Chadwick Boseman Saves His Best for Last in the Middling 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman and is based upon the August Wilson stage play of the same name, premiered this past Friday on Netflix with much fanfare.

The buzz surrounding the film, which tells the story of legendary blues singer Ma Rainey and her band as they endure a tumultuous recording session, proclaimed that Boseman, the famed star of Black Panther who died of colon cancer this past August at the age of 43, would win a Best Actor Oscar for his final film role.

I went into my viewing of Ma Rainey skeptical of the voracity of Boseman’s supposedly Oscar worthy work. In the wake of the tragic death of an artist, particularly a young one, critics often succumb to sentimentality and overlook skill. I assumed the same was true of critics praising Boseman, who plays Levee, the combustible cornet player in Ma Rainey’s band who’s blessed with prodigious talent and equal ambition.

I also brought my own personal history regarding Boseman’s past acting work to my viewing. I know it is blasphemous to say now…but I ‘ve never been impressed by Boseman as an actor. I always felt he was a safe and comfortable screen presence but lacked charisma as a movie star and depth as an artist.

After finally viewing Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which currently boasts a 99% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, I can report two things… critics are right about Boseman, who gives a superb performance, but they are terribly wrong about the film itself, which is thin cinematic gruel.

In fact Boseman’s performance is all-the-more-noteworthy because it overcomes the inept direction and flimsy filmmaking that surrounds it.

Boseman’s death unquestionably brings a profundity to the film that would otherwise be lacking. It’s impossible to watch one of Boseman’s scintillating monologues as Levee where he rants and raves against God, without the uncomfortable acknowledgement that the actor was grappling with his own tenuous mortality at the time of filming, which was about a year before he died.

In the film, Boseman’s usually safe and comfortable screen presence is replaced by a pulsating existential energy that frantically emanates from his every pore. Boseman’s nice guy persona is used as a subversive weapon in Ma Rainey, as it lulls the audience into a false sense of security, and that deception adds a powerful depth and dimension to his character.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie has nowhere near as much meat on its bones as Boseman’s feast of superb acting.

The blame for the film’s failure falls squarely on director George C. Wolfe. Wolfe, a stage director with minimal and dismal film credits, is desperately out of his league on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

The film feels rushed and dramatically unmoored. It has the aesthetic of a made-for-tv movie, so much so that I was half expecting, if not hoping for, commercial breaks. It also lacks any narrative rhythm and is as visually stale as it is awkwardly staged.

Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey and she too is garnering critical praise and Oscar buzz, but her performance is forced and ineffective. Davis is an actress that seems to want audiences to like her, and her Ma Rainey lacks genuine grounding because of it, or to put it another way, her Ma Rainey’s bottom isn’t big enough or black enough (in a metaphysical and symbolic sense - not a physical or racial one) to convince.

Davis’s performance, and in turn the film, also suffer greatly because her lip-syncing is so distractingly devoid of any believability or vitality.

It is terribly unfortunate that the work of August Wilson, one of America’s greatest playwrights, has yet to be successfully adapted to cinema. Wilson’s classic Fences hit the big screen in 2016 and garnered similar critical praise but that too felt undeserved and fueled by something other than honest critical assessment.

The truth is that establishment critics often critique racially themed films made by minority directors featuring minority casts using paternalistic kid gloves and on a pronounced curve. For example, critics swooned over the middling and mundane Marvel movie Black Panther.  So I have no doubt that the current critical adulation for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is due to the film’s racial politics rather than its supposed cinematic worthiness.

The reality is that Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is the height of middlebrow mediocrity, but it will still attract copious amounts of fawning from poseurs and pawns eager to signal their anti-racist virtue. One of the worst consequences of our current racial moral panic is that film and film criticism has become so politically correct and socially delicate as to be rendered artistically irrelevant and intellectually impotent.

Fortunately, those heaping praise and adoration on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom will only reveal themselves to be shamelessly pandering philistines rather than studiously sophisticated cinephiles.

Unfortunately, in these hopelessly woke times this sub-par film is guaranteed to garner a plethora of Oscar nominations, but none will be deserving except for Boseman’s.

The bottom line is that it’s a tragedy that Chadwick Boseman’s greatest performance came in his final role and that it had to happen in such a muddled misfire of a movie as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recoimmendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A very poorly made film, but Chadwick Boseman gives a truly terrific performance - his best ever.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mank is a Tale of Old Hollywood - and of our Corrupted Modern Age

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

Hollywood loves stories about Hollywood but Mank doesn’t glamorize Tinsel Town’s golden age but rather reveals the wound festering beneath the mythology…the same wound inflicting modern America.

On its surface, Mank, the new film by esteemed director David Fincher, chronicles the life and times of famed screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, most notably his struggle to write the Oscar winning screenplay for Citizen Kane.

Just below that gloriously photographed black and white surface though, a complex story of class struggle, financial control and political corruption lives, and it is that narrative that makes Mank a story for our time.

Herman Mankiewicz a.k.a Mank, brilliantly portrayed by Oscar winner Gary Oldman, is a disheveled drunkard and degenerate gambler with an undeniable roguish charm. A brilliant wordsmith, Mank’s quick and erudite wit gets him in the good graces of the media mogul William Randolph Hearst, and by extension, the Hollywood heavyweights at MGM, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.

It is from this privileged perch at the luxurious dining tables of W.R. Hearst and in the offices of L.B. Mayer and Thalberg, that Mank is shown the diabolically deceptive practices and devious machinations of those in power. Mank’s growing discomfort and disgust at the charade of these powerful but hollow men eventually manifests in some alcohol-fueled, but extremely insightful diatribes.

But Mank, ever the slave to his own destructive impulses, is impotent to do anything about these men…until the opportunity to write a screenplay for the “boy genius” Orson Welles comes along.

With Citizen Kane, Mank uses his mighty pen to embarrass and eviscerate the all-powerful Hearst while also extending a middle finger to the repugnant Mayer.

Mank resonates in our current time because like Hearst and Mayer in the time of Citizen Kane, the new generation of decadent robber barons from Wall Street to Silicon Valley (Netflix – the film’s producer and distributor, prominent among them) wield their financial, cultural and political power to dominate and control society from their gilded castles while the rest of us scratch and claw just to stay alive.

In Mank there is a terrific scene where Louis B. Mayer tearfully speaks to a collection of MGM workers, whom he calls family, asking them to take a 50% pay cut in order to save the company. Mayer’s performance in that meeting is better than any acting he financed during his long reign at the movie studio, as he gets the workers to give up their money while he walks away giving up nothing.

That scene speaks to the nefarious political and media narrative of the last forty years since the Reagan (and Thatcher) revolution brought us the unmitigated horrors of financialization and trickle-down economics cloaked in the waving flag of an empty patriotism. It also perfectly encapsulates America since the financial collapse of 2007-08, where a plethora of too big to fail corporations with big bosses receiving huge bonuses got bailed out while working people picking up the tab got financially beaten down and will never recover.

It is the anger over that blatant economic unfairness and injustice that fueled movements as disparate as the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders and even Trump’s rise to power. But as Mank shows us, the game is rigged, as the propaganda mills promise to strangle any working class movement in its crib.

As the last two presidential elections proved, oligarchs and their media minions will relentlessly wield identity politics like a cudgel to bludgeon the working class and cease any chance at any economic change. Divide and conquer has never been so easy as in our current age of manufactured victimhood.

The character Mank embodies the impotent confusion of so many American voters. He is a compulsive contrarian and as much as he loathes the malignant management class he is also wary of labor unions. Intuitively a man of the left, Mank is still clear-eyed enough to see that both sides of the duopoly are thoroughly compromised.

The devil’s bargain Mank makes with the power structure costs him his soul, and Citizen Kane is his attempt at personal redemption and revenge for the little guy. Like the rest of us, all Mank is able to do is take pleasure in his small and ultimately inconsequential victory.

Mank’s triumph with Citizen Kane is public but completely personal, as it garners him an Oscar but leaves the power structure that so infuriates him, unbowed, unbent and unbroken…even to this day.

For proof of this one need look no further than the recent election. Americans were forced once again to choose between two vacuous avatars for the same oligarchical ruling class.

Even in the midst of a pandemic and government forced shut down resulting in an economic holocaust for working class people, both parties in Washington steadfastly refuse to consider universal healthcare, universal basic income, or even stimulus payments but are united in their insatiable desire to fellate the corporate class. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, same as every boss we’ve ever had.

As for Mank, it is a slightly flawed, but thoroughly worthwhile, art house film that boasts some A-list talent, chief among them Fincher and Oldman. For those with the patience to stick with it, Mank does what very few movies attempt to do, never mind accomplish…it tells the uncomfortable, complicated and ugly truth about America and Americans. Bravo.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A complicated film that pulls no political punches. Gary Oldman and David Fincher flex their consider artistic muscles in this challenging but worthwhile drama.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hillbilly Elegy and the Culture War Clash

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 11 seconds

IS HILLBILLY ELEGY A TRULY TERRIBLE MOVIE OR ARE LIBERAL CRITICS BLATANTLY BIASED?

The new Netflix film Hillbilly Elegy chronicles life among a dysfunctional white working class Appalachian family and savage reviews from liberal critics has triggered another battle in the culture war.

Hillbilly Elegy, the new film from Oscar winning director Ron Howard, premiered to much fanfare and controversy on Netflix Tuesday.

The film, which stars perennial Oscar nominees Amy Adams and Glenn Close, is based on J.D. Vance’s 2016 autobiography of the same name, and tells the story of how Vance escaped his chaotic upbringing at the hands of his white-working class Appalachian family, most notably his volcanically erratic mother Bev and his hard-edged grandmother Mamaw, and became a Yale Law School graduate.

The book Hillbilly Elegy became a cause célèbre in the wake of Trump’s 2016 election victory because it gave the establishment a glimpse into the misunderstood white working class and poor folk from flyover country that had come out en masse for Trump.

Among the media elite, the shine wore off of Vance and his book pretty quickly, though, as he was labeled too conservative for consumption after having the temerity to label his hometown hillbilly culture as corrosive and self-destructive. Vance’s critique of the Appalachian white working class was just too pro-personal responsibility for the liberal establishment’s tastes.

It is in this context that Hillbilly Elegy has come out in film form and generated a great deal of vitriol and venom from mainstream movie critics.

For example, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe proclaimed it “poverty porn”. Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post called it “almost laughably bad – if it weren’t so melodramatic”. And Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times derisively decried the movie as “an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics”.

These critical eviscerations are not anomalies as the film currently has a dismal 25% critical score review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. There is some pushback though, as the film currently boasts a robust 89% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

In response to the cavalcade of critical denouncements, noted conservative pundit Ben Shapiro tweeted about the film “I've seen "Hillbilly Elegy." Amy Adams and Glenn Close are both terrific. The movie is a well-told family drama. The reason the critics are crapping all over it is simple: the book was treated as humanizing "Trump supporters," and is now a Bad Book™. So the movie is also Bad™.”

My experience of Hillbilly Elegy began when I read and the book back in 2016. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it to be an extremely insightful and compelling account.

Hillbilly Elegy is an important book and it should have been an important movie…but having seen it I can report that it most assuredly is not. Instead it is a maudlin, dramatically obtuse, narratively incoherent, appallingly poorly made and atrociously amateurish cinematic venture.

Director Ron Howard is an artistic eunuch not exactly known for his deft cinematic touch, and he is as ham-fisted as ever on Hillbilly Elegy.  Howard clumsily creates a contrived drama and fumbles the film’s flimsy narrative to such an egregious degree as to be cinematically criminal.

Howard’s visually unimaginative, painfully trite and obscenely shallow approach reduces Vance’s dramatically potent life story into a cinematically flaccid cross between a Lifetime movie, an ABC After-School Special and an anti-drug public service announcement.

As for the acting? Amy Adams is one of the best actresses around, but her performance as the volatile Bev is forced and rings entirely false. Decked out in her oversized ‘mom jeans’, with frizzy hair and sans makeup, Adams is devoid of both subtly and humanity. Adams’ performance is such an over-the-top, one-note caricature it is actually embarrassing.

Glenn Close contrived performance as the foul-mouthed matriarch Mamaw doesn’t fare much better. Both Close and Adams are obviously angling for an Oscar with their ugly-fied, faux-gritty acting, but they end up being uncomfortably shallow and cartoonish in their roles.

Ben Shapiro claiming that Hillbilly Elegy is “well-told” and that Adams and Close are “terrific” only proves that he is either being intentionally contrarian in order to stoke the culture war or he really doesn’t know a goddamn thing about movies and acting. I promise you, Hillbilly Elegy is not the hill(billy) that Ben Shapiro should be willing to die on.

With that said, I have no doubt that liberal critics are gleefully overplaying the very bad hand that is Hillbilly Elegy. If the film were made by a minority director as opposed to a pasty white one, and dealt with black poverty as opposed to poor white people, their criticisms of it would be substantially more delicate and thoughtful.

White liberal critics have long been protective and paternalistic toward black artists and films. Examples of which can be found in the critical reception of Spike Lee’s film Da Five Bloods (2020) and Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018). Both movies are dreadful cinematic disasters, but critics fawned over Da Five Bloods and were wholly encouraging of DuVernay’s abysmal film because of its “diversity”.

Hillbilly Elegy could have been treated with the same kid gloves and rose-colored glasses as Lee and DuVernay’s work- but wasn’t, and one can surmise that the white working class subject matter and the conservative politics of the protagonist are a major reason why.

So is Hillbilly Elegy truly that terrible or as Ben Shapiro suggests are liberal movie critics blatantly biased against it?

The answer is definitely…YES…to both.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Ron Howard at his worst. Just an embarrassingly terrible movie with terrible performances and terrible writing and terrible directing and everything is terrible.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice - A Review

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

 MY RATING: 3.75 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT - This intimate, gut-wrenching glimpse at the lengths that parents will go to keep their children, and hope, alive…is a surprisingly poignant portrait of familial love and grief.

In Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice, filmmaker Pailin Wedel masterfully documents the compelling story of the Naovaratpong family, comprised of father - Dr. Sahatorn, his wife Nareerat and their teenage son Matrix, who suffer the terrible loss of their beloved two year-old daughter Einz from ependymoblastoma, a rare and aggressive brain cancer.

During Einz’s illness, her father frantically uses his science background (he is an engineer) to try and learn on the fly and discover a cure for his ailing daughter as she deteriorates.

After a dozen surgeries and 20 chemotherapy and radiation treatments, it becomes readily apparent that time is running out for little Einz. In response, Sahatorn then turns his attention to cryogenics, in the hope that he could freeze his daughter after death, in order to one day re-animate her when a cure for her disease is found.

Immediately following Einz’s heart-breaking demise, doctors from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation go about cryogenically freezing her. Once that process is completed, Einz’s body is sent from Thailand to storage in Arizona.

This story sounds like some bizarre science fiction, but Hope Frozen masterfully turns this strange tale into a morally and ethically complex story that is intensified by the emotional power of grief.

In addition, the film raises a plethora of profound philosophical questions, but to its credit it never presumes to know the answers.

The film ponders what is consciousness? Is consciousness attached to the body? Are memories kept in tact when someone is cryogenically frozen? Is that frozen body really a person or just a collection of flesh and bones? Can death be scientifically defeated? Will cryogenics even work? Can people be re-animated in the future? Will a cure for cancer ever be found?

These questions are made even more complicated by the family’s fervent faith in science coupled with their spiritual belief in Buddhism. This results in the family grappling with issues such as will freezing Einz stop her from reincarnating? And is cryogenics just imprisoning Einz’s soul in a lifeless body?

The most intriguing member of the Naovaratpong family is the son Matrix, a smart and sensitive young man haunted by his sister’s death.

At his father’s prodding Matrix is a scientific genius that dedicates his life to finding a way to bring his sister back to life. Ever the big brother, he even becomes a novice Buddhist monk in an attempt to try and protect his dead sister’s soul.

Like his mother and father, Matrix will never shed the painful burden that is the death of Einz. The Naovaratpong’s simply can’t let go…of their daughter, of the dream of their daughter’s future and of their grieving wound.

By cryogenically freezing Einz, the family freezes themselves into a perpetual state of hope and grief…this keeps Einz fresh in their minds. Their hope and grief are all they have left so they do not want to let them go. As long as hope for her return and grief for her loss are frozen in place, Einz lives on.

As the film progresses, the story takes on multiple twists and turns that makes for interesting viewing – particularly a scene where Matrix calls home after a trip to America, but the most fascinating part of the film is the love for Einz at the core of it.

You can question the family’s decision to cryogenically freeze their daughter and their quest to keep the hope of her alive in the face of death, I know I did, but what I never did was question the purity of their motives or the profundity of their love.

As a parent it is impossible to watch Hope Frozen and not have compassion and empathy for Sahatorn, Nareerat and Matrix. Their love for Einz is exquisitely beautiful to witness even when it is wildly contorted by grief and despair.

The family’s devotion to science in the form of cryogenics in the hope of overcoming death is no different than any other faith taking center stage in an existential crisis. Faith is our shield against the slings and arrows of life and the inevitability of our own annihilation.

The Naovaratpongs wrap themselves in the cloak of science in order to maintain the illusion that Einz will rise from the dead, just as a Catholic like myself clings to that same delusion that death can be conquered through God’s love and power.

This need to believe in something, anything, to make the colossal pain of grief, and the terrifying prospect of the eternal abyss of death, subside, is all too human, and is strikingly highlighted in Hope Frozen.

In conclusion, Hope Frozen: A Quest to Live Twice is a deeply moving documentary because it reminds us that life is fleeting and that love isn’t everything…it’s the only thing.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Only Thing Dumber Than the #HandsOffAnastasia Twitter Furor is the Dreadful Movie That Sparked It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 28 seconds

Some Russians have taken offense at Anastasia Romanov’s cartoonish depiction in a low-budget movie released earlier this year. They shouldn’t waste their energy on a criminally stupid piece of film making.

In case you haven’t heard, #HandsOffAnastasia is the outrage du jour on Twitter. If you were unaware of this controversy, I deeply envy you. Here is a quick breakdown of how #HandsOffAnastasia came to be. 

In Spring of this year a terrible movie titled Anastasia: Once Upon a Time came and went and no one cared because it was laughably low budget and hysterically awful. The film is a live action kids movie that tells a fantastical tale of Anastasia Romanov time traveling, with the help of a wizardly Rasputin, from Russia in 1918 to Madison, Wisconsin in 1988 in order to evade Vladimir Lenin and Yara the Enchantress’s malevolent grip. To give you an indication of the caliber of movie that Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is, here are some highlights…Rasputin has a break dance battle at a mall, plays video games and models in a fashion show, there are some absurdly random musical numbers, and a Filipino comedian plays Lenin.

I am no expert on Russian history, but I am pretty sure the film is not entirely historically accurate. And this is where the outrage comes in…apparently some Russians are up in arms that “Hollywood” would denigrate Russian history and besmirch a Sainted Russian figure like Anastasia Romanov, who was brutally murdered by Bolsheviks at age 17 with the rest of her family, by comically re-imagining her tragic tale…thus #HandsOffAnastasia was born.

More kindling on the #HandsOffAnastasia fire is a clip from the film circulating online that shows Anastasia eating spaghetti with her hands, thus implying she, and all Russians, are uncivilized barbarians.

Sadly for me, this whole #HandsOffAnastasia situation forced me to watch this stupid movie. My assessment is this…how do you say “much ado about nothing” in Russian?

First things first…Anastasia: Once Upon a Time is obscenely amateurish and ridiculously imbecilic…but it doesn’t make Anastasia out to be some Neanderthal anti-princess. The spaghetti eating scene isn’t mean spirited or even “anti-Russian”, it is just unconscionably lazy movie making.

The other thing, and this is the most important point, is that this film is so inconsequential as to be absurd. Why anyone, anywhere would care what it says or does is beyond me.

This is not some “Hollywood”, big budget operation backed by the marketing muscle of Disney. The movie was produced by Congolomerate Media and distributed by Freestyle Digital Media…not exactly Hollywood heavyweights…in fact they don’t even qualify as flyweights…or Hollywood, which is why no one has ever heard of this film until this silly controversy.

The budget for the film is bare bones, and it shows in the locations, cheap special effects and shabby costumes. Whatever money they did have seems to have been almost entirely spent acquiring the rights to the Cindi Lauper song “Time After Time”, which it uses liberally (without Lauper’s pricey vocals) throughout the film for no discernible reason.

If I could point to one remarkable thing about Anastasia: Once Upon a Time it would be that it boasts the largest collection of the worst Russian accents ever captured on film at one time. The biggest star in the movie is Brandon Routh who plays Tsar Nicholas II. Once upon a time Routh played Superman on the big screen, and in Anastasia he reveals his kryptonite is twofold…acting and a Russian accent.

The film is produced by Armando Gutierrez, who also did no one a favor by casting himself in the critical role of Rasputin. The film would have been better served casting an inanimate carbon rod in the role instead of Gutierrez.

On the bright side, there is exactly one good performance in the film, and that comes from the talented Amiah Miller, a young actress who played Nova in War for the Planet of the Apes.

Besides that the only interesting thing about this movie is that on its IMDB page it actually lists Anastasia Romanoff as one of the screenwriters. That is an intriguing marketing ploy but simply cannot be true because if the real Anastasia ever had to watch this dreadful movie she would run into the basement and shoot herself just to end the misery and embarrassment. I am sure that last joke offended some people…but here is the thing, if you have the time and energy to get upset about that lame joke or about this nonsensically preposterous movie, then you really need to get a life.

This isn’t to say that Hollywood, like the rest of America, isn’t Russophobic. It certainly is. It isn’t to say that Americans aren’t historically illiterate about Russia and ignorant about Russians. They certainly are. It is to say that this third rate clownshow of a movie is so laughably trivial that it should never ever generate any emotion, be it positive or negative, from anyone, anywhere.

#HandsOffAnastasia is, like so much of Twitter culture, a function of people with too much time on their hands searching high and low, far and wide for something, anything about which to be offended.

In conclusion, the hypersensitive Russian woke folk of #HandsOffAnastasia desperately need to keep their hands off Twitter and go out and re-connect with their heritage by doing truly Russian things…like competing in a break dancing battles at the mall, or modeling in impromptu fashion shows, or eating spaghetti with their hands.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

UNpregnant: A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SOME MINOR SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This stillborn comedy is a mess of a movie but it does succeed as a piece of pro-abortion agitprop

Last week was a good week if you crave poorly crafted movies designed to trigger culture war clashes, but a bad week if you’re a cinephile more interested in quality cinema than political posturing.

On September 9th, Netflix defecated Cuties, the controversial French film that hypersexualizes 11 year-old girls, onto an unsuspecting and uncomfortable public.

The very next day, September 10th, HBO Max picked up the gauntlet of inappropriateness and released UNpregnant, its teen girl, road trip, abortion buddy comedy.

Thankfully UNpregnant is rated PG13, which means the scantily-clad, twerking 11 year-olds of Cuties only have a two year wait before they can watch the movie-version of the abortion handbook that is UNpregnant.

UNpregnant is the story of Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson), a 17 year-old over-achiever in Missouri who asks her misfit former friend Bailey (Barbie Ferreira) to give her a ride to New Mexico for an abortion.

Missouri and its surrounding states all have laws against minor’s getting abortions without parental consent, and Veronica is afraid to tell her “Jesus freak” Catholic parents, so she needs to hit the road to the Land of Enchantment for the no-strings, underage abortion at the end of the rainbow.

In mythical girl power fashion, Veronica and Bailey’s journey is undertaken in a Pontiac Firebird, because like a phoenix, these girls will rise from the ashes of the patriarchal society that oppresses them…or something like that.

Unfortunately, UNpregnant is a painfully conventional and relentlessly dull film. It’s ironic that a movie burdened with such flaccid performances and impotent comedy should be about a pregnancy borne out of unrestrained virility.

The film’s dreadful script, which is in part written by Ted Caplan and Jenni Hendriks and is based upon their book of the same name, reads like the exposition Olympics, and Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s direction is abysmally amateurish.

The two leads, Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira, try as hard as they might, lack any comedy chemistry whatsoever. Both of them push so hard to make something funny happen that you’d think they were actually in labor…but the fruits of that labor never appear as apparently the comedy in their performances was aborted too and never had the chance to grow beyond a miniscule fetus.

UNpregnant wraps itself so tight in liberal political correctness it could pass for a social justice mummy. The movie has all the right heroes and heroines and all the proper enemies to appease the woke faithful.

For instance, the film exerts a great deal of energy proving it isn’t racist by having every single black person in the movie be wonderful allies to the abortion cause.

Yes, these black people, like Peg, the pawn shop owner with the heart of gold, Jarrod, the local cowboy with the heart of gold, and Bob, the apocalyptic conspiracist with the heart of gold, are all edgy and dangerous, but ultimately, due to their previously mentioned hearts of gold, end up being kind and extremely helpful to Ivy league bound, suburban white girl Veronica in her abortion quest. 

And just in case viewers were confused about the cultural politics of the movie, there’s a superfluous lesbian romance thrown in too.

As for the villains, there’s Kevin, Veronica’s white, empty-headed yet controlling, stalker boyfriend, who intentionally failed to reveal the condom broke. Like all straight white men in Hollywood movies nowadays, Kevin is simply no good.

The most deplorable villains in the movie though are a family of pro-life, white Christians who are the personification of evil. This family is meant to represent the pro-life movement, as unsubtly indicated by their secret “pro-life” room in their home, and by their mobile pregnancy and ultrasound equipped recreational vehicle, which they use to chase down Veronica and Bailey.

The sequence with the evil pro-life family is so farcical and tonally out of step with the rest of the movie, it feels like it is intentionally placed there for no other reason than to denigrate and inflame Christians.

Needlessly ridiculing Christians is not exactly a sound marketing strategy if, like UNpregnant, you are trying to make a popular movie and not some niche arthouse film. Proof of this is that UNpregnant currently has a 40% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes total sense since 65% of Americans identify as Christian.

The film does currently boast an 85% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, but I think that has everything to do with it being a shameless advertisement for abortion and woke utopian wet dream of anti-Christianity for establishment liberals rather than any honest analysis of its artistic or entertainment merits.

As a cinematic venture, as a comedy and as a piece of entertainment, UNpregnant fails miserably, but as a piece of agitprop that normalizes abortion, which I believe is the movie’s ultimate intention, it thoroughly succeeds.

Abortion in UNpregnant is depicted as a gateway to freedom and truth and an undeniable good. Abortion is portrayed as this wondrous and physically, mentally and emotionally painless procedure that leaves girls emphatically relieved and joyously buoyant in its wake. As post-abortion Veronica sums up to her mother at movie’s end, “I don’t feel bad…”

I’m glad at least someone didn’t feel bad at the end of the movie, because I sure did, and not because of UNpregnant’s political stance on the complex issue of abortion, or its ham-handed cultural politics, but because it is an unfunny, cliché-ridden, mess of a movie that is poorly written, acted and directed.

In conclusion, UNpregnant is a stillborn cinematic dud that should have taken its own advice and aborted itself in the first trimester of its creative process.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 13 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

New HBO Max Teen Comedy UNpregnant Seems to Suggest Abortion is Nothing but a Barrel of Laughs

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 24 seconds

UNpregnant appears to ignore the moral complexity of abortion in favor of promoting an insidious amorality on the issue. 

UNpregnant is the controversial new abortion buddy comedy movie set to premiere on HBO Max on September 10th.

The film, based on the novel of the same name, tells the story of Veronica, a pregnant 17 year-old girl, and her friend Bailey, as they go on a wild and whacky road trip from Missouri to New Mexico so that Veronica can get an abortion.

In its trailer, UNpregnant sells itself as a zany road picture where hilarity ensues when a goofy odd couple of teenage girls steal a car and try to hop a train on their epic odyssey down the yellow brick road to abortionland.

The road picture narrative is a long time Hollywood staple, think Bing Crosby and Bob Hope with their numerous “road to” musical comedies of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s…except in UNpregnant, Crosby and Hope are teenage girls crossing state lines to get an abortion. Hilarious!

It is easy to see why pro-life advocates are up in arms over UNpregnant as the trailer makes the film appear to be a piece of pro-abortion agitprop specifically designed to antagonize them by making light of abortion and demonizing Veronica’s Catholic parents as “Jesus freaks”.

2020 has been a banner year for decidedly pro-abortion films with UNpregnant, the critically acclaimed drama Sometimes, Always, Never, Rarely, and the indie dramedy Saint Frances, which all have an amoral attitude toward abortion, all being released.

Notice I described these films as pro-abortion and not pro-choice, that is because pro-choice implies a grappling with the moral gravity of the abortion decision, whereas pro-abortion removes any moral dimensions at all, and reduces abortion to being akin to getting a nose piercing.

This amoral approach to abortion is perfectly summed up by Kelly O’Sullivan, writer and star of Saint Frances, who told Time magazine, “I wanted to write a story where it’s a non-traumatic depiction of abortion. It’s ordinary and light and sometimes funny…”

Yes, because if abortion is anything it is ordinary, light and sometimes funny.

Hollywood has not always been so devoid of nuance in its depiction of the extraordinarily complex issue of abortion.

In 2007, Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress all portrayed their female protagonists wrestling with an unwanted pregnancy and highlighting the choice part of the pro-choice position, with each ultimately choosing to not have an abortion.

These films were wildly successful, with Juno and Knocked Up raking in $231 million and $219 million respectively, and Waitress pulling in a respectable $22 million with just a $1.5 budget.

Juno also garnered four Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, while winning for Best Original Screenplay.

The commercial and critical success of these films was a result of their mirroring American’s extremely conflicted feelings on the subject of abortion.

Polling shows that a majority of Americans are pro-choice in some form, but as Barbara Carvalho of Marist Poll told NPR, “People do see the issue as very complicated, very complex. Their positions don't fall along one side or the other. ... The debate is about the extremes, and that's not where the public is."

In the thirteen years since Juno, Knocked Up and Waitress hit big screens Hollywood has abandoned the nuance and dramatic complexity of American’s view of abortion in favor of the extremist pro-abortion message of UNpregnant.

Tinsel Town is no longer interested in connecting with as wide an audience as possible but rather prefers to signal their self-professed virtue with cultural propaganda that directly targets underage girls while preaching to the minority of pro-abortion zealots in their midst.

Most troubling for movie lovers is that internal moral conflicts are what make for the most interesting drama and comedy, and to ignore them in favor of self-aggrandizing political posturing is self-defeating for both artists and the movie industry.

An example of a mainstream filmmaker successfully embracing morally complex issues, including abortion, is Knocked Up director Judd Apatow, who has made a career of wrapping moral debates in his signature raunchy humor.

Apatow’s films, which include 40 Year Old Virgin, This is 40, Funny People and Trainwreck, are “conservative” comedies where adult protagonists face moral dilemmas and though tempted to make the libertine choice, eventually make the difficult but responsible one instead.

As Hollywood’s cultural politics become ever more strident, Apatow’s formula, which has made him a gazillionaire, will become anathema in the movie industry and “get woke, go broke” will most assuredly be made manifest in La La Land.

The UNpregnant trailer, which boasts such cringe-worthy dialogue as “it’s my life, my choice” and the insipid tag line “when life gets off track, forge your own path”, makes clear the popular 2007 approach of entertaining adults with moral complexity is now abandoned in favor of indoctrinating kids with extremist agitprop.

Maybe when UNpregnant comes out we’ll discover that it’s a terrific film and more morally complex than its trailer suggests…or maybe it is the canary in the cultural coalmine reflective of how the new, grotesquely woke Hollywood is desperate for its cancer of vapid amorality and decadent depravity to metastasize to the next generation of girls and young women. My bet is on the latter.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 23 - Richard Jewell

On today’s podcast Barry and I take a look at the 2019 Clint Eastwood film, Richard Jewell. On the episode we discuss the hopefully soon-to-be discovered, glorious genius of the film’s star Paul Walter Hauser, as well as the reliable acting brilliance of Kathy Bates and Sam Rockwell. In addition we wrestle with the often-times frustrating nature of Clint Eastwood’s directing approach and the never ending mystery of Jon Hamm.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 23 - RICHARD JEWELL

Thank you for listening!

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 22 - The Old Guard

This week Barry berates me for trying to stay current by choosing as a topic the new Netflix sci-fi action movie The Old Guard, starring Charlize Theron. In the episode we break down the movie and consider what worked (not much), what didn’t (a lot), and why. We also dive into the unending mystery of who actually shot this movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 22 - The Old Guard

Thanks for listening!

©2020

The Old Guard: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just an idiotically dreadful piece of movie junk.

The Old Guard, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood and written by Greg Rucka (based on his comic book of the same name), tells the story of a group of centuries old “immortals” - warriors who cannot be killed, and their leader Andromache, as they navigate a hostile modern world. The film stars Charlize Theron as Andromache, with supporting turns from Mathias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kiki Layne and Harry Melling.

As the coronavirus cinema void continues unabated, Netflix has attempted to meet movie demand with some of its original content…such as the action/sci-fi film The Old Guard.

The Old Guard is not a movie I would ever venture out to see in the theatre even in the best of times, but Netflix now has leverage over me since I’ve not been able to get my cinema fix for over four months now…and so…I succumbed and rolled the dice on The Old Guard.

To be fair, my bet on The Old Guard wasn’t entirely a long shot as Charlize Theron has proven herself to be a formidable action movie protagonist…the glorious Mad Max: Fury Road and the entertaining Atomic Blonde being proof of that. The movie also boasts two actors I have long admired, Matthias Schoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor, among its cast. So while I didn’t have my hopes up, I also wasn’t expecting it to be abominable.

Boy was I wrong.

The Old Guard is an awful movie.

It is also as ineffectively directed as any major motion picture you’ll come across.

Director Gina Prince-Bythewood, whose only claim to fame was the egregiously overrated Love and Basketball (2000), lacks any and all requisite skill or talent to tackle a film of this nature. It is stunning to think that this movie had a $70 million budget and yet at best looks like a flimsy Sci-Fi channel throwaway movie and more often than not looks and feels like amateur hour at the local cable access station.

The action sequences are dull, derivative and repetitive. The visuals are stale and flat. The character development and performances are insipidly vapid. Oh…and the story is utterly imbecilic…just completely nonsensical and idiotic. But beyond that it I guess it was ok.

One mystery I have yet to figure out is why the film has two cinematographers in its credits. Barry Ackroyd and Tami Reiker are both listed in the credits, but having two DP’s is a surefire recipe for disaster. One can’t help but wonder if one of them started the film and was replaced. Ackroyd is a serious guy, having received an Oscar nomination and winning a BAFTA for The Hurt Locker. Reiker is much less accomplished, but the notion that Ackroyd was potentially mentoring her doesn’t hold water as she has been working in the industry for over twenty years. Regardless of why there are two cinematographers, the bottom line is that whoever shot this movie ought to be ashamed of themselves.

As for the directing, you might think that since Prince-Bythewood is not good at action sequences she might at least be good at drawing solid performances from her cast. You’d be wrong.

Make no mistake, Charlize Theron is a terrific actress and a potent action movie presence, but in The Old Guard she not only looks terrible but lacks any dynamism or magnetism at all. I understood what she was trying to do with her character - create a deeply wounded soul battered by the slings and arrows of such an egregiously long life without end, but she is so poorly photographed and directed she ends up being nothing but dour, shallow and unconscionably boring.

Kiki Layne, last seen giving an uneven performance in the equally uneven If Beale Street Could Talk, plays a new member of the Immortals gang and is embarrassingly lackluster and awkward. The wooden Layne is woefully miscast as she is painfully uncomfortable with the action sequences and seems unable to even remotely connect with the dialogue or drama of the less physically demanding scenes.

Both Matthias Shoenaerts and Chiwetel Ejiofor are two enormous talents wasted as their characters are so poorly written as to be incoherent.

And finally, Harry Melling gives a dinner theatre murder-mystery level performance as the bad guy from big pharma. Good Lord, all Melling was missing was a mustache to twist as he laughed maniacally.

What is frustrating to me is that the plot of The Old Guard could potentially be turned into an interesting cinematic venture, but Netflix handed to keys to what they thought might be a new signature franchise to Prince-Bythewood and she (and Reiker/Ackroyd) proceeded to fill the gas tank with maple syrup and paint the interior with raw sewage. The car may still be able to run after this…but it’s gonna need a lot of work before that can ever happen.

In conclusion, The Old Guard isn’t just a missed opportunity, it is a cinema abomination. Only movie masochists need ever glimpse a second of this dreadful film. If you want to see Charlize Theron in all her action movie glory, skip The Old Guard and go watch Mad Max: Fury Road. You’ll be glad you did.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Epoisode 21 - The Vast of Night

After an interminable Summer hiatus…Barry and I are like Fast Eddie Felson in The Color of Money…WE ARE BACK, BABY!! On this episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast we discuss the The Vast of Night, a sneaky good little sci-fi film currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Come join Barry and I as we take the Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Starship back to 1950’s New Mexico where we grapple with over-active imaginations and possibly UFO’s!! And we also marvel at the formidable skill of up and coming director Andrew Patterson, who makes his impressive feature film debut with The Vast of Night.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 21 - THE VAST OF NIGHT

Thanks for listening!

©2020

The Monty Python Classic 'The Life of Brian' Relentlessly Mocked Christianity Forty Years Ago, Comedy Needs to Do the Same Thing to the Church of Wokeness Today

Estimated Reading Time: 3 Minutes 33 seconds

The woke are winning the culture war and comedy needs to step up and expose these ludicrous fools for their fanaticism before it’s too late.

The Life of Brian, Monty Python’s classic cinematic mocking of Christianity, was so scandalous for its blasphemy back when it was released in 1979, that it was actually banned by some British theatre owners, while others gave it the scarlet letter of an X-rating.

An X-rating in those days was the movie rating equivalent of being stoned to death for saying “Jehovah!”

As a sign of how dramatically the culture has shifted in the last forty years, the BBFC now rates The Life of Brian a very warm and fuzzy 12A – suitable for viewers 12 and up.

The film isn’t considered dangerous for its blasphemy anymore because Christianity doesn’t much matter anymore…and I say that as a practicing Catholic.

Christianity with its endemic corruption, devout fanatics and exuberant magical thinking has been usurped in our culture by a newly ascendant religious force even more severe in nature.

That force is wokeness, which is accompanied by its own inquisition and enforcement wing – cancel culture.

If you doubt that wokeness is the new dominant cultural religion, consider this…in most places in the U.S. you aren’t allowed to go to church because of coronavirus but are wholly encouraged to attend Black Lives Matter protests - which apparently confer some magical and mystical powers of immunity upon attendees.

Meet the new religion…same as the old religion.

Monty Python were such a brilliant comedic force they not only obliterated the old religion in The Life of Brian, but also ridiculed the new one too, forty years before it rose to power.

In the film there is a scene - which would never get made in today’s stultifying p.c. environment - that deals with transgenderism.

Set in the Coliseum of Jerusalem, the scene shows the People’s Front of Judea…not to be confused with the Judean People’s Front…comprised of Stan (Eric Idle), Reg (John Cleese), Francis (Michael Palin) and Judith (Sue Jones-Davies), meeting to discuss their goals.

When Stan keeps interjecting feminine pronouns into the proposed language…he is asked by Francis why he keeps bringing up women?

Stan -  “I want to be one….I want to be a woman….from now on I want you all to call me Loretta…It’s my right as a man.”

Judith – “Why would you want to be Loretta, Stan?

Stan – “I want to have babies…It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants.”

Reg - “You can’t have babies!”

Stan - “Don’t oppress me!”

Reg - “I’m not oppressing you Stan, you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? You gonna keep it in a box?”

After some hemming and hawing, Francis chimes in with a solution.

Francis (to Stan) - “We shall fight our oppressors for your right to have a baby, brother…ooops…sister, sorry.”

Reg - “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies if he can’t have babies?”

Francis – “It’s symbolic of our struggle against oppression!”

Reg – “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”

It is impossible to imagine any comedy of today having the testicular fortitude to do a scene as brutally honest and savagely insightful as that.

“Symbolic struggle against reality” is the perfect definition of wokeness and this is why we need a new Monty Python-esque group to make a film eviscerating wokeness as exquisitely and relentlessly as the The Life of Brian did Christianity…maybe call it The Life of Karen.

Wokeness, with its incessant self-righteousness, aggressive illogic, absurd preferred pronouns and ridiculously insufferable p.c. jargon, is a gloriously target rich comedy environment.

Sadly, there’s no Monty Python equivalent in our times comically capable of dismantling the new Church of Wokeness. The most prominent sketch comedy show today is Saturday Night Live, and they’re shameless, politically correct lap dogs.

In stark contrast to the ballsy comedy bravado displayed by Monty Python forty years ago, watching SNL’s impotent, flaccid, woke-approved humor is like getting a scolding from a Methodist temperance movement a hundred years ago.

SNL is so neutered by wokeness, in 2019 they actually fired comedian Shane Gillis before he ever appeared on the show because he offended the Cancel Culture Centurions and Tiny Torquemadas of Twitter…the horror!

Besides suffocating the comedy of today, the woke are actively scouring tv and film history searching for retroactive blasphemers to silence.

The Office, Community, 30 Rock, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Scrubs and Fawlty Towers, among others, have all had episodes scrubbed from streaming services for their past politically incorrect sins.

Let us pray to our Lord and Savior Brian and his Sacred Shoe and Holy Gourd, that Monty Python’s glorious canon is not next on the cancel culture crucifixion list.

By today’s woke standards they’d certainly deserve it for their insightful dismantling of transgenderism, their mockery of speech impediments in the form of ‘pwonouncements’ by Pilate and his ‘fwiend’ Biggus Dickus, and for the crime of having men play female roles!!

“On the bright side”…if Monty Python does get crucified at least they’ll go out singing!

The bottom line is this…wokeness must be stopped and I believe the best way to stop it is to mock it. Sadly though, the Church of Wokeness is winning the culture war because unlike Monty Python forty years ago, today’s comedy hasn’t found the courage to tell the unvarnished, hysterical truth…and we are all worse off because of it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Hamilton: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!1 THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Recommendation: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Might be worth seeing just to get it out of your system, but truly, it is not worth the two hours and forty minutes.

Hamilton, written by Lin Manuel Miranda and directed by Thomas Kail, is a live recording of a 2016 performance of the stage musical of the same name. The show tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s founding fathers, and stars Lin Manuel Miranda in the lead role, with supporting turns from Leslie Odom Jr., Renee Elise Goldsberry, Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs and Jonathon Groff among many others.

Hamilton hit Broadway back in 2015 and was met with universal adoration, which included eleven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book and Best Original Score and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The mainstream media fawned all over the show and deified its creator and star, Lin Manuel Miranda, to a striking degree…he even won a MacArthur Grant for his alleged genius. Similar to Rent, which debuted twenty years before it, Hamilton became an unabashed pop culture phenomenon and was the hottest, and priciest, ticket in any town in which it appeared.

I think the slavish adoration of Hamilton (and Miranda) by the media was a function of their aggressive affection for President Obama…as the show, with its diverse cast and devout optimism in America and its ideals, is a sort of a theatrical manifestation of Obama-ism.

The establishment’s instantaneous exalting of Hamilton was stunning to behold and raised very serious propaganda red flags for me. For that reason, and the fact that tickets were exorbitantly expensive and exclusive, I have never seen the musical on stage.

I was curious to check Hamilton out though when, thanks to Mickey Mouse shelling out a record $75 million to Mr. Miranda for the privilege of showing his work, it premiered on the Disney Plus streaming service.

In my appraisal of the show, let’s start with the good first.

Among the cast the highlights begin with Tony winner Renee Elyse Goldsberry…who absolutely crushes her songs with a vocal dexterity, ferocity and power. Even though she plays Angelica Schuyler, a somewhat secondary character in the bigger picture of things, Ms. Goldsberry is the beating, and at times bleeding, heart of the show.

Tony winner Daveed Diggs plays Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson and delivers with a palpable charisma, comedic sense and charm that lights up the stage whenever he’s on it.

Okieriete Onaodowan plays Hercules Mulligan and James Madison and brings a subtly powerful presence and striking rap style to his role, which could easily have been lost in the shuffle in the hands of a lesser actor.

Christopher Jackson’s robust voice and dramatic skills animate the role of George Washington and in the second half he nearly steals the whole damn show.

And finally, Jonathon Groff actually does steal the show in the minimal role of King George. Groff may very well be the best singer in this ridiculously talented bunch, and he belts out his songs “You’ll Be Back/What Comes Next?I Know Him” with such a delirious vigor and aplomb that it is simply intoxicating. (Groff is also excellent in Netflix’s Mindhunter!)

Now for the bad news.

By far the biggest problem with Hamilton is that the show is populated by a plethora of very talented people…but its lead, Lin Manuel Miranda, is definitely not one of them.

A musical simply cannot be worthwhile if its lead is uncharismatic, a dreadful singer, an embarrassment as a rapper and a truly atrocious actor.

I cannot tell you how shocking it was for me to behold Miranda’s severe limitations as a performer after having heard for four straight years that he was a once-in-a-generation genius. Miranda really is a stark naked emperor and it seems no one wants to admit that obvious but uncomfortable truth.

Let’s start with his singing. It is always going to be a problem when the lead of a musical can’t sing, and so it is with Miranda and Hamilton. Miranda has an extremely limited vocal range, and his voice is…and I am being extremely generous here…weak and pedestrian. The fact that Miranda is surrounded by a cast of ridiculously talented singers only accentuates his vocal impotence.

Hamilton’s big claim to fame is that it is, in its own way, a hip-hop musical, so maybe you’d think Miranda’s numerous short comings as a singer wouldn’t be that big of a deal…you’d be dead wrong. Miranda’s rapping is, unbelievably, even worse than his singing. Miranda raps with a whiny, nasally voice and comes across like a nerdy history teacher trying to be “hip” for the young people in his classroom. Watching him rap is like watching a grandparent dirty dance at a wedding…it is just a viscerally uncomfortable embarrassment.

Add to this the fact that Alexander Hamilton is supposed to be this dude that the ladies adore, and yet he is played by the ultra-anti-masculine, doughy dullard Miranda. Whenever one of the female characters are professing their love or attraction for Hamilton it made me cringe.

The funniest thing of all was in the second half of the play watching Miranda try and cover his really abysmal singing by pretending to act. Miranda repeatedly forced a fake cry in order to disguise the glaring weakness of his flaccid voice. What made this so amusing is that Miranda is just a staggeringly terrible actor…I mean he is pulling some junior high school drama class level stuff on stage.

I couldn’t help but think of Christopher Guest’s fantastic 1996 comedy Waiting for Guffman while watching Hamilton. In that film the brilliant Christopher Guest plays Corky St. Clair…the writer/director and eventual star of a play he puts on in Blaine, Missouri.

Go watch Waiting for Guffman to see Corky’s dance moves, and his stunning duet, A Penny For Your Thoughts, and you’ll see Lin Manuel Miranda in Hamilton in a nutshell.

Despite Corky being hysterically untalented, he is still adored by the rural rubes who don’t know any better. Lin Manuel Miranda is the Corky St. Clair of Broadway.

Of course, the media, like the know-nothings in Blaine, give Miranda a pass for his weakness as a performer because they think he is some sort of musical theatre genius. I obviously disagree. But even if that is true, the bigger problem to me is that the only reason Miranda stars in the play is due to his obviously over-sized ego. Even Miranda fans must admit that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of Broadway performers who could do a better job in Hamilton than he did. Hell there are a handful in this actual production who could do the part better than him…like Leslie Odom Jr.…or Daveed Diggs…or Anthony Ramos…or Christopher Jackson and on and on.

Also, in terms of Miranda’s ego…Steven Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Weber didn’t star in their musicals…so what kind of ego must Miranda have to think he needs to star in his, especially when he lacks the requisite skills to pull it off?

In regards to the music in the show…well…there is not a single memorable song to be found in Hamilton despite the fact that there are numerous performers giving memorable renditions of the material. Not one. Part of that, but not all of it, can be written off to the use of rap, which is an art form that generally does not age even remotely well. (Here is another comedy that I thought of while watching Hamilton - The Simpsons Planet of the Apes Musical, which uses rap music about as effectively as Hamilton…so Lin Manuel Miranda is both Corky St. Clair AND Troy McClure!)

As for Miranda’s creative genius…I don’t get it. I mean, I guess it is clever to adapt Ron Chernow’s book Alexander Hamilton into a musical…but it feels like he just put history to rhymes. Does that rise to the level of amazing? Count me unimpressed.

So basically, everything wrong with Hamilton falls on Miranda’s shoulders and boils down to an egotistical, self-reverential and underwhelming songwriter trying to carry a pop-music/rap musical despite being an insipid and abysmal performer.

But besides that…how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? (See I can use historical references too! Where’s my MacArthur Grant!)

Hamilton has been praised for its color conscious casting…in other words, its decision to cast of actors of color in the roles of white people of history. This is obviously a grand symbolic gesture…but of what? Diversity? Sure. Inclusion? Ok. But this soft gesture of inclusion and diversity, which won over rich, white, Obama-ite neo-liberals, also has a shadow to it, as the only white actors with prominent roles in the show play the villains, King George and the cowardly and incompetent Charles Lee. Both King George and Lee aren’t just villainous, but also clownishly effeminate…much in contrast to the actors of color surrounding them who are robustly masculine. One can’t help but conclude from the evidence presented that Hamilton is not only pro-diversity and inclusion, but insidiously anti-white, particularly anti-white masculinity (not to mention that no white woman at all appears in any roles but the ensemble).

Hamilton has not aged well in its five years of existence, and as previously mentioned that could be a function of using rap and popular music as its backbone. This is heightened by the fact that even politically the show has gone from darling to doubted among the media, which now has seconds thoughts about Hamilton, which is likely a result of the media’s succumbing to the cult of wokeism.

You see, it is difficult to cheer the tearing down of statues of Washington and Jefferson for being slave owners, and then celebrate them in a musical even if they are played by black actors. In this way, Hamilton is, like Obama himself, painfully outdated for the era of rabid social justice and, ironically, Black Lives Matter.

Also outdated is the notion of celebrating the founding fathers and their accomplishments which include quaint ideas such as freedom of speech, which were radical in their day and have, incredibly, become radical once again in our own. In the era of cancel culture, BLM and SJW’s, free speech is anathema, and the founding fathers are criminals to be posthumously punished, not heroes to be celebrated and humanized.

After sitting through the seemingly endless two hour and forty minute run time my conclusion is this…I found Hamilton to be little more than Sesame Street social studies for rich, self-loathing white neo-liberals who want to bask in the warmth of their own self-righteousness and self-deluded coolness. It is a sterile, vanilla, Disney-fied piece of dramatic preening that poses at intellectual depth but is as shallow as a kiddie pool.

In terms of its cinematic worthiness, the staging of the play does seem impressive in a sort of “wow the drama club did a really nice job this year” sort of way, but it, like nearly every stageplay ever photographed, does not translate well to film.

The bottom line is this, I am glad I finally got see Hamilton if for no other reason than I now know I do not need to see Hamilton. I am also glad that I never got suckered into the Hamilton hype and got fleeced for a ticket, and instead only had to pay $4.99 for my Disney Plus subscription to find out that the show is a glittering piece of musical theatre fool’s gold. For all the folks who fell for its alleged, in the moment, 2016 charms…the joke is on them, as history once again has the last laugh.

©2020

Horny Women of the World Unite! Don't Let Woke Puritans Cancel the Steamy Netflix Movie 365 Days!

Estimated Reading Time: 69 seconds

A vocal minority of totalitarian busybodies is taking on the lustful populist majority in trying to censor the racy fan favorite. While it’s a terrible movie, pulling it would be a very bad day for film.

The controversial erotic romance 365 Days has been among the most watched movies on Netflix since it premiered last month, and may very well end up being the most popular film of the year on the streaming service.

Some passionate fans have been so enamored with the steamy Polish movie, which chronicles the decidedly unorthodox relationship between studly Italian mob boss Massimo, and Laura, the gorgeous Polish woman he kidnaps, that they are clamoring for a sequel.

Despite its lascivious appeal to millions of mostly female viewers, there is a vociferous minority demanding Netflix pull the movie from its service because it allegedly glorifies kidnapping and rape.

This brigade of uptight scolds has even launched a petition at Change.org calling for the film’s removal from Netflix, and as of this writing, it has garnered an anemic 6,300 signatures.

My advice to these 6,300 fragile woke puritans is that 365 Days is not the hill to die on…and they will die on it because the hordes of hellaciously horny lady philistines that need some escapist release will not take losing their harmless cinematic guilty pleasure lying down.

Thankfully, Netflix has thus far resisted the mob’s demand to pull the film…but the damage may already be done. Under politically correct pressure the media messaging around 365 Days has quickly turned from a knowing wink to a judgmental scowl.

For instance, on June 17th The Daily Mail ran a story highlighting fans desperation for a sequel to the sex filled movie. On June 19th columnist Amanda Platell wrote an article stating she was seduced by the film, which she described as a “guilty pleasure” for women stuck in coronavirus lockdown, and that she saw “no harm in it”.

But by July 2nd the worm had turned after the vocal minority made their displeasure known, and so The Daily Mail began running headlines like “Is this the most degrading, sexist show Netflix has ever aired?”

This type of flip in media messaging used to take years to achieve but it now takes mere days for the establishment press to quickly move to alter the public narrative to appease the woke mob.

One can’t help but wonder if all of this negative media noise about 365 Days will succeed in scuttling the planned production of the sequel or will make Netflix choose to either dump the original or not run the sequel, thus leaving the movie’s ravenously libidinous fanatics high and dry.

I support Netflix’s decision to ignore the calls to pull 365 Days not because I think it is a good movie…it sure as hell isn’t – it is so bad it makes 50 Shades of Grey look like Citizen Kane…but because audiences should have the right to watch, or not watch, whatever the hell they want no matter how terrible it is.

As for the charges that 365 Days, which I found more neurotic than erotic, promotes kidnapping or rape…that is just ludicrous. The movie is so absurd as to be ridiculous, as it more resembles a raunchy live action cartoon than reality.

Consider the intricately incoherent details of the plot. The wealthy and impossibly handsome Massimo kidnaps the impossibly beautiful Laura because she perfectly matches the vision of an angelic woman that appeared to him right after he momentarily died during a mob hit. Massimo then gives Laura 365 days to fall in love with him while in his custody.

That plot isn’t a handbook for wannabe sexual predators, it is escapist soft-core porn for concupiscent middle-aged women who want to curl up on the couch with a bottle of wine and a “neck massager” and indulge in some secret “guilty pleasuring”.

Even Oprah Winfrey’s magazine O says of the film, that it is among many erotic movies that are "guilty pleasures"—though why feel bad about what you like?” Exactly.

I would go a step further and ask not only why feel bad about what you like, but also, why demand others not be allowed to like the things that you don’t like?

This is the main problem with the manic religious fervor of wokeness as it promotes the tyranny of the fragile and the thin-skinned over the popular opinion of…in this case…the horny majority.

If the ever-expanding politically correct bonfire of the vanities does engulf 365 Days, it would not exactly be a major crime against the art of cinema, but it would be a very bad sign for our culture.

This exceedingly cheesy movie has become an unlikely canary in the entertainment coalmine. If Netflix does cave to the small but vocal woke mob regarding 365 Days (or its planned sequel) as decisively as the news media has, then it portends a very dark, yet ironically vanilla, future for choice in film.

The healthiest outcome for all of us is for the horny majority to reign supreme in the Battle of 365 Days. For in movies as in sexual attraction, there is no accounting for taste, or in this case - lack thereof…but it is imperative that we as a culture suppress our totalitarian impulses and grant each other the freedom to indulge our bad taste.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mr. Jones: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Not worth paying to see, but the striking and unnerving scenes of the Holomodor are worthy of your time to watch when it comes out on Netflix or cable.

Mr. Jones, directed by Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, is the true story of British journalist Gareth Jones as he discovers and then reveals the horrors of Stalin’s genocidal famine in Ukraine in 1933. The film stars James Norton as Jones, with supporting turns from Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard.

Agnieszka Holland is an interesting cinematic figure. In 1990 she wrote and directed Europa, Europa, a staggeringly brilliant film about the remarkable life of Solomon Perel during World War II for which Holland garnered a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Ever since Europa, Europa though, Holland has churned out absolutely nothing of note.

The tepid mediocrity of Ms. Holland’s filmography from 1991 to present day may explain why I had never even heard of Mr. Jones until I was assigned to watch it and write about it.

That said, as a big fan of Europa, Europa, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, as well as being a Russophile and an admirer of good journalism, I thought Mr. Jones might just hit my sweet spot and be a new cinematic feast amidst the current coronavirus movie famine.

Sadly…while there were certainly some powerful sequences, overall the lackluster direction and script left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

The biggest problem with Mr. Jones is that it is wildly uneven, with a devastatingly poor narrative structure.

The first half of the film plays out like a PBS melodrama…and not a very good one. Holland attempts to give a stylized view of the suffocating conformity of the British establishment, and then the debased debauchery of Walter Duranty’s Moscow, but is never quite able to adequately pull it off.

Another major structural issue is Holland’s choice to weave George Orwell’s writing of Animal Farm into the story. Shockingly, Orwell actually opens the movie and is used as a landmark throughout the narrative. The snippets of Orwell are at best frivolous and do nothing more than distract from the main dramatic thrust of the story.

The second half of the film is much, much better than the first. Midway through the film shifts to the devastation in Ukraine, and this is where Holland finds her footing. The scenes of starvation and desperation are exceedingly well-done and uncomfortable to watch. There is one sequence that is so brutal it left me unnerved for days. Holland’s use of the bleak and foreboding Ukrainian winter exquisitely conveys the existential depth and expanse of the ocean of suffering that was the Holomodor.

The problem though is that Holland failed to adequately build a dramatic foundation upon which to lay the tragedy of the Holomodor. I think the film actually would’ve been better served if it started with the trip to Ukraine, as that approach would have emphasized the brutal nature of the topic at hand from the get go. It also would have given context to Jones’ struggle and maybe even better fleshed out his character, which is remarkably paper-thin in the film.

Make no mistake though that Gareth Jones’ story is compelling and definitely worthy of a major movie, just that Ms. Holland is unable to tell the story with enough dramatic vigor or cinematic verve to do it justice. I couldn’t help but think that Gareth Jones life was worthy of an HBO or Netflix mini-series, as there is awful lot of meaningful story to tell.

In terms of the acting, the cast all do solid, if unspectacular, work.

James Norton brings an every man sort of energy to his Gareth Jones, which makes sense, but he definitely suffers from a charisma deficit, makes is a hindrance to his carrying the entirety of the movie. Norton never commands the screen or demands the audience’s attention, which at times undermines the film’s dramatic power.

The luminous Vanessa Kirby plays Ada Brooks, a sort of love interest to Jones. Kirby is an alluring and at times intoxicating screen presence, but is vastly misused and under utilized in Mr. Jones. Kirby is blessed with a striking screen magnetism but never gets to put meat on the bones of her character, which is a terrible waste of her prodigious talents.

Peter Sarsgaard is always an intriguing and emotionally complicated actor, and his morally compromised and diseased Walter Duranty is no exception. Sarsgaard has minimal screen time but makes the most of it as he limps and slithers through the scenery like the devil with whom Duranty made his deal.

Mr. Jones premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival back in 2019, and debuted for British audiences in February of 2020 and was scheduled to be released in the U.S. in April of 2020…but coronavirus rudely intervened.

The film was then released for purchase (but not for rent!) on streaming services in mid-June…and since I was hired to write about it, I reached into my expense account cookie jar and bought the movie for $14.99. Maybe it is my coronavirus budget talking but even though $14.99 is basically the price of a movie ticket here in the City of Angels, I found that price to be excessive.

My recommendation regarding Mr. Jones is not to purchase it…the cost is too high and it simply isn’t worth it. But I do think it might be worth watching for free on Netflix or cable when it comes out. The scenes of the Holomodor alone are worth the investment of time.

The bottom line is this…Mr. Jones is a great story (and Gareth Jones was a great man) but not a great film.

©2020

The New Movie Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of our Current Press

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In 1933, British journalist Gareth Jones risked life and limb in service to the truth, while in comparison, the journalists of today only care about access to power and towing the elite’s ideological line.

Mr. Jones, a new film by esteemed director Agnieszka Holland, tells the true story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who travels to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovers the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocidal famine of Ukrainians.

Sadly, Mr. Jones, which boasts a fantastic cast of James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, is a terrific story wrapped in a bad, dramatically unfocused and meandering film.

But thankfully, despite its cinematic unworthiness, the movie still contains important insights very relevant to our current time.

What makes Mr. Jones noteworthy is that the film’s noble protagonist is, unlike our current corrupt press corps, a dogged journalist more loyal to truth than to ideology, and more interested in maintaining his integrity than gaining access to power and wealth.

The film opens with Jones fresh off his 1933 interview with Hitler that leaves him convinced that war is ultimately inevitable. This belief gets him ridiculed for being naïve and hysterical by the stodgy and comfortable old guard of the British press.

Jones then sets his sights on the Soviet Union and tries to figure out how Stalin has been able to pull off his economic boom while the rest of the world is mired in depression, so he goes to Moscow in search of answers.

Upon arrival he finds not the worker’s paradise that fellow journalists, like the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, have been deceptively portraying to the world, but instead discovers firsthand the repressive and totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Jones then follows a lead and risks his life by sneaking off a train and going to Ukraine, where he is thrust into the horrors of the Holomodor, which are brutally and effectively depicted in the film.

When Jones exposes this calamity to the western world, political expediency causes it to be met with either skepticism or indifference. Unlike other journalists of his, or our, age, Jones refuses to tell people in power what they want to hear, instead telling them the truth, and is essentially blackballed and exiled because of it.

No doubt the same would happen today to any reporter brave enough to go against the officially approved narrative.

Our current press corps is inhabited by truth-disdaining, sycophantic stenographers more akin to the villainous Walter Duranty, a propagandist for the cause who sold his journalistic soul in exchange for a decadent and depraved lifestyle, than the truth-seeking Gareth Jones.

It is ironic that journalists of yesteryear, like Duranty, were complicit in positive falsehoods about Stalin’s Soviet Union, while journalists of today are complicit in negative falsehoods about Russia.

The cavalcade of journalistic failures and fiascos directly or tangentially related to Russia in recent years include, but are not limited to, the distortion of truth about the Maidan uprising, the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the ridiculous Cuba microwave weapons story, and of course, Russiagate, the biggest journalistic fraud perpetrated upon the American public since the Iraq War. And just this week we have added to this cornucopia of corporate media crap the ‘Russians pay bounty to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan’ nonsense. All of these stories are vapid, thin, propagandistic gruel, devoid of any depth, insight or actual reporting.

One glimpse at the ever-growing list of recurring journalistic farces involving Russia and it becomes glaringly obvious that Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War CIA program that planted stories and journalists in newsrooms across the media, is alive and well in practice, if not in name.

It is readily apparent that just as Walter Duranty was getting his marching orders from Moscow, reporters of today get their marching orders from Langely.

Of course, the truth-averse, ideologically driven journalism of the corporate media isn’t restricted to just Russia stories, as evidenced by the slavish and slanted coverage of Black Lives Matter and other woke endeavors.

The thing that I find most grating about the reliably deceptive establishment media is their incessant complaining about Trump’s alleged war on the press.

These same news outlets were conspicuously silent when Obama prosecuted whistleblowers nine times, which is three times more than all of his predecessors combined.

There was also nary a word of dissension from the intrepid souls in the media when Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI spied on reporters and tried to coerce them to expose their sources.

The most glaring example of the ideological cancer in journalism is the cheering by the establishment media of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange, who has done more to inform the public of the truth than any corporate-controlled reporter at any news outlet in the world, and may very well die in prison for it. 

The current crop of subservient sycophants play-acting as journalists in the corporate media are an utter disgrace to their profession, and they dishonor the staggering sacrifice that people like Gareth Jones made in service to truth.

Mr. Jones is not a great movie, but it does chronicle the great struggles of a noble man. If only we had many, many more like him today, maybe truth would be revered and the powerful held accountable. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Da 5 Bloods: A Review

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

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A terribly disappointing movie not worthy of anyone’s time.

Da 5 Bloods, directed by Spike Lee and written by Lee, Kevin Wilmott, Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to that country as old men to search for the remains of their fallen comrade and to search for buried treasure. The ensemble cast includes Delroy Lindo, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Clarke Peters, Jonathan Majors and Chadwick Boseman.

It is difficult to remember now, but at one point in time, Spike Lee was arguably the most important filmmaker in the world, and certainly one of the most interesting. Blessed with a Scorsese-esque cinematic confidence and an artistic defiance reminiscent of Oliver Stone, Spike Lee was a director who demanded attention back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.

Lee’s Do the Right Thing had exploded onto screens in 1989 and revealed its director to be an innovative artist and daring provocateur.

Lee’s follow-ups to Do the Right Thing, Mo Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever (1991), weren’t as combustible as his noteworthy first hit, but they were solid films that showcased Lee’s deft craftsmanship.

All of these films led up to Lee’s crowning achievement, Malcolm X, which hit theatres in 1992. Malcolm X is an extraordinary cinematic achievement and is an absolute masterpiece that capped Lee’s remarkable artistic run from ‘89 to ‘92.

After that though, the wheels started to come off the Spike Lee wagon, as his movies became less and less relevant as his mastery of craft diminished rapidly. From this point on Lee became famous for being famous and was more identifiable as a Knicks fan than as a filmmaker.

For all intents and purposes, Spike Lee’s movie making had been on a very precipitous decline from 1994 until 2018…then BlackKklansman came out.

BlackKklansman was not a perfect movie, but it did crackle with a vibrancy and vitality which had been notably absent from Lee’s films in the preceding two and half decades following Malcolm X.

It was due to the return of Lee’s trademark cinematic dynamism in BlackKklansman that the sense that maybe, just maybe, we were going to be treated to a late stage artistic renaissance from Spike Lee, gathered momentum.

It was with all of this in mind that I watched Lee’s newest film, Da 5 Bloods when it premiered on Netflix last Friday.

To say I was disappointed would be a dramatic understatement. Whatever artistic momentum Lee garnered post BlackKklansman has quickly bogged itself down in a foolish quagmire north of Ho Chi Minh City in the dramatic mistake that is Da 5 Bloods.

Lee indulges his very worst instincts on Da 5 Bloods, and produces a bloated, boring, derivative, meandering mess of a movie that pulsates with an amateurism that is shocking to behold coming from someone with Lee’s past success.

There are so many things wrong with Da 5 Bloods it is difficult to narrow it down to just a few…but I will try.

The script is absolute garbage, as the narrative and the dialogue all feel like they were stolen from a high school freshman’s drama diary. There are so many narrative threads wandering aimlessly through this movie it seems like a dramatic daycare center…and absolutely none of them work…none of them!

The dialogue is only remarkable because it is so disingenuous, inhuman, pretentious and mannered.

Matching the on-the-nose, cringe-worthy dialogue, are the over-the-top performances.

I think Delroy Lindo is a terrific actor, as is Jonathan Majors, but even their talent cannot overcome Lee’s preference for posturing over acting, and theatricality over subtlety.

The entire cast gives performances that feel out of rhythm and forced. Lindo is given the heaviest load to bear, and he definitely strains under it, as his work feels contrived and empty.

As for the filmmaking, Da 5 Bloods contains action sequences, which is something Lee has never really delved into in his previous films…and it shows. The battle scenes in this movie are not just bad, but an embarrassment, like something out of an old tv show.

Lee also made the decision to use his 60 year old actors to play themselves as young men, and while I understand what he was trying to do with that, it ended up reducing the action scenes to pure farce.

The battles are also devoid of all realism and cinematic ingenuity. I watched the movie wondering how the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese won the war but were so damn easy to shoot, especially when they would continuously just run straight at their adversaries.

The technical aspects of the movie are equally amateurish, as it is visually dull and stale, lacking all vibrancy and vitality.

There is one scene, which contains a pivotal plot point, that occurs at the hour and a half mark, that is so poorly executed and so ham-handed in its telegraphing that I was left groaning in disgust. What the hell happened to the director who made the masterpiece Malcolm X? Where is the Do the Right Thing Spike Lee who was an absolute master of his craft? Sadly, that Spike Lee is long gone, and we are left with a director and writer who simply does not remember how to make a worthwhile movie.

Added to those woes is Terence Blanchard’s relentlessly bombastic score, that is so distractingly awful it boggled my mind. Blanchard’s swelling music intrudes anywhere and everywhere it can, suffocating the movie with a monstrosity of musical plushness.

The film does have some bright spots in the form of documentary montages that are sprinkled throughout the film and crackle with insight and intensity, but they are so few and far between they are an afterthought.

In conclusion, the promise and the prowess Spike Lee showed decades ago and ever so briefly in BlackKklansman, seem a very distant memory when watching the abysmal Da 5 Bloods. I simply cannot recommend this movie for any reason, but would encourage you to revisit Spike Lee’s earlier works, most notably Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X, as well as Blackkklansman, in order to see what used to be, and what might have been.

©2020

Spike Lee's 'Da 5 Bloods' is a Dreadful Disappointment, but Virtue-Signaling Establishment Critics Lack the Courage to Tell the Truth About It

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

There’s only one good thing about this film: it exposes mainstream film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their pandering to fellow woke elites.

Spike Lee’s new movie, Da 5 Bloods, starring Delroy Lindo, Chadwick Boseman and Jonathan Majors, tells the story of four black Vietnam veterans who return to Vietnam as old men in order to retrieve the body of their long lost comrade and search for buried treasure, premiered this past Friday on Netflix to much fanfare.

Lee has long been an artistic provocateur on issues of race, so as the U.S. once again struggles with civil unrest and social upheaval over racial injustice, you would think now would be a perfect time for a new movie from the Academy Award winner who brought us Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and BlacKkKlansman.

You would be wrong.

While Da 5 Bloods does have some intriguing moments, particularly the documentary montages interspersed throughout the film, the majority of the movie is a sloppy, bloated, decadent, incoherent, endlessly meandering, melodramatic mess.

Sadly, the movie, which features a trite and derivative script, a relentlessly bombastic score and painfully amateurish action sequences, is too cinematically inept to be of any socially conscious value.

Ironically, the film’s lone insight into race relations in America is entirely unintentional as it exposes liberal film critics for their self-serving racial paternalism and their complete lack of professional integrity.

It is inconceivable to me that any cinematically literate person could conclude Da 5 Bloods is anything but a pronounced disappointment but, remarkably, critics have been falling all over themselves to praise the film, some even claim it is an Oscar favorite.

On the film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, critics have given it a staggering 92% score.

What was striking to me about the critical fawning over the movie was that in contrast, audiences at Rotten Tomatoes scored the film a much more reasonable 62%.

A look at the Rotten Tomatoes scores of other prominent films directed by black artists in recent years reveals a similarly suspicious divide between critics and audiences.

For example, in 2015 another Spike Lee film, the abysmal Chi-Raq, garnered an 82% critical score and a 50% audience score.

In 2015, Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ compelling but flawed Best Picture winner received a blistering 98% critical score compared to a more rational audience score of 79%.

In 2018, the middling Black Panther somehow overcame its notable faults to become a box office smash and a Best Picture nominee while receiving an extraordinary 97% critical score compared to its more accurate audience score of 79%. The 97% critical score makes it the highest rated superhero movie of all time.

Black Panther’s negative18-point disparity between critical score and audience score is three times larger than any other superhero movie in history. 

In 2019 critics adored Barry Jenkins’ film If Beale Street Could Talk at a rate of 95% while audiences gave it a discerningly tepid 70%.

Also in 2019, critics slobbered over Jordan Peele’s confounding horror hit, Us, with a 93% score while audiences recoiled from it with a 59% rating.

The social justice warrior contingent will no doubt deduce from these numbers that the significantly lower audience scores are a result of hordes of incorrigible racists intentionally under rating a movie purely out of racial animus.

The facts betray that argument though, as other unquestionably brilliant black films, such as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (92 critical/90 audience) and Malcolm X (88 critical/91 audience) as well as John Singleton’s iconic Boyz n the Hood (96 critical/93 audience), have received universal praise and are devoid of such large differences in rating.

It seems obvious to me that mainstream critics are judging current black films not on their merits but on a politically correct curve.

Maybe this biased perspective is born out of fear of being labeled a racist or a heretic in the church of wokeness if they criticize a black film, or maybe it is some sort of pandering paternalism, which in and of itself is its own pernicious form of racism.

Sadly, these critics, just like those public health officials who recently went against their own expert opinions and declared that people needed to get out and protest racism despite the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, are frighteningly quick to trade their professional and personal integrity in order to satiate the woke mob and be seen as politically correct “allies”.

Critics that judge films on a racial curve in order to signal their virtue and moral superiority are doing a great disservice to both cinema and artists of color, as neither is well served by their blatant disregard of their professionalism and their pathetic woke posturing and pandering.

In conclusion, Da 5 Bloods is an awful film but it has done a service by exposing the untrustworthy critics in the establishment media for only caring about their social status among woke elites and not giving a damn about the art of cinema.

Now, if you want to watch a worthy Spike Lee film pertinent to this tumultuous time, go watch his unadulterated masterpiece Malcolm X, or the dynamically brilliant Do the Right Thing or the uneven but insightful BlacKkKlansman…but definitely avoid the dismal Da 5 Bloods.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020