv movie she’s making about his mother. How that resolves itself is never entirely clear but by the awful sound of the music in May December, I think if Georgie didn’t get the gig on Elizabeth’s film, he definitely got it on May December.

Haynes also treats us to some immaculately crafted, cheesy as hell zoom shots, and tightly choreographed scenes that are epically hilarious in the most subtle of ways.

The funniest part of the film though is that both Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman, seem to be completely unaware that this is a comedy and entirely locked in to melodrama mode…and are both pretty awful at it.

Moore sports a grating and completely contrived lisp that is the height of distraction, and Portman is so mannered as to be a mannequin. Both of them are constantly acting, which is exactly what both of their characters are doing as well. It’s like they’re in a hall of mirrors and the real people, Gracie and Elizabeth, are impossible to differentiate from the spate of reflections upon reflections.

Speaking of mirrors, that’s not to say that there isn’t magic between these two acting icons. On numerous occasions Moore and Portman share a small space in the film and despite the lisps and the over-acting, the scenes crackle with life. These scenes are often shot, masterfully, in mirrored spaces, like bathrooms or changing rooms, and watching Moore and Portman work their instinctual magic through a camera and through a mirror or multiple mirrors, is absolutely mesmerizing.

Also mesmerizing, is Charles Melton, who plays Gracie’s victim and now husband, Joe. Melton gives the most layered, nuanced and finely crafted performance imaginable, and one of the best performances of the year. Melton, who is best known for starring in the CW series Riverdale (which I’ve never seen), is so present, genuine, grounded and exceptional as Joe it’s like he’s in a different movie altogether.

Another standout performance is by D.W. Moffet, who plays Gracie’s first husband Tom. Moffet has essentially one scene in the movie, and it’s a conversation between Tom and Elizabeth - who is asking him about the experience of being on the wrong end of Gracie’s infamous affair with an underage boy. Moffet is extraordinary in this compact scene. In lesser hand this scene is just an exposition dump and some mugging for the camera, but Moffet turns it into a profound and deeply moving drama all its own.

As the film unfolds, viewers can either accept it as a piece of heightened parody and camp, or can resist it and be extremely disappointed in it as a straight drama that gets lost in a swamp of melodrama.

I chose to enjoy the comedy of it all, and laughed out loud on numerous occasions…like when Natalie Portman’s Elizabeth does a skin-care commercial that is just like a real-life Natalie Portman skin-care commercial. I don’t know why I found that so funny…but I burst out laughing nonetheless.

If you’re looking for a smart, sly, sneaky and subtle comedy about predatory relationship power dynamics, the exploitative nature of our culture and the venality of fame, then May December is for you.

If you’re looking for a high-intensity, prestige drama that will move you deeply, then May December is not for you.

I chose the former and thought May December was a worthwhile cinematic venture. I think if you go into it with the proper, finely-tuned expectations, you’ll end up appreciating it and be glad you watched.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Leave the World Behind (Netflix): A Review - It's the End of the World as We Know It...and Obama Feels Fine

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film never lives up to its potential but it does feature some impressive cinematography and a tantalizing and unnerving narrative. It isn’t a great movie but it does make for a good conversation/thought piece.

Leave the World Behind, written and directed by Sam Esmail, is a dystopian, apocalyptic, psychological thriller produced by Barrack and Michelle Obama now streaming on Netflix.

The film, which stars Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke and Mahershala Ali, is based on the novel of the same name by Ruuman Alam, and it tells the story of the Sanford and Scott families as they navigate an unfolding cataclysm across the U.S. from a tony neighborhood on Long Island.

The Sanford’s, a white family from Park Slope-adjacent Brooklyn, made up of the ornery Amanda (Julia Roberts), her easy-going husband Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their teenage children Archie (Charlie Evans), who is obsessed with girls, and Rose (Farrah McKenzie), who is obsessed with 90s pop culture – like Friends and The West Wing, rent a beautiful home at the beach on Long Island for a week.

In the middle of their first night, there’s a knock at the door, and two black people, G.H. (Mahershala Ali) and Ruth (Myha’la), appear. The story between the Sanfords and the Scotts go from there but I won’t get any more in-depth on it in order to avoid spoilers.

The rest of the plot revolves around mysterious events that are happening in the U.S., specifically in relation to the Sanfords and Scotts, in New York City.

Technology, such as cell phones, the internet and cable television, stop working, leaving the protagonists in an information and communication blackout, which allows chaos and paranoia to flourish.

Once again, in order to avoid spoilers, I will refrain from delving much deeper into the plot than that.

The film’s director, Sam Esmail, is best known for creating the tv series Mr. Robot, but this is just his second feature film, and despite some very bright spots, at times it shows.

To Esmail’s great credit, he creates some very vivid and stunning images in Leave the World Behind, that rattle viewers to the core. Visually the film never fails to unnerve with one apocalyptic nightmare visual after another, like luxurious paintings hanging in a dystopian art gallery.

Esmail and cinematographer Tod Campbell use an often swirling, spinning, panning, zooming and rotating camera to make the viewer just as discombobulated and disoriented as the characters portrayed on-screen. All this camera movement isn’t just directorial masturbation, but instead is very cinematically effective and done with an admirable amount of precision and creative dexterity. As the character’s go through their strange journey, Esmail’s camera leaves viewers in a world where up is down, and left is right…literally.

The same is true of the camera framing, as things are often shot from odd angles, and despite the visuals being crisp and amid razor-sharp straight lines, everything is framed off-kilter and off-center, to great affect.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the look of the film, the story it shows and the drama it reveals are often sorely lacking.

The biggest issue with Leave the World Behind is that it is bursting with a cavalcade of dramatic potential, but is never able to fully realize it.

The greatest obstacle to the film’s dramatic success is that it gives us one-dimensional, unreal characters, places them in an extreme yet compelling and entirely believable situation, and then has them behave in the most inane, counter-intuitive and annoying ways imaginable.

I can’t give too much away in regards to specifics, but things happen, and characters behave, in ways, both big and small, that are just ridiculous beyond belief and it frankly ruins the film as the tension and drama are undermined by these egregious plot and character improbabilities and decisions.

There’s a bit at the end which is meant to be poignant, and could have been really terrific, but is ultimately neutered by a failure of Esmail to thoroughly impress upon the audience, through repetition or targeted intensity, the crucial pieces involved. (Again, I am being intentionally vague to avoid spoilers.)

As for the cast, they do the best they can with the rather shallow characters they’ve been given.

Julia Roberts’ Amanda is basically an upper-middle class, left-of-center Karen, exercising her mid-life crisis muscles by being an irritable bitch for reasons she will never even try to understand. Roberts is a steady screen presence but she has never brought much of interest to the table and Leave the World Behind is no exception.

Ethan Hawke has matured into a solid actor and his good-natured Clay is a passable and likable attempt at an everyman – if ‘everyman’ were a college professor of English and Media Studies. It’s the character of Clay that is much more troubling than the actor portraying him, as Clay is the clueless, sack-less white man incapable of not only defending himself but of mustering the courage to even attempt it.

Charlie Evans and Farrah Mackenzie play the teens Archie and Rose respectively, and there isn’t much to the characters or the actor’s performances. Neither of them jumps off the screen or generates the least bit of magnetism.

Mahershala Ali is, as always, a strong presence on-screen, but his character G.H., is an absurd stand-in for the film’s producer Barrack Obama. G.H. is impeccable. He is unfailingly good, smarter than everyone and entirely incapable of cowardice. He is principled, moral, ethical, noble, brave and above all…correct. Yawn. The truth is that there were twists and turns that could’ve occurred with G.H. to make him more interesting, but they never happen and so we are left with little more than a cardboard cutout of the man that Barrack Obama, and his slavish sycophants, thinks he is - paging Dr. Freud…narcissism alert!

Myha’la as Ruth Scott is fine, I guess, but again, she doesn’t have much with which to work. Ruth is, like G.H., better than everyone else…I suppose simply because of her immutable characteristics…namely that she is black and a woman. Like Roberts’ Amanda, Ruth is an incorrigible bitch but it’s ok because she’s just speaking her truth…or something like that.

The genuine drama between Ruth and G.H., and between the Sanfords and the Scotts, is eschewed in favor of a rather tepid, embarrassingly trite, middle-of-the-road, decidedly elitist and liberal, high school freshman level identity/race politics that feels forced and obscenely phony, which is very unfortunate.

Speaking of politics, the fact that the Obamas produced this movie, the first non-documentary film they’ve produced, is both telling and, frankly, quite unnerving.

The apocalyptic, dystopian, and totally believable plot of Leave the World Behind, and Obama’s insider status among the power elite, makes it feel like this movie isn’t a piece of fiction but rather a piece of predictive programming…or enlightened prophecy, as to what awaits us.

That may sound irrational, or like “conspiratorial thinking” – something that is lambasted in the film as being unserious despite it being proven correct in the story (and more and more often in real life), but whether conscious or unconscious, artists and art often have a way of showing us the catastrophe that is right around the corner. 9/11 is a recent example of this.

The film is marinated in an establishment politics that is entirely rigid, center-left and upper-class. This elitist, left-liberal orthodoxy is so deeply ingrained in the movie that most-mainstream, establishment indoctrinated viewers won’t even recognize, and if they did they wouldn’t see it as political.

I’ll write a much more in-depth, political, psychological analysis of the film in the coming days, but will state here only that this movie is riddled with as much insidious propaganda as anything I’ve seen in any feature film in recent times.

Whether it be subtle, or not-so-subtle, attacks on libertarians, right-wingers, white people, conspiracies, and even Elon Musk, or anything else that isn’t establishment approved, the film never fails to be in complete lockstep with mainstream orthodoxy as designed by the aristocracy and oligarchy.

In this way the film, despite its attempt to present itself as edgy and politically avant-garde/revolutionary, is, at its heart, an intellectually and dramatically flaccid but ideologically faithful homage to the status quo….just like the former President who produced it.

In conclusion, Leave the World Behind is chock full of dramatic potential but is never able to fully realize it. Despite some compelling visuals and sequences, the film’s dramatic and narrative failures ultimately leave it an unsatisfying viewing experience.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Boy and the Heron: A Review - The Master Miyazaki Returns

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

Hiyao Miyazaki is arguably the greatest director of animated film in cinema history. His filmography, which includes such classics as My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Ponyo, is a cornucopia of the weird and wonderful.

Miyazaki, who is 82-years-old, hasn’t made a feature film in a decade (The Wind Rises), and it was believed that he was finished making movies. But fortunately for us, Miyazaki is back with a new film, The Boy and the Heron, which premiered in theatres this past weekend.

The Boy and the Heron follows the travails of Mahito, a twelve-year-old boy living in Tokyo during World War II. Despite Mahito’s valiant efforts, his mother, Hisako, is killed when her hospital burns to the ground one night.

Mahito and his industrialist father Shoichi, then move to the countryside to live in the estate Hisako grew up on. Shoichi remarries with Hisako’s look-a-like younger sister, Natsuko – who becomes pregnant.

Things get typically weird from there as Mahito is pestered by an aggressive heron, and stumbles onto a hidden tower which leads him on a dark yet magical journey in the hopes of seeing his mother again and saving his step-mother from peril.

The Boy and the Heron, like so many of Miyazaki’s movies, deals with very deeply profound philosophical, psychological and existential issues. For example, grief and the meaning of life are the two pillars around which the film is constructed.  

Many of Miyazaki’s movies seem like dreams that often veer into nightmares, or like something cobbled together from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and The Boy and the Heron is no exception. There are shapeshifting demons/angels and giant, carnivorous warrior parakeets, and adorable pre/post life souls that float like balloons, and aggressive hordes of pelicans.

Through it all Miyazaki keeps his protagonist Mahito focused on finding his pregnant step-mother Natsuko and the dream of seeing his long-lost mother again, and it is that fragile humanity and gut-wrenching emotion that gives the film not only its meaning but its purpose.

As always with Miyazaki, the animation is glorious and gloriously weird. Things in Miyazaki’s world look ever-so-abnormal to the point of nightmarish. For instance, the heron is at first gorgeous, but then over time becomes grotesque. The old women, as is custom in Miyazaki films, are charming yet gruesome, witch-like characters.

The film is available in many theatres here in the U.S. either in Japanese with English subtitles or dubbed in English. I saw the film with my young son and subtitles move too fast for him to read, so we saw the dubbed version and it works well for the most part.

The cast are a collection of solid, well-known actors, such as Christian Bale, Florence Pugh, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson. Most of them are perfectly fine, with Pattinson in particular giving a quite remarkable performance that is unrecognizable.

Christian Bale, an actor I usually like, stands out though for a rather poor performance, as his work as Mahito’s father Shoichi is bizarre. At different times Bale gives Shoichi a New York accent that often stumbles into a Boston accent. All of Bale’s voice work here seems to be out of place and out of step.

Beyond that there isn’t much to complain about…it’s a Miyazaki movie after all, but it must be said that despite this being allegedly one of Miyazaki’s most personal stories, it is not among his best films. That is not to say the movie is bad, it’s just to say that in light of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, of which there are many, The Boy and the Heron somewhat pales in comparison.

I thoroughly enjoyed seeing The Boy and the Heron and was thrilled that my son, who wasn’t even born when Miyazaki’s last film came out, got to see his work on a big screen. My son and I have watched all of Miyazaki’s movies in recent years and he is as big a fan as I am. It brings me endless amounts of joy watching my son watch Miyazaki movies, as he just loves everything about them.

We’ve yet to see a Miyazaki movie we’ve disliked. My son’s favorites are my favorites too, starting with My Neighbor Totoro. After that it’s Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, Porco Rosso, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky and The Wind Rises. I would rate The Boy and the Heron below My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, but right up there with any of Miyazaki’s other work. And it is most definitely better than any of the garbage Disney and Pixar have churned out in recent years.  

It was heartening to me to see that The Boy and the Heron was number one at the U.S. box office this weekend, which is something I never thought could happen. That both The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One, two Japanese films, would be so well received by U.S. audiences in back-to-back weeks is a glimmer of hope in an often-times dark and depressing popular culture landscape.

If you haven’t seen Miyazaki’s earlier films, you should go to the streaming service Max – and click on the Studio Ghibli portal, as it has all of Miyazaki’s films available to stream. Miyazaki’s movies are unique because they’re for both adults and children (I’d say kids 7 and up but your mileage may vary in terms of proper age to start). For kids I recommend you begin with My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo, and for adults you can start with those or with Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, and go from there…you won’t be disappointed, and it’ll whet your appetite to see The Boy in the Heron in theatres.

In conclusion, I thoroughly recommend you see The Boy and the Heron in the theatre, and appreciate Hiyao Miyazaki while we have him on earth and still making movies.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Godzilla Minus One: A Review - The Glories and Horror of the God Encounter

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

My rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. As good as it gets in terms of Godzilla moviemaking. Not just a great Godzilla movie, but a really fantastic film all its own.

Language: Japanese with English Subtitles.

Godzilla Minus One, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is the 37th film in the Godzilla franchise, and the 33rd film produced by Japan’s Toho Studio, the place where Godzilla got his start back in 1954.

That original Godzilla movie, aptly titled Godzilla, wasn’t just the birth of the great kaiju film in modern cinema, it was also a truly fantastic piece of cinema. Every Godzilla movie since has paled in comparison, even the good ones, and there have been plenty of good ones…at least from Toho.

Godzilla Minus One is a reboot of the franchise and a remake of sorts of the first Godzilla movie. It tells the origin story of Godzilla and his first foray into his favorite sport…destroying Japanese cities.

The film is set at the tail end of World War II and in the early post-war years and it follows its protagonist, Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), as he tries to integrate back into civilian life after a deeply traumatic war experience.

Shikishima is a failed kamikaze pilot who ditched his suicide mission on the pretense that his plane malfunctioned. He ends up on a small Pacific Island used for airplane maintenance by the Japanese. It is here that Shikishima is confronted by not only his cowardice, but by a youthful and spry, mysterious sea monster the locals call Godzilla.

After the war, Shikishima is haunted by his shameful wartime cowardice, which he wears like a scarlet letter. He tries to build a life in the ruins of Japan and his mental state, and becomes a step-father and de facto husband to a young woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the infant child she rescued during the war. He also gets a job aboard a ship that must destroy mines in the Pacific left over from the war.

While working this job, you’ll never guess who he runs into…his old foe Godzilla. But this time Godzilla is bigger and badder than ever thanks to the testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific by the U.S., which triggered Godzilla to grow bigger and stronger and angrier.

What makes Godzilla such a compelling movie monster is that he is, as Jungian psychology would describe him, the “God encounter”. Godzilla is, to quote the Bhagavad Gita and Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, “death, destroyer of worlds.” Godzilla is the void. He is both the immovable object and the irresistible force. One cannot help but feel insignificant and helpless in the face of such astonishing, horrifying destructive power.

In terms of the mythology of Godzilla, the foundation of it is that Godzilla is born both as a symbol of the dangers of the atomic age as well as the manifestation of Japan’s guilt and divine punishment for their aggression. In other words, he is God’s revenge on mankind for deploying nuclear weapons on earth, and hubris for Japan’s imperial ambition and heinous war time behavior.

The original Godzilla film resonated because it understood this mythology. As the Godzilla franchise has moved along over the decades, that mythology has been watered down if not entirely neutered, turning Godzilla into some sort of cuddly friend, or fierce environmental warrior.

Godzilla Minus One makes no such error. Here, Godzilla is not cute and cuddly, or friendly in the least. He is a dead-eyed and destructive killing machine that cannot be reasoned with, only endured.

The politics of Godzilla Minus One show a Japanese people exhausted by war and the malignant government that got it into one, and the incompetent government that survives after war. In this vulnerable state, the people of Japan are forced to do for themselves in the battle against Godzilla.

I won’t go into too much detail in order to avoid spoilers, but I will say that Godzilla Minus One is easily the second-best Godzilla movie ever made, behind the original – which is only the best in this instance because it is the original.

The sequences where we see Godzilla in action are spectacular, and considering the film had a budget of a measly $15 million, which is just 10% of what the most recent American Godzilla movie cost to make, is remarkable.

But this is exactly how you make a monster movie. You give people what they want…namely Godzilla wreaking havoc, and doing it in a realistic setting, with real-world consequences, inhabited by complex yet compelling characters. In other words, take the Godzilla subject matter seriously, something the recent spate…hell…ALL OF, the American Godzilla movies have failed to do.

Ironically enough, while reading the news this morning I read that the Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer will finally be released in Japan after months of controversy. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, is not exactly a hero in Japan, where his handiwork slaughtered roughly 225,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Oppenheimer famously does not show the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor does it show their gruesome aftermath. When Godzilla comes to shore in Godzilla Minus One and makes his way through a Japanese city, what happens, and its aftermath, are undeniably evocative of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the hell on Earth that Oppenheimer’s genius unleashed.

Accordingly, I think, as odd as this sounds, that Oppenheimer and Godzilla Minus One would make for a splendid double feature, as the former sets the stage for the death and destruction in the latter.

Take away the psychological musings, and as a pure piece of entertainment, Godzilla Minus One still works incredibly well. I went to the film with my wife and young son, who is too young to read the subtitles quickly enough – but he saw the trailer and wanted to see the film. My son had a few questions about the plot throughout, but not that many, and he could understand what was happening for the most part without reading the subtitles. He absolutely loved the film…for the same reason I grew up loving Godzilla…because Godzilla is awesome in the truest sense of that word.

Watching Godzilla unleash his destructive powers and fury onto the world is both horrifying and highly entertaining, and the fact that it is treated seriously and that characters you care about are in great peril when Godzilla rampages, makes that rampage all the more compelling.

In terms of the filmmaking, Yamazaki does a stupendous job directing this film. Godzilla Minus One pays homage to the original Godzilla in numerous ways, and does the same with a diverse array of films, from Jaws to Dunkirk.

The cast are terrific, without a bad note among them. And the special effects are better than anything I’ve seen in recent years from any of the American studios.

If, like me, you’re a huge fan of Godzilla movies, Godzilla Minus One is a dream come true, as it’s not only a great Godzilla movie, it’s a fantastic film in its own right.

If, like my wife, you couldn’t care less about Godzilla, you should still see this movie, as she didn’t just endure Godzilla Minus One, she actually enjoyed it.

At a time when blockbuster filmmaking from American Studios is at an all-time, ghetto-dwelling, nadir, Toho’s Godzilla Minus One is a glorious, shining city on a hill. Of course, that city is shining because Godzilla just stomped all over it and set it on fire with his atomic breath.

Godzilla’s back, baby!!!

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

On this combustible episode, Barry and I ingest heroic amounts of cocaine and then incoherently yell at each other about the comedy/horror movie Cocaine Bear. Topics discussed include guilty pleasures, bad taste and the perils of living with bears. 

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 110 - Cocaine Bear

Thanks for listening!

©2023

November 2023 Propaganda Report: 60 Minutes Strikes Again...and Again...and Again!

Now that I’ve begun to dip my toes back into the cesspool of propaganda, I’m once again coming to the grim realization that I don’t have to walk far to find those putrid waters.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I stumbled upon an episode of the CBS dinosaur 60 Minutes and was shocked/amused at how shamelessly it peddled propaganda against Russia, China and Iran, no doubt in the hopes of convincing gullible Americans into believing some Manichean ideal about us being the good guys, and them being the bad guys, and how we must righteously annihilate them in a world war.

In the weeks that followed, 60 Minutes has kept up its relentless propaganda pace with astounding consistency. In fact, since 60 Minutes started its 56th season on September 17, 2023, over the course of eleven episodes the show has run an astonishing twelve segments either directly or tangentially accusing Russia, China and/or Iran of various evils and nefariousness. This relentless cavalcade of propaganda pieces has been entirely devoid of nuance or journalistic integrity, filled with false assumptions, decidedly one-sided, egregiously vacuous and transparently contrived.

The 60 Minutes episode from November 12th is a perfect example of the type of vapid-to-the-point-of-inane propaganda now common place in American media. The topic on this episode was…shock of shocks…the evil of those nefarious Iranians and Russians!! How original.

The first segment was about an alleged Iranian government program to kill or kidnap American officials, citizens and Iranian dissidents on U.S. soil, which is a nmcie companion piece to the 60 Minutes segment I previously wrote about which dealt with an Iranian-American arrested for espionage in Iran, who was eventually part of a recent prisoner swap.

Leslie Stahl, sporting her trademark physics-defying hairstyle that is best described as Andy Warhol run through a nuclear Cuisinart and a turbo wind tunnel, started off the festivities by reading a list of U.S. officials allegedly targeted. The list included such world-class asshats as Mike Esper, Mike Pompeo and to top it all off, John fucking Bolton.

Bolton and Stahl sat down for one of the more contrived sequences in 60 Minutes history, which is quite an accomplishment, and Bolton, as is his wont, talked tough while looking like a constipated Seussian character. Bolton is one of the more blood-thirsty and maniacal hawks in recent U.S. history, again…quite an accomplishment, and he is completely devoid of any credibility on issues revolving around Iran, Russia, China, the Middle East, Europe, Asia or anywhere else in the world, but Stahl, of course, lapped up his braggadocio bullshit and never once pushed back against his false bravado or his claims…nor did she…you know…show any actual evidence to back up the FBI’s claims of an Iranian kidnap/assassination program.

Stahl then interviewed Masi Alinejad, an Iranian dissident woman living in Brooklyn whom the FBI claims was targeted by this Iranian kidnapping/assassination plot.

Alinejad came to the U.S. fourteen years ago and has been an outspoken advocate for women in Iran, and routinely confers with women in Iran and posts videos online of them not wearing a headscarf in defiance of Iranian religious law.

To be kind, Alinejad comes across as absolutely batshit crazy. She is hyper emotional and seems like the type of person you’d see wandering the streets of Brooklyn talking to neighborhood squirrels while wearing an ornate Kentucky Derby hat and a vintage wedding dress.

Alinejad shared her story of how Iran hired an Azerbaijani man in New York to buy a gun and track down Alinejad, then kidnap her and take her to Iran for trial.

Stahl’s reaction to this story is as revealing as it is pretty funny, as she says it “sounds implausible”. No shit Leslie…maybe it “sounds implausible” because it is, in fact, implausible.

Apparently, the kidnap plot against Alinejad crumbles and so the Iranians pivoted and told this criminal from Azerbaijan to skip the kidnapping and just kill her. The criminal allegedly stalks her, then goes up to her front door and “tries to get in” her house.

What’s weird about this claim of this guy trying to break in to Alinejad’s house is that 60 Minutes shows door cam footage of him on her porch meant to prove the claim, but the video doesn’t show him actually trying to get in to her house at all…in fact he never touches the door. He wanders back on forth on the porch looking at his phone, like a delivery man wondering if he has the wrong address. If there was footage of him actually trying to break in, which would be pretty damning…60 Minutes would’ve shown it. But apparently, they don’t because they didn’t.

According to the story, the alleged assassin then leaves…apparently because he couldn’t get in the house – no doubt held back by the fact that he never touched the door, and then is pulled over by cops for “running a stop sign”, and the police find a rifle in the trunk of his car.

Let’s unpack this shall we…the guy has a weapon, which the FBI alleges he was going to use to kill Alinejad at the behest of Iran, but for some inexplicable reason he decides not to take the weapon with him when he goes to kill her and ends up just standing around like a dope on her porch. What was he going to do, meet her, introduce himself and then tell her to hold on while he runs to his car and gets his rifle?

Also, never believe coincidences in cases like this. This guy wasn’t pulled over by the cops by happenstance…he was marked and everyone knew what he was doing. A strong indicator of this is that if you or I run a stop sign, the police are not going to search the trunk of our car. They will give you a ticket and that will be that. This is why I assume that this alleged assassin from Azerbaijan was actually either an intelligence agency asset or an informant of some kind, and that the entire plot was manufactured by the feds.

Now why would I assert such a crazy thing? Well because this 60 Minutes story also reveals that the man who allegedly wanted to kidnap or kill John Bolton hired a hitman online (yeah…ok) and that hitman wasn’t really a hitman…he was…you guessed it…an FBI informant.

The FBI has lots of informants and they get up to lots of nefarious stuff for their fed paymasters. For example, that 2020 kidnap plot against Michigan governor Whitmer…the vast majority of people involved were actually working for the FBI. If you look at many big-name cases, particularly in the wake of 9-11, the same is true. Hell, at the very least two of the 9-11 hijackers were living with an FBI informant in San Diego right before the attacks.

So, take all of this nonsense from the FBI and 60 Minutes about a vast Iranian assassination/kidnap plot with a gigantic grain of salt.

That said, governments and their intelligence agencies do kidnap and kill citizens of other countries. You know how I know that? Because 60 Minutes unironically shows a video in this segment where an Iranian citizen confesses to assisting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard with their kidnapping and assassination program. The Iranian man, a smuggler who was allegedly given carte blanch in his illegal business if he cooperated with the Revolutionary Guard, confesses in a video MADE BY ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS IN THE BACK OF A CAR AFTER THESE SAME ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE AGENTS KIDNAPPED AND FORCEFULLY INTERROGATED THE GUY. Ms. Stahl fails to recognize the irony of using a confession video obtained through an Israeli kidnapping plot to prove the villainy of Iranians for their kidnapping plots.

Speaking of other governments kidnapping people…that sounds sort of like…I don’t know… the U.S. government rendition program under the Bush regime.

And speaking of assassinations of other country’s government officials…that sounds a lot like the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Not to mention the cavalcade of scientists assassinated in Iran by Israeli intelligence in the last decade.

Stahl does bring up the Soleimani assassination but fails to see any similarities as the Iranian General was a “terrorism mastermind”. As always, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder, as U.S. foreign policy over the last 75 years has killed and terrorized infinitely more people, especially Iranian people, than the “terrorist” Soleimani could ever dream of matching. Bolton, Pompeo and the entirety of the George W. Bush administration are at a minimum, equals to Soleimani on the terrorism chart.

Speaking of dead Iranians…does anybody remember the 290 Iranian murdered by the U.S. in 1988 when the U.S.S. Vincennes shot down Iranian Air flight 655 over Iranian airspace? Well…I’m sure Iranians do, and they probably think of it as a terror attack. The George H.W. Bush was president at the time and he refused to apologize to Iran because America never apologizes….typical terrorists behavior.

Stahl goes on to recount the FBI allegations against Iran saying that in order to keep a legal distance, Iran uses “proxies” from the criminal world to do their dirty work.

This sounds quite similar to how the U.S. intelligence community uses criminals to run guns and drugs into the U.S. from Central and South America in order to fund their black budget projects…like, ironically enough, Iran-Contra.

It is also similar to how prior to the war in Afghanistan, poppy production in that country under Taliban rule had fallen to nearly zero…but after we went on the hunt for Bin Laden by starting a war there, poppy production skyrocketed, followed by a flood of heroin into the U.S. and Europe. The same thing happened during Vietnam, when the CIA would run heroin from Thailand through Vietnam and into the U.S. Not surprisingly, Leslie Stahl didn’t bring any of this uncomfortableness up.

Also not surprisingly, when Stahl spoke of Iran using proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah to fight their wars and foment dissent in other countries, she failed to mention how the U.S. has famously used such stand-up good guys as Al Qaeda and ISIS as proxies in the Middle East against various enemies, such as the old Soviet Union and modern-day Syria.

60 Minutes’ allergy to the truth and addiction to establishment propaganda didn’t stop with the inane Iranian kidnapping story. Up next on the same episode was even more WWIII drum banging in the form of a story about Russia’s “cultural genocide” in Ukraine.

In a previous episode, 60 Minutes did a segment about Russia’s “quiet invasion” in Georgia and now they’re doing a segment on Russia’s “cultural genocide”…how sneaky of those Russians to do “quiet” invasions and “cultural” genocides, instead of those noisy invasions and actual genocides like Israel is doing in Gaza.

The main thrust of this segment was that Russia is targeting Ukrainian churches, libraries and museums in order to wipe out Ukrainian culture and identity.

The specifics of the charges against Russia in this case are…well…almost irrelevant considering the dubious sources with incentive to manufacture any story they want with no journalistic resistance to it. That said, I don't doubt in the least that churches, libraries and museums have been destroyed in Ukraine.

What I find fascinating though is that as this story aired another war is raging…this time in Gaza, and lots of churches, including the third oldest Christian church in the world, St. Porphyrius, and hospitals too, have been deliberately targeted, as have civilians.

You can bet your ass that 60 Minutes will not run a story on the cultural genocide of Christians by Israel…and that’s because when Israel commits cultural genocide, or any other kind of genocide, it’s good, but when Russia does it, it’s bad.

To be fair, it isn’t just Israel that gets a free pass…we give a free pass to ourselves as well. Remember when the Iraqi museum under U.S. military control was looted during the Iraq War, and Donald Rumsfeld’s response was to scoff at the charges and then to declare that “stuff happens”?

I certainly do not condone Russia’s military destroying Ukrainian churches, museums and libraries, nor do I condone their alleged looting. But I must say that these charges would be more impactful if western media outlets hadn’t already run with vacuous accusations of Russian rape camps and massacres, both of which have been shown to be scurrilous charges and empty propaganda talking points.

What I find so deplorable about establishment media’s modern war coverage is, whether it be in Ukraine, Syria, or Israel, the manufacturing and hyping of false atrocity stories.

War is bad enough as it is that you don’t need to gin up phony furor over fake rape camps or beheaded babies and the like. War is an atrocity all its own, it doesn’t need any help. And frankly, these stories only further to coarsen and dehumanize the public…which is already pretty coarse and inhumane.

The following Sunday, November 19th, 60 Minutes kept the propaganda train rolling with a segment titled “The Disappeared”, which was a shameless appeal to emotion that was so devoid of journalistic integrity as to be egregious.

The segment told the story of how Russia is “abducting” Ukrainian children from Ukraine and taking them into Russia. 60 Minutes reports that according to the Ukrainian government, the “official” number of children “abducted” by Russia is 19,000 but that they think the “real” number is 300,000…that’s quite a range…one might even say it is “highly improbable”. Just so everyone knows, 60 Minutes makes abundantly clear throughout the segment that all of this “abducting” is a “war crime”.

The story follows a “brave” Ukrainian grandmother, named Paulina, as she “rescues” her nine-year-old grandson Nikita who was “abducted” by the Russians. This story is…ummm…complicated to say the least.

So, Paulina’s grandson Nikita has special needs and was attending a boarding school for disabled students in Ukraine. His parents are completely out of the picture, but why that is, is never revealed in the story, we only learn that the grandmother is “in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson”. Curious considering that Nikita was “abducted” nearly 8 months ago…which indicates he had no family member as his guardian prior to the “abduction”.  

Also curious is that Paulina lives far away (in Poland) from Nikita, as she works and has to pay for the boarding school….or so 60 Minutes tells us. The reality is that Paulina hasn’t seen Nikita in a long time and it has nothing to do with the Russians. In fact, she is in such close contact with Nikita that she only finds out he has been “abducted” by the Russians, when his picture is posted on social media by a Ukrainian activist group.

The host of the segment, Cecilia Vega, then informs us that over the seven months Nikita was “held captive”, the Russians played a “cruel game of hide and seek”, moving the child three times in eight months.

In an attempt to expose the villainy of the Russians, a digital map is used to show the long journey Nikita was taken on “post-abduction”. First, he is taken out of Ukraine to Crimea, then to Russia proper – but still close to the border, and then…astonishingly…he is taken back to Ukraine not all that far from where he was originally “abducted”. Cecilia Vega’s voice-over sums up this journey by simply declaring that the child was taken “deep into Russian-held territory”.

Paulina then works with an activist group in Ukraine dedicated to “rescuing” the children “abducted” by Russia, and they hatch a plot to get Paulina to Nikita.

We are told by a former Ukrainian politician who now runs the non-profit activist organization that “rescues” these children, that each child who returns to Ukraine is :a witness to a war crime”…which is a strange thing to say since it will just signal to Russia not to release any more children…right? Ms. Vega never asks that question because it would complicate the shallow sound-bite she is so eager to get and the Manichean narrative she has pledged to uphold and propagate.

Then we hear about Vlad, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, who recounts his tale of being taken from his home in Ukraine by Russian soldiers and put in a “camp”, which sounds an awful lot like a school. Among the tortures he endures are that he has to say the Russian national anthem every morning (the horror!!).

Vlad also tells us that speaking Ukrainian was forbidden in the “camp”, which means he got to experience exactly what every ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizen experienced after the U.S.-led coup in 2014 in Ukraine. The post-coup government banned the Russian language, Russian media outlets, opposition political parties and even Russian Orthodox Churches…and some Ukrainian ones too.

Vlad, being a teenager, lashes out at these ridiculous restrictions and tears down a Russian flag in anger. He is then put in the detention facility part of the “camp” and is held in “isolation”. 60 Minutes acts like this is the most barbaric thing to have ever occurred, and I concur, that children, even 16-year-olds, should not be put in isolation. Unfortunately, in the U.S. 35% of all prisoners held in youth detention facility are held in isolation at one point during their incarceration. Celia Vega never mentions that fact.

Vega did mention that the Russians were “indoctrinating” children in these “camps” by telling them “repeated lies” like “Ukraine lost the war”. By all observable metrics, Ukraine has lost the war though, and the indoctrination charge is pretty rich coming from 60 Minutes – which does nothing more than indoctrinate its viewers with the most pernicious of propaganda.

As for Vlad, his story is a sad one, but he did get back home, so Russia’s “abduction” campaign seems very, very ineffective. Considering that the Ukrainian military routinely “abducts” teens and old men off the street and uses them as forced conscripts, which they then throw into the meat grinder at the front line to be slaughtered, it’s safe to say that Vlad was lucky to be in a Russian school instead.

And that is really the point of all this. The notion that Russia is moving children out of a war zone for the safety of the children is only absurd and ridiculous if you have a cartoonish and comic book understanding of Russia and Russians. You don’t have to think Russians are the good guys to believe that they don’t want to massacre children.

And considering the fact that Israel has slaughtered more civilians and children in just over a month of war in Gaza, than Russia has in two years in Ukraine, speaks to this reality.

Another piece of evidence backing this notion is that Paulina makes it to the school where Nikita is living under Russian control. Despite the fact that she has no legal guardianship of Nikita, Russian officials, including Maria Mlova-Balova – the woman who is “accused of war crimes” by Ukraine (and 60 Minutes) for her work running Russia’s Child Services, Paulina is allowed to leave with Nikita.

Mlova-Belova, or as 60 Minutes identifies her “the accused war criminal”, tears up with joy at the reunion of Paulina and Nikita. Mlova-Belova – “the accused war criminal”, then gives gifts to Nikita and says to Paulina, “would like you like to stay in the Russian Federation with us maybe? We can give you some money, maybe a car?”

Paulina declines, as Mlova-Belova calls the reunion a “joy” and wishes Paulina and Nikita a “happy life”. Paulina and Nikita then leave for the long journey back to Poland.

Just think about this for a moment…Mlova-Belova –“the accused war criminal”, greets a Ukrainian grandmother with gifts and an offer of citizenship and financial aid, and then allows her to come take her grandson and leave, despite the fact that the Ukrainian government official running the rescue operation says every returned child is a witness to a war crime, and this “war criminal” woman puts the entire interaction on video and shares it with the world.

Does this sound like some nefarious, child-stealing enterprise being run by a “war criminal”? Does Maria Mlova-Belova sound like a monster who wants to harm Ukrainian children? In addition to that, is a nine-year-old boy with special needs some great prized possession or piece of war booty the Russians covet? Or is the more likely scenario that Mlova-Belova is a Russian bureaucrat doing her best to find a safe place or safe home for children in great peril in a very complex and difficult situation? We know what 60 Minutes wants you to think, but the facts of this scenario speak to a much more nuanced and complicated situation.

(This is not to even mention the fact that as this story ran, Israel is waging war in Gaza and making no effort to avoid killing many, many children – according to some reports, over 5,500. It would seem Russia is doing a much more humane thing by removing children from an active war zone. I’ll let you decide.)

On Sunday, November 26th, 60 Minutes ran yet another propaganda segment titled “Rise”, which was about a former American Marine Corps officer who runs a program which brings Ukrainian war widows and their children to the Swiss Alps for a week in order to climb mountains and confront their psychological trauma of having lost a husband/father.

The segment was hosted by a weepy, teary-eyed Scott Pelley, who introduced us to Nathan Schmidt, the former Marine who served three brutal tours in Iraq and has the psychological scars to prove it.

Pelley repeats the terms “Putin’s invasion” and “Putin’s unprovoked invasion” like mindless mantras throughout the segment, just so everyone knows that subtlety and nuance are not welcome on 60 Minutes, despite those declarative condemnations being, at best, disputed. To state aloud that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” is to prove yourself uninformed to the point of illiteracy in the recent history of Ukraine and America’s involvement.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Schmidt, who is so obviously torn up about what he witnessed and experienced in Iraq, helping Ukrainians heal from the psychological wounds of war, when the Iraqis, whose country he invaded, are apparently left to fend for themselves when it comes to dealing with the immense trauma, he and his nation inflicted upon them.

When hearing the very sad stories of the Ukrainian war widows and their children, I couldn’t help but wonder…where are the ethnic Russian Ukrainians who lived in the Donbas who were left widowed and orphaned by the Ukrainian government’s bombardment of thei towns and villages post the 2014 coup – a coup which was instigated and sponsored by the U.S.? Ukraine killed 14,000 ethnic Russians in the Donbas…so there are lots of war widows and orphans to choose from for a healing mountain climb. Why weren’t they invited?

And where is the healing mountain climbing for the relatives of the 48 ethnic Russian Ukrainian citizens who were burned alive in the union house in Odessa in 2014 by Ukrainians and backed by the U.S. installed Ukrainian government? I’m sure they’d like to climb a mountain and forget their troubles too.

This 60 Minutes segment is the heartstrings portion of the propaganda program, similar to the previous segment on the “disappeared” children. It is meant to overwhelm you with raw emotion, which will short circuit your brain and your critical thinking ability. Facts? We don‘t need facts! We need feelings!!

The thing that bothers me the most about this wave of 60 Minutes propaganda pieces is not the shamelessness, but the obvious venality, vacuity and malignant intent of it all.

This 60 Minutes anti-Russian/China/Iran propaganda isn’t meant to inform, it is meant to inflame. Its goal is to misinform, disinform and blind the populace to reality and dull their ability to think critically while aggravating their emotions, all in the hopes of ginning up support for a massive war against the new Axis of Evil.

War is undoubtedly a racket, and 60 Minutes is a critical part of that racket’s infrastructure. The dupes and dopes who buy into the bullshit that 60 Minutes and the neo-con American government are peddling, will ride the wave of their incuriosity and righteousness, and flag-wave us into a world war and our own annihilation.

I know Quixotically waving my red warning flags will make no difference in the long run and will do nothing to stop the inevitable, but at least it gives me something to do while the dogs of war howl louder and louder and 60 Minutes keeps the beat by incessantly banging their war drums.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Propaganda Watch - Ireland Edition

This past Thursday, a man stabbed and seriously injured five people, two women and three young children, at a school in Dublin, Ireland.

Anti-immigration protests broke out in response to the attack, which many believed to have been committed by an Algerian immigrant (a claim which has not been officially confirmed), and escalated into a riot, with police being assaulted, buildings and vehicles being burned, and stores looted.

The preceding two paragraphs are my simple attempt to describe in as journalistically neutral a way the calamitous events of November 24, 2023 in Dublin, Ireland. It could certainly use a few more drafts and an editor, but it is professional enough to be passable.

It wasn’t that hard to write those two paragraphs, and yet, perusing the coverage of the terrible events in Dublin on Thursday in the leading newspapers here in the U.S., one finds some egregious journalism, insipid bias, and blatant propaganda on display. When compared to these newspaper’s coverage of similar incidents, it reveals an ingrained bias and insidious level of propaganda that is alarming but not shocking.

Let’s start with the “paper of record” The New York Times.

The New York Times headline on its original article about the Dublin incident reads, “Rioters Clash With Police in Dublin After Children are Hurt in Knife Attack”.

At first glance this seems to be accurate, but when you read between the lines you realize the headline, and the story beneath, are a minefield of managed propaganda.

Let’s start with the phrase “children are hurt in knife attack”. This phraseology is intentionally meant to diminish the horror of the attack. Notice, the children are “hurt”, which is a passive descriptor, and the term “attack” is not a verb here, and is also passive.

Another way to write the headline would be to describe the incident as “children wounded in knife attack” or “children attacked by knife-wielding man”. Those descriptions create a much more visceral response regarding the attack, as opposed to the Times headline which tries to create the visceral reaction in regard to the riot which followed.

It's similar to how establishment media describe death in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Israelis are “killed” (viscerally charged language – killing is ugly and brutal and the people who kill – the Palestinians – are to be regarded as actively evil) while the Palestinians “die” (passive – as if it’s a quiet and sterile act of God). There’s also the phrasing of Hamas releasing Israeli “hostages” while Israel releases Palestinian “prisoners”. How the establishment media wants you to react to a story is signaled in the semantics of the story.

Speaking of semantics, the term “rioters” is also a very distinct choice that intentionally carries with it a stigma and negative connotation meant to convey judgement and condemnation, placing the reader in opposition to the “rioters” and their cause. But is the term “rioter” the accurate choice?

A riot certainly broke out in Dublin on Thursday, so describing the people doing the fighting with police and burning and looting as rioters would seem accurate…except it didn’t start as a riot, it started as a protest and then escalated/spiraled out of control into a riot. An accurate description would be to say that “protests devolved into riots”.

The New York Times was not alone in their use of the term “rioters” and “riot” as both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal did the same.

The Washington Post headline ignored the attack on women and children altogether and simply declared, “Far-Right Protestors Burn and Loot in Dublin in Worst Violence in Decades”. You’d be hard pressed to find a more biased headline than that to describe the events of November 24, 2023 in Dublin.

The Post article then goes on to describe how “…rioters, some wielding metal bars, smashed windows and looted shops in the city center.”

The Wall Street Journal opened with, “Ireland witnessed its worst civil disorder in decades after rioters marauded through Dublin city center looting shops and setting buses and police cars on fire in a spate of violence…”.

“Rioters marauding” is quite the creative flourish, and would make for a great band name or album title.

The picture painted by the Times, Post and Journal is pretty clear, that the “riot” and the “rioters” are much worse than the “incident” where five people were stabbed. Hell, The Washington Post ignored the attack in favor of the riots in their headline. These corporate media outlets make it even more clear of their intention by only quoting police and government authorities in their stories.

There are quotes from Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, who deemed the “rioters” to be “thugs”. And from Irish Justice Minister, Helen McEntee, who stated, “a thuggish and manipulative element must not be allowed use an appalling tragedy to wreak havoc…”.

There are numerous quotes from police officials, who blamed the riots on a “lunatic, hooligan faction driven by a far-right ideology”.

What was missing from every single article I read, and not just in the big three newspapers mentioned above, was a quote from someone who was actually attending the “riot” and/or participating in it.

As someone interested in journalism, it seems to me that finding out why these people are crazed enough to riot would be a pivotal piece to the story…but apparently not.

That’s not to say that the “rioters” motivations are ignored, they aren’t, as every article claims, without evidence, that the “rioters” are “far-right”, “anti-immigrant” hooligans. The only source for those claims are police and government officials.

You may be thinking, what is wrong with any of the preceding examples of journalism I have presented? Well, when seen in context with the establishment media’s coverage of other similar incidents, it tells quite a story.

Back in May of 2020, George Floyd died while being forcefully detained on a street by multiple Minneapolis Police officers. Floyd’s desperate pleas for his life and subsequent death were captured on video and quickly spread through social media, igniting outrage and protests, which descended into a riot which involved violence, burning and looting.

The previous paragraph is a passable paragraph describing the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent civil unrest with a minimal amount of bias injected. The term “killing” could replace the word “death” in the second sentence, but at the time it was not entirely clear what killed him…and frankly it’s still pretty murky to this day. That said, it is relatively accurate.

The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, were all very clear in describing the “rioters” in Dublin the other day. Interestingly enough, they never used the term “riot” or “rioter” to describe what happened in the wake of George Floyd’s death (now deemed a murder).

The headline of the Times’ article on Dublin blared, “Rioters Clash with Police”, but the Times’ headline regarding the unrest following Floyd’s death reads, “Fiery Clashes Erupt Between Police and Protestors”.

Notice how the story in Dublin is framed? “Rioters Clash with Police” makes it clear who is instigating – the “rioters”…not to mention the term rioters makes clear they and their cause are to be perceived negatively and with disdain.

In contrast, the violence between police and “protestors” in Minneapolis appears to simply be an act of nature, like a volcano, as “fiery clashes erupt”.

And of course, the rioters in Minneapolis are described as “protestors” throughout the reporting and never as rioters, thus giving them and their cause nobility and not tainting it with criminality, like the term “rioters” implies.

The Washington Post did the same, with their headline stating, “Protests Continue to Rage”.

The Post article features this astonishing paragraph, “Protesters broke windows and charged over fences to breach a police precinct station in Minneapolis and set it on fire late Thursday as officers retreated from violent confrontations that boiled over days after George Floyd died in police custody.”

The actions described, breaking windows, charging over fences and setting a police station on fire, are all very clearly acts that occur in a riot, and not at a protest…and yet the Post, as well as the Times and the Journal, never, not once, refer to the people who commit these acts as “rioters”. The “rioters” in Dublin all broke windows and lit things on fire, and were called “rioters” for it.

The Post article also quotes one of the “protestors” inside in the police station who is actively lighting it on fire. The quote reads, ““We’re starting fires in here so be careful,” one man shouted as sprinklers doused protesters who had burst inside. Flames began to rise from the front of the building as hundreds of protesters looked on, and soon smoke was billowing from the roof.”

Quoting this man, and the particular quote they use, is an obvious attempt to humanize the man, the “protesters” and the “protest” movement. You see, this “protestor” is concerned for human life and wants to make sure everyone is safe as he burns the police station to the ground. (I actually believe that this quote is manufactured by the reporter as it is just too perfect…but I cannot prove that) Why did the reporter use only that quote and not another? Curious.

Of course, the Post didn’t get any quotes from the protestors/rioters in Dublin, because that would illuminate their motivations and maybe even humanize them, something which apparently is anathema since it is so dangerous to hear their point of view.

The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and is right-wing, was no different in its coverage of the Floyd “protests”. The Journal’s original article says, “…protesters walked for 2½ miles to a Minneapolis police precinct. Some damaged windows, a squad car and sprayed graffiti. Police in riot gear formed into a line to confront the protesters and fired tear gas…”

The Journal never labels the “protestors” as “rioters”, despite the fact that the police were wearing “riot” gear….which is pretty funny. Why didn’t the police put on “protest” gear?

Another interesting comparison between the Dublin “riots” and the George Floyd “protests” is that these big three establishment media outlets all use police and government officials as sources and for quotes regarding Dublin, but not with regard to the Floyd “protests”.

These police and Irish government official’s claims are taken at face value and never questioned. When these officials call for “law and order” and declaring the “rioters” “thugs” and “hooligans”, it is seen as a positive and their actions noble in a fight against rampant hate and criminality.

In contrast, none of these three mainstream newspapers got quotes from police officials in their articles on the “protests” in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The only government official quoted was Trump who was painted as a tyrannical demagogue for calling the “protestors”, “thugs”.

Regardless of what you think or feel regarding the “riots” in Dublin or the “protests” about George Floyd’s death, the important thing to understand, and why I am writing this article, is that you are being relentlessly manipulated. How you think and feel is not a function of you rationally examining and weighing evidence. It is a result of you being emotionally manipulated through the use of subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, propaganda techniques.

The news you read or hear or watch, is manufactured and is a tool to manipulate you to into feeling how the ruling elite want you to feel.

In the case of Dublin, the globalists want you to decry anti-immigration sentiments and to see anyone who resists unfettered immigration as a “far-right”, racist villain, even though these Irish “rioters” may, in the case of Ireland (which has never been a colonizer – only colonized), be in an existential war to save the country and culture their ancestors fought for, and died for, for centuries.

The same manipulation is true regarding the George Floyd “protests”. The ruling elite want you to believe, and polls show an overwhelming majority of liberals do believe, that police are slaughtering unarmed blacks by the thousands every year. That is demonstrably false even though it “feels” correct according to media coverage.

Hyper-racialization and mass immigration are among the most valuable weapons used by the ruling elite to divide, conquer and pillage…and most of the people fall for it most of the time.

The bottom line is that, to quote the great George Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Unfortunately, with attention spans and I.Q. dropping like flies in our insatiably emotionalist, social media saturated culture, fewer and fewer have the ability, or the will, to see what is in front of their nose and to sniff out the insidious and insipid establishment propaganda that is hiding in plain sight.

So, if you open your eyes and engage in the struggle, you’ll clearly see the mountains of bullshit in which they are currently rubbing your nose.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023