Minari: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped venture that ultimately underwhelms.

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, tells the semi-autobiographical story of Chung’s South Korean immigrant family as it tries to achieve the American dream in 1980’s Arkansas. The film, which stars Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung and Will Patton, has received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor (Yeun) and Best Supporting Actress (Youn).

Having survived the slog of cinema that was 2020, where even the very best films of the year like Mank, Nomadland and Judas and the Black Messiah are not great films, I held out hope for Minari to ride in on a white horse and save this year of cinema from death by a thousand mediocrities.

Unfortunately, Minari is not up to the task.

Minari is not a terrible movie, but it is not a very good one either. It suffers from many flaws, most notable being it doesn’t know what it is or what it wants to be and therefore ends up being a whole lot of nothing.

For example, in theory it has all the trappings of an arthouse movie but is so painfully conventional in execution it becomes devoid of interest and artistic credibility.

Minari is sort of like a working class Korean immigrant version of Marriage Story mixed with a culture clash/fish out of water/American Dream story, but it never successfully or even adequately tells any of those stories, preferring the approach of throwing everything into the stew yet creating no flavor.

A major flaw with the storytelling approach of Minari is that it has a generalized perspective, so there is no one particular protagonist to lead us through the story. Since Chung is writing auto-biographically, it would have been interesting to have his childhood perspective lead the way. But Chung seems incapable of the skill that would require, and therefore he halves the baby and spreads perspective around which saps the story of dramatic power.

Chung is also a rather unimaginative visual stylist, as Minari is a painfully flat film with sub-par framing and composition as well as a dull and stale color palette.

There are some interesting performances in the movie, most notably by Yeun and Will Patton of all people, but Chung’s lackluster direction is unable to contain these performances and therefore the drama dissipates even when the actors are running on all cylinders. Chung’s inability to break through the conventional leaves viewers detached and disinterested in the plight of these characters despite some skillful acting work.

Chung’s biggest failing though is as a writer, as he is incapable of trusting his audience with a pure arthouse experience and therefore sprinkles in narrative arcs and beats that are cookie-cutter conventionalities that fall dramatically flat. The contrast of this conventional story being wrapped in the deliberately paced trappings of an arthouse movie creates a frustrating movie decidedly at cross purposes with itself.

Ultimately, with the generalized perspective, the conventional narrative arcs and the tedious visual aesthetic, Minari feels like a bad tv drama more than a serious piece of cinema and Oscar contender.

As evidenced by the plethora of Oscar nominations and a stunning 98% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, Minari is being lauded as a phenomenal film. But it seems to me that this is wishful thinking rather than accurate analysis of the film on screen.

In the wake of last year’s stirring success of Parasite, a spectacular piece of filmmaking by Korean director Bong Joon-ho, Minari has no doubt been given a boost among the critical elite in the hopes of bolstering “diversity and inclusion” and recreating Parasite’s stirring success.

In the flat earth society that is our culture, Parasite and Minari are in the same category despite having nothing in common except that they share the same language and ethnicity of director. This is absurd, but it is how our culture thinks and works, especially in the era of identity politics.

If Minari were the same story but centering around the struggles of some white family, critics would rightfully ignore it for the uninspired, middling movie that it is. The fact that mediocrities like Chung and Minari are nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay speaks to how precipitous the decline in the art of cinema has become and to the hyper-delusional nature of a film business glorifying “diversity and inclusion” instead of talent, skill and craftsmanship.

In conclusion, there is absolutely nothing interesting or remarkable about Minari. It is an underwhelming and instantly forgettable film that is not deserving of any accolades or praise. If you want to see a mundane, middle-of-the-road movie, Minari is definitely for you.

©2021

The Trial of the Chicago 7: 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. Yikes. What an abysmal Sorkinian shitshow.

The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, recounts the story of the infamous prosecution of a group of famed anti-Vietnam war protestors arrested for inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Among the star-studded ensemble are Sacha Baron Cohen, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Eddie Redmayne, Michael Keaton, Mark Rylance and Frank Langella.

The film, which is streaming on Netflix, has been nominated for 6 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Sacha Baron Cohen).

The Trial of the Chicago 7 tells an extremely important story, but unfortunately, it is an abysmally crafted, relentlessly hackneyed shitshow of a movie.

One can only speculate as to why such an aggressively trite cinematic venture has been so well received.

Maybe people say they like this movie because they think this is the type of movie they’re supposed to like. In this way The Trial of the Chicago 7 is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln in that It covers a “serious” historical topic meant to convey a noble truth about a current social political issue. Lincoln was a terrible movie too, but that didn’t stop critics from fawning over it during their Obama sugar high. It was like critics endorsed the film in an attempt to avoid seeming to be against the abolition of slavery - as inane as that sounds.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like baby boomer porn where Sorkin and his fellow boomers can signal their historic virtue all over themselves in a frantic fit of masturbatorial self-righteousness. The film allows the auto-erotic boomer fantasy to extend to current issues and protests movements like Black Lives Matter, with climax no doubt gushing forth accompanied by an orgasmic cry of “right side of history!”

Regardless (or as Dictionary.com would now say - ‘irregardless’) of why it is being praised, it is definitely being praised. At the website Rotten Tomatoes the film currently has a 90% critical score and a 91% audience score.

It is at times like these that I feel the world has officially lost its mind. .

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is so cinematically cliched, dramatically defective and pretentiously pedantic it feels like a two hour and ten minute SNL skit.

The film boasts some of the most embarrassing acting of the year. Sacha Baron Cohen is nominated for a Best Supporting Actor for his work as 60’s icon Abbie Hoffman. Cohen looks like a dad who dressed up in in a bad hippie costume to accompany his kids to a Halloween dance. It is painfully embarrassing watching the 49 year old Cohen play acting as the 30 year-old Hoffman. Adding to the suck is the fact that Cohen absolutely tears limb from limb Hoffman’s unique New England accent, and ends up sounding like Borat, a Brooklynite, Big Daddy from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and a posh Brit all rolled into one giant acting shit sandwich.

Eddie Redmayne is just as dreadful as Tom Hayden. Redmayne is a charisma-less acting vampire that drains every scene of even the most remote bit of life. He too mauls an American accent like a newly freed Vegas tiger seeking revenge on his life-long tormentors Siegfried and Roy.

Even Mark Rylance, the great Mark Rylance, churns out a sub-par performance. Rylance plays the iconic civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who was one of the great New York characters of all-time. Rylance’s Kunstler is so far removed from any version of reality as to be criminal. Rylance too never properly wields Kunstler’s distinctive New York dialect. But as my friend Mo Danger pointed out, to Rylance’s credit he at least seems like the only actor in the cast not in on the Sorkinian joke.

The Trial of the Chicago 7’s biggest problem though is the direction of Aaron Sorkin, who simply lacks the requisite cinematic skill to take on such sprawling and complex subject matter.

Sorkin’s ham-fisted, hit-all-the-bullet-points, broad brush, watered down approach drains the dynamic story of any dramatic power. His limp direction also leaves his actors floundering, unable to piece together performances with any dramatic coherence.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is like a very special episode of Sorkin’s 90’s remake of Fantasy Island …The West Wing. It is so self-reverential, pandering and dramatically flaccid as to be egregiously cinematically inept.

The piece de resistance of The Trial of the Chicago 7 is that it builds to a cinematic climax where people unironically stand and clap in a courtroom. It’s like Sorkin went all meta and made a movie set in the 1960’s that had the dramatic sensibilities of a high school drama from the 1980’s.

The story of the Chicago 7 is one that needs to be told…maybe in a Netflix mini-series so as to give each character more depth and the conflagration in Chicago in 1968 more context. The Trial of the Chicago 7 fails to adequately recount the time, place, events and characters involved in one of the crazier and more dangerous times in American history, and that failure is entirely on Aaron Sorkin.

My advice is to either skip The Trial of the Chicago 7 or go all in and just hate watch the damn thing, because it is certainly a target rich environment for scorn and cathartic loathing. Either way, this movie is a blight on the cinema landscape and can’t be forgotten soon enough.

©2021

Netflix's The Dig is not a White Supremacy Rallying Cry

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Netflix’s The Dig is a movie about a famous archeological discovery, not a pro-Brexit, white supremacist rallying cry

Only a woke academic could find hidden villainy in this perfectly benign and mildly pleasant British film. 

The Dig is a Netflix film starring Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan and Lily James that dramatizes the 1939 excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial site at Sutton Hoo that transformed our understanding of the history of early medieval England.

The film, directed by Simon Stone and written by Moira Buffini, has been nominated for five BAFTAs including for Outstanding British Film.

But not everyone is so enamored of the movie, as some see it as a pro-Brexit film espousing white supremacy.

Louise D’Arcens, a Professor of English at Macquarie University in Australia, recently attacked the film because it commits the cultural sin of  “nostalgically appealing” and “romanticizing” an “imagined continuity between Anglo-Saxons and modern British people that does not speak to the complexity of Britain today.” The horror!

D’Arcens complains the film “re-animates key tropes from the persistent British and American ideology of Anglo-Saxonism”, which she claims “was vital to underwriting white racial supremacy as a mandate for Britain’s imperial power and the expansionist concept of Manifest Destiny…”

When viewed through this distorted lens, The Dig transforms from a tame historical drama/love story into a nefarious Brexit propaganda film surreptitiously waving an ‘England for the English!’ banner.

I didn’t see any white supremacy or Brexit sub-text in The Dig, but rather an utterly banal, benign and innocuous movie examining the universality of life, death and the impermanence of things.

The Dig is one of those proficiently shot, well-acted British dramas with which we’ve become so accustomed. It isn’t great and it isn’t awful. It’s fine. It’s a middlebrow piece of entertainment geared toward Anglophiles who’ve already devoured Downton Abbey and are looking to satiate their taste for all things British.

Not surprisingly, there are numerous contradictions and illogical observations in D’Arcens’ misguided analysis.

For instance, a major narrative in the film is about class struggle. Protagonist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) is a self-taught, working class excavator from Suffolk, who is hired by wealthy landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). Their budding relationship must navigate the suffocating class structures of the time period.

The class narrative is also highlighted when Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), a pompous archeologist from the British Museum, invades Sutton Hoo, belittles Basil and ultimately takes credit for his tremendous discovery.

Yet D’Arcens interprets the Phillips-Basil clash as not being about class but rather “highlighting ongoing tensions between Britain’s rural counties and its metropolitan centre” with rural meaning pro-Brexit/bad and metropolitan anti-Brexit/good.

This assessment seems oddly regressive as it lionizes the elite (Phillips) and vilifies the working class (Basil).

D’Arcens also bemoans the film “drawing uncritically on a historical tropes of expansionism – despite the fact the violence of colonialism and occupation is well understood today.”

This is directly at odds with the disparaging appraisal of Basil as a bad guy avatar for Brexiteers. Basil is the victim of the colonialism of educated metropolitan Philips. Like countless British colonialist before him, Phillips comes to Basil’s “foreign” land of Suffolk, takes power, steals treasures and brings them back to London. Yet, incongruously in D’Arcens’ deconstruction Phillips is also a heroic symbol of anti-Brexit sophistication.

D’Arcens then writes,

“One of the great reckonings in the film comes when Basil’s wife, May, urges her disaffected husband to return to the dig. She tells him:

 ‘You’ve always said your work isn’t about the past or even the present. It’s for the future, so that the next generations can know where they came from. The line that joins them to their forebears.’

This appeal to the idea of genetic continuity is rousing and profound, but also exclusionary and insular. May assumes racial and cultural uniformity in Britain, and shared forebears for all.”

Good lord, this is in no way an appeal to “genetic continuity” or an assumption of “racial uniformity”.

A major storyline in the film is that WWII is about to begin and the survival of Britain is at stake. This isn’t about genetic continuity or racial uniformity because the ethnogenesis of Anglo-Saxons developed between migrant Germanic tribes that came to the island back in the 5th century and indigenous Britons, thus Germans conquering Britain is not a genetic or racial threat. Hell, the royal family has German bloodlines.

The existential crisis facing Britain in the film is not a racial or genetic one, it is a national one as it is their (multi-racial) nationality that will disappear if the Germans prevail, not their race or genetic line.

D’Arcens continues, “(May) speaks to the film’s 21st century viewers, many of whom would not see an unearthed Saxon as a forebear, and might rightly wonder what “future generations” the film has in mind for Britain.”

If multi-cultural 21st century Brits, regardless of their race or ethnicity, don’t acknowledge a centuries dead Saxon king as a forebear for their nation, that says more about their historical ignorance and ethnic arrogance than anything else.

D’Arcens closes by lamenting, “…as cinematic archeology (The Dig) looks far more to the past than to the future.”

Considering The Dig is a movie set in the past and tells the story of characters discovering an even older past, this is an incredibly inane climax to a wholly inadequate analysis.

In conclusion, The Dig is not a great movie, but it also isn’t a dangerous one. It’s a mildly pleasant film that will most definitely not turn you into a brutish Brexiteer or Anglo-Saxon supremacist…I promise.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Zack Snyder's Justice League: 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. An imperfect film, but if you like superhero movies, it’s worth the effort.

THE SNYDER CUT IS HERE AND IT WAS WORTH THE WAIT

After much consternation, speculation and hype…the eagerly anticipated Justice League “Snyder Cut” has finally premiered on HBO Max and I watched all four hours of it.

If you don’t know about the Snyder Cut then you’re probably a healthy human being living a normal life, but just to get you up to speed here are all the relevant details.

Zack Snyder, who has directed such notable hits as 300 and Watchmen, became the artistic force of the DC Comics cinematic universe in 2013 when he helmed Man of Steel, a reboot of the Superman origin story.

Snyder followed that up by directing Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016 and its sequel Justice League in 2017. Unfortunately, due to the sudden and tragic death of his daughter Autumn, Snyder had to drop out of post-production of Justice League, and was replaced by Joss Whedon.

Whedon, at the behest of the movie studio Warner Brothers, re-shot a lot of material and made substantial changes to the tone and tenor of Justice League in the editing process, thus obliterating Snyder’s original artistic vision.

When finally released in November of 2017, Whedon’s version of Justice League was panned by critics and performed poorly at the box office.

Ever since then rumors have swirled of a “Snyder cut” of Justice League which restored Zack Snyder’s original artistic vision. A group of hopeful fans started a movement, #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, in order to pressure Warner Brothers to do just that and let the world see Snyder’s version of the film.

After years of hemming and hawing, Warner Brothers finally relented and agreed to release the Snyder Cut, and even gave Snyder a rumored extra $70 million to reshoot some scenes and re-edit.

The result of all of this is Zach Snyder’s Justice League, now streaming on HBO Max.

Let’s be clear, Zach Snyder’s Justice League isn’t Citizen Kane, nor is it a superhero masterpiece like The Dark Knight, but it is a thoroughly satisfying and entertaining DC superhero movie that is infinitely superior to Joss Whedon’s Justice League.

As the end credits role in the Snyder cut a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” plays, and it seemed very apropos considering the movie feels an answered prayer for long-suffering DC fans.

The greatest changes Snyder made to Justice League were restoring its dark theme and tone and doubling its running time from two hours to four hours.

Zack Snyder has always been much more a cinematic stylist than a proficient storyteller, and so giving him two extra hours to flesh out narratives and character arcs is enormously helpful.

The same was true with Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The theatrical release of that movie was two and a half hours, but Warner Brothers later released a directors cut titled “The Ultimate Edition”, that added an additional thirty minutes and it is a far superior, and much more dramatically and narratively coherent movie than the original theatrical version.

The Snyder Cut’s four hour running time may be a barrier to those ambivalent about superhero movies or with limited attention spans, but it adds much needed depth, context and coherence to the story and I found the movie to be surprisingly captivating the entire time.

Another noticeable and needed change Snyder made was in giving more time to Ray Fisher’s Cyborg and Ezra Miller’s Flash in order to flesh the characters out. Both Cyborg and Flash got short shrift in Whedon’s version and in the new cut they prove themselves to be very compelling characters.

That’s also true of villain Steppenwolf, which went from being a rather dull cardboard cutout in Whedon’s version to being a powerful and multi-dimensional character in Snyder’s cut. 

The newly added scenes with DC supervillain Darkseid also resonated, and elevated the film by giving added context.

The recent crop of DC films have often been maligned by critics and audiences for being too thematically dark, unlike the supremely successful Marvel films which are often fun and light fare.

Joss Whedon’s Justice League floundered though because it tried to bring Marvel frivolity to DC’s existentialism. To its great credit, the Snyder cut unabashedly embraces DC’s dark roots and shuns any Marvel imitation.

While Snyder is no Christopher Nolan, he is an accomplished cinematic stylist, and regardless of what you think of his style, it is unquestionably true that both Batman v Superman and Justice League were considerably improved when the entirety of his vision was allowed on screen.

When the suits at Warner Brothers have meddled with Snyder’s vision, his DC films have suffered critically and financially.

If Warner Brothers were smart they’d learn to leave the artists they’ve hired to direct their flagship properties alone, because those directors are better at making good movies than any suit pushing banality and conformity over artistry.

The next Batman movie, The Batman, is being directed by Matt Reeves, who is terrific, as evidenced by his two fantastic Planet of the Apes movies that were exquisite blockbusters. Reeves could help Warner Brothers and DC start fighting back against the Marvel behemoth, but only if they let him do his thing and don’t meddle and muddle things up like they’ve done with Snyder’s films.

As for Zach Snyder’s Justice League, it isn’t for everybody. It may be too long for some, or too dark for others, but despite being an imperfect film, it certainly hit a sweet spot for me.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 32 - Coming 2 America

On this episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I return to Zamunda for Coming 2 America, the Eddie Murphy led sequel to his 1988 comedy classic Coming to America. Topics discussed include backyard skunks, Eddie Murphy's faded star and the trouble with today's comedy. As an added bonus this episode features a return of the insanely popular segment - "Let's Pretend We're Studio Execs", where we play Hollywood bigwigs and recast the movie!

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: episode 32 - Coming 2 America

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

On this weeks episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I hop in a van and hit the road with Chloe Zhao's film Nomadland starring Frances McDormand. This episode contains discussions on grief and the meditative nature of the film, the required arthouse mindset, and the power of non-actors on-screen. Also featured are scintillating conversations about Jeff Bridges' Snicker bar diet, Chocolatey Chocolate Balls, Amazon's nefariousness and a live blow-by-blow account of a Wild Kingdom moment in Mike's backyard.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 31 - Nomadland

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Coming 2 America: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie proves that Eddie Murphy’s comedy fastball is a faded, distant memory, which transforms this movie from a limp comedy into a devastating tragedy.

There was a time when Eddie Murphy was the biggest comedian and movie star on the planet. In the 1980’s he had a string of comedy blockbusters, 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983), Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Coming to America (1988), that made him the epicenter of comedy culture. Back then it was Eddie’s world and we were all just living and laughing in it.

Murphy’s meteoric rise to fame began on Saturday Night Live , where he debuted in 1980, at the tender young age of 19, and hilariously held court until 1984. Murphy was a electrifying presence on the show and an equally dynamic stand up comedian, as evidenced by his stand up comedy specials Delirious (1983) and Raw (1987).

Coming to America (1988), directed by John Landis, was an intriguing film as it showcased Murphy’s scintillating talent, his abundant charisma and his remarkable versatility. The film was rated R so Murphy’s more profane comedic edge could be spotlighted, but it also had a love story at its heart, which allowed Murphy to mine his more sweet and good-natured side.

Coming to America was an original and captivating comedy that seemed to portend Murphy’s star growing even larger. But unfortunately, instead of being the launching pad to even greater heights, Coming to America ended up being the last good thing Eddie Murphy has ever done. Yes, there were some mildly acceptable movies that came after it, such as The Distinguished Gentleman (1992) and Bowfinger (1999), but these banal efforts pale in comparison to Murphy’s glorious mid-80’s apex.

33 years later Eddie Murphy and company are back with a Coming to America sequel. Coming 2 America, which premiered on Amazon Prime Friday, March 5th, is the 30 years too late Coming to America sequel that no one was asking for and that none of us deserve.

The film, directed by Craig Brewer, is a rehashing of the 1988 original, with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall back reprising all their iconic roles. The problem though is that Eddie Murphy long ago lost his comedy fastball and his comedy caddy Arsenio Hall never had a fastball to begin with.

Another obstacle for the film is that cultural shifts over the last 33 years have created an audience of fragiles too delicate to handle any raunch, so the bare breasts and R rating from 1988 are history and now Eddie Murphy is forced to live in a rather tepid PG-13 world which is woke approved.

The end result of all this is that Coming 2 America is egregiously and remarkably unfunny. The lone bright spot in the nearly two-hour endeavor is the brief scene when Murphy and Hall don the make-up and bring back their famous barbershop alter egos and take some digs at the absurdity of the woke world we all inhabit, but besides that minor bit of humor, there isn’t a laugh to be found.

A big reason why there are no laughs is because there are a lot of painfully unfunny people in the movie.

For example, Leslie Jones plays a long lost and forgotten one night stand from Prince Akeem’s old days, and she is beyond dreadful. Ms. Jones’ career success is one of the great mysteries of the modern age as she has never, ever been funny…not even by accident. To her credit, at least she is consistent in being aggressively awful.

Jermaine Fowler plays Akeem’s bastard son LaVelle and seems like a survivor of charisma bypass surgery. Fowler is so uninteresting and embarrassingly unfunny on-screen I would rather watch my own autopsy than suffer through watching him “act” again.

The gorgeous Kiki Layne plays Akeem’s princess daughter, and spearheads the girl power narrative that drives this jalopy right off the cliff. Layne is a beauty but she is as wooden and dull an actress as you’ll ever come across. Every scene she appears in comes to a resoundingly screeching halt as her dead eyes act like black holes sucking the life out of everything in their orbit.

There is no point in criticizing any of the forced plot points or the film’s groveling social politics, because none of those things would have matter if the damn thing were just funny. But sadly, Eddie Murphy is just not able to reignite that elusive comedy and charisma spark that propelled him to the heights of the entertainment industry nearly forty years ago.

Murphy is unimaginably rich, so he didn’t make Coming 2 America because he was short on the mortgage payments. I think Murphy made Coming 2 America and 2019’s underwhelming Dolemite is My Name, because he actually wanted to do something worthwhile once again.

I think the wheels began to come off the Murphy wagon when he stopped doing stand up comedy back at the end of the 80’s. Murphy was such a star that he became detached from real people and reality and it was easier not to do the hard work of being good at stand up…which takes a lot of hard work.

For years I’ve heard stories from dozens of people about Murphy’s could not care less work ethic on films in the 2000’s and early 2010’s. It’s not uncommon to hear actors and crew bitch about a star they’ve worked with, but the stories I kept hearing all told the same story. According to these folks Murphy was a lazy, entitled, ego maniac who did barely the bare minimum on movies. He even used to insist that a double be used for every shot he was in where he didn’t have dialogue…we aren’t talking over the shoulder stuff, we are talking Eddie wide shots and reaction shots stuff. Even for spoiled movie stars, this sort of thing is outrageous. T be clear, I don’t know if these claims are true - they might just be the result of the usual jealous sniping and bitching against stars, I just know I’ve heard them quite a bit.

In this context, it becomes apparent that Eddie Murphy stopped giving a shit about thirty years ago and only started giving a shit again in the last few years because his star had faded to the point where he wasn’t telling punchlines, he had become one. But during those decades of aggressively not giving a shit, Murphy lost the spark that made him so special back in the day, and now he can’t reignite it.

I think that sucks because the world is a better place when Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy and not some comedy eunuch churning out flaccid garbage like Coming 2 America. Sadly, I don’t think we are ever going to see Eddie Murphy be great again, and Coming 2 America is a prime exhibit making that case.

In conclusion, I really wanted Coming 2 America to be great but I would’ve been thrilled if it just boasted some quality Eddie Murphy moments. Sadly, the film isn’t anywhere near great, in fact, it is terrible. And worst of all Eddie Murphy looks entirely incapable of being Eddie Murphy anymore, which transformed Coming 2 America for me from being a bad comedy into being a profundly sad tragedy.

©2021

The Mauritanian: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. A great story but not so great movie. Not worth paying to see but its subject matter is crucially important and makes the film worthy of a watch when it becomes available on a streaming service for free.

The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, tells the true story of Mohamedou Salahi, who in the wake of 9-11 was tortured and held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay detention camp for 14 years without charge.

The film, which as of March 2nd is in theaters and available on Video-On-Demand, is adapted from Salahi’s memoir Guantanamo Diary, and stars Tahar Rahim, Jodie Foster, Shailene Woodly and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Mauritanian is a great story, but unfortunately not a particularly great film. Despite some effective moments, particularly the torture sequences, and a solid performance from Tahar Rahim as Salahi, it’s a mediocrity that’s not nearly as good as I wanted it to be or that it needed to be. One can’t help but wonder what a better director could have done with such dramatically potent material.

The film suffers because it looks like a tv movie. This rather flat and dull aesthetic keeps the story dramatically constrained and so we are never drawn into it.

The performances are equally middling, with the lone exception being Rahim, who plays the riddle that is Sahir with a charm and humanity worthy of note.

Jodie Foster won a Golden Globe for her work as a defense attorney Nancy Hollander in the film but I found her performance to be rather banal. Shailene Woodley gives an equally lackluster performance as another lawyer Teri Duncan.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays Marine Corps lawyer Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who was assigned to be the prosecutor on Sahir’s case. Cumberbatch deploys a Southern accent to his Couch (who is a real person) and it is egregiously awful. When British actors miss on American accents, particularly New York and Southern accents, it is so mannered and lifeless as to be painfully distracting, and Cumberbatch’s butchering of the dialect is gruesome to behold. As I watched Cumberbatch lose his wrestling match with the Southern drawl I couldn’t help but wonder…were there no American actors available to play this part?

That said, while the movie isn’t worth paying $20 to see On Demand, I still recommend The Mauritanian when it becomes available for free if for no other reason than it is an important story that contains some vital lessons for our current turbulent time.

As Orwell taught us, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”, and in the United States of Amnesia, our prodigiously propagandized populace is conditioned to be myopic in the moment and utterly blind to the past. This makes for a pliable citizenry that can be led around by their noses by a mainstream media designed to do just that. This is heightened by gullible Americans lacking the intellectual vim and vigor to swim against the powerful current of establishment narratives in a search for some semblance of truth.

Thankfully The Mauritanian is at least a visual aid to remind America of that which it is consistently capable, namely, brutal authoritarianism fueled by frantic emotionalism.

The film does a service by reminding viewers of a few critical things.

First that Guantanamo Bay prison is still open and people still languish there, despite Obama’s promises to close it when he became president in 2009.

Second, that al-Qeada and the U.S. were allies in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It doesn’t get into great detail or anything, but even that little bit of information might be shocking to those who’ve conveniently forgotten that fact (or never knew it in the first place) and other much more damning facts about America and al-Qaeda’s fruitful relationship, then and now.

And third, that war criminals like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Barrack Obama, and their immoral minions, have never been punished for their atrocities, which is an abomination considering those that exposed their crimes, such as Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, rot in prison or are forced to live in exile.

As The Mauritanian highlights, post 9-11 America went into a full-blown hysteria. The result of this hysteria was the Patriot Act, massive surveillance, rendition, torture and the mass murder and mayhem of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

 America has only gotten more hysterical in the following two decades. In recent years we’ve had one mindless panic after another. There’s been the Russia panic, the #MeToo panic, and the racism/white supremacy panic…all of them delusions and illusions built on minimal evidence and fueled by irrationalism and self-righteous fanaticism.

These panics have been used to distort reality and manipulate people into fighting for draconian and totalitarian measures to combat them.

The most alarming hysteria is the new “domestic terrorism” panic that sprung up in the wake of the Q-Anon Capitol riot of January 6th.

In reaction to this Q-Anon clownshow the political establishment and media have gone full Spinal Tap and upped the hyperbole to 11…9-11 that is.

The delusional discourse that the Capitol riot was a 9-11 level event has led to politicians demanding a “9-11 Commission” type of investigation. I wonder if the new Q-Anon Commission, maybe headed by the new “Reality Czar”, will be as toothless as the contrived show trial that was the 9-11 Commission?

Watching The Mauritanian I couldn’t help but think that Washington and the mainstream media want to do to troublesome “conspiracy theorists”, traditionalists, Christians and Trumpists what Bush, Obama and company did to Mamadou Salahi…make them suffer and disappear. Unfortunately, many regular liberals who have either sold their souls or lost their minds, moral compass and way after years of being heavily propagandized and indoctrinated, wholeheartedly agree with this assessment.

This furor and frenzy over “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacy” is inversely proportional to the actual threat from these manufactured shadows dancing upon America’s cave wall. 

9-11 was a savage and heinous attack, but the U.S.’s over reaction to it brutalized innocent people and ended up transforming the brush fire of Islamic radicalism it was meant to extinguish into an inferno that engulfed the world and torched the Constitution. It seems very likely that a similar over-reaction to the Capitol Riot will result in the same counter conflagration on American soil, and the phantom threat of “right-wing radicals” and “white supremacists” will thus be made manifest.

In conclusion, The Mauritanian isn’t great but is worth watching because it serves a noble purpose, which is to remind Americans of their unquenchable thirst to demonize and dehumanize those they deem as terrorists. Though the targets are now different, America’s evil impulse is as powerful as ever, and so is its susceptibility to hysteria and rampant emotionalism…and that portends a terrifyingly dark future indeed.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Nomadland: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An exquisitely crafted film that boasts a powerful yet grounded performance from Frances McDormand.

Oscar front-runner Nomadland chronicles the working class despair wrought by American capitalism, but still manages to kiss Amazon’s ass.

The film gives a gritty glimpse into the struggle of the working poor but genuflects to corporate power instead of exposing it.

Nomadland, starring Frances McDormand and written and directed by Chloe Zhao, tells the story of Fern, an older woman who lives in a van and survives as a seasonal worker in various locales across America.

The film, which is currently in theatres and streaming on Hulu, is based on the non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century and uses some of the real people from the book to play themselves in the movie.

Nomadland is fantastic and an Oscar front-runner, but it’s not for everybody as it’s an arthouse, verite style film with a loose narrative structure that lacks predictable dramatic beats. It is less a straightforward story than it is a melancholy and mournful meditation.

It is the topic of that meditation - American capitalism, impermanence and grief that makes Nomadland such an intriguing piece of cinema.

The story begins with Fern being forced to leave her long time residence in Empire, Nevada after the town’s US Gypsum plant closes and the once bustling area is abandoned.

Fern then takes to the road to run from her grief over losing Empire and her husband and travels throughout the west searching for seasonal employment.

She makes friends with fellow travelers, all suffering in similar circumstances, as she lives out of her van while working menial jobs in Nevada, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Chloe Zhao’s deft directorial touch gives the film a looser pace which results in a narrative with great space to breath. Zhao allows space, silence, framing, lighting and a very effective soundtrack work in unison to finely cultivate the drama instead of imposing it upon viewers.

The sense of isolation and desperation felt by Fern is heightened by cinematographer Joshua James Richards’ gorgeous panoramic shots of the vast and beautifully bleak western landscape.

Like the desolate landscapes, the deep lines in McDormand’s gloriously cinematic face also tell the story of all the hardships and heartbreaks throughout the years that have brought Fern and her working class kind to the brink of extinction.

Speaking of extinction, the film repeatedly refers to dinosaurs, and the sub-text is clear, the meteor of globalization, financialization and anti-unionism has hit and Fern and the working class in America are dinosaurs destined to aimlessly walk the darkened earth searching for scraps until they drop dead from exhaustion.

The film also frequently references carnivores, the symbolism of which is that American capitalism eats up and spits out working class people like Fern. In one scene Fern is horrified watching a crocodile in a zoo devour skinned rabbits for lunch, her primordial horror is driven by the fact that American capitalism is the crocodile, and she and all the poor people she loves are the rabbits.

Fern and her friends all bought into the lie that is the American dream, and now they find themselves older with dwindling energy and resources, alone and vulnerable living out the American nightmare. They’ve worked hard their whole lives and have nothing to show for it except for the existential terror of life without any safety net.

Despite the finely crafted filmmaking, McDormand’s powerfully grounded performance and the film’s chronicling of the wandering underclass and rightfully bemoaning the Titanic-esque economic state of America, it disappoints because it refuses to name or chastise the corporate villains hiding in plain sight.

For example, Fern works every Christmas season at an Amazon warehouse. The film actually got permission to shoot in a real Amazon fulfillment center, and that undoubtedly compromised its integrity.

The Amazon related scenes seem as if they were scripted by the company’s human resources and marketing departments as they’re basically shameless ads for the corporate behemoth.

Fern is shown leisurely meandering down vast warehouse walkways smiling and waving to other employees, and having fun in the break room with new friends, and telling others about how much money she makes and how the company covers the cost of her long-term van parking while she is an employee. The reality of employment at Amazon is much different, as the union busting, worker exploiting Bezos beast brutally cracks the whip on its employees like a frantic pharaoh building a pyramid one box at a time.

On its surface Nomadland is a descendant of the Sean Penn directed film Into the Wild and John Ford’s famed adaptation of Steinbeck’s working class masterpiece Grapes of Wrath.

Fern is somewhat a cross between Into the Wild’s free-spirited protagonist Alexander Supertramp and The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad. The problem though, as highlighted by Nomadland’s shameless acquiescence to Amazon, is that Fern is Supertramp without spirit and Joad without spine.

Maybe the film’s lack of testicular fortitude in regards to Amazon is just another piece of sub-text, surreptitiously alerting viewers that the real problem is the modern demonization of masculinity and the feminization of America. In this way Fern is a castrated Tom Joad, not only unable, but unwilling, to fight against oppressors, instead preferring to collaborate in her own exploitation and denigration. 

More likely though is that the film’s Amazon ass-kissing is a function of that corporate monstrosity’s massive influence over Hollywood. Amazon is now a major movie and tv studio, and the suck ups and sycophants in Hollywood know that to get on Amazon’s bad side is a potentially fatal career move…so they pucker up and play act at caring about working class concerns rather than actually doing something about them.

Nomadland will probably win a bunch of well-deserved Oscars, but unfortunately the film is The Grapes of Wrath without the wrath, as it ultimately genuflects to the corporate power that created the working class tragedy it masterfully chronicles.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Judas and the Black Messiah: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed but fantastic film that vibrates with a formidable vitality that also features two Oscar-worthy performances by Daniel Kaluuya and LaKieth Stanfield.

Judas and the Black Messiah, which opened in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max on February 12th, recounts the true story of the betrayal of Fred Hampton, the charismatic chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panthers, by Bill O’Neal, an FBI informant.

The flawed but fantastic film, written and directed by Shaka King, features a fascinating story and scintillating performances from Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as O’Neal, which makes it among the very best movies of this thus far cinematically calamitous year.

I have never been much impressed by Daniel Kaluuya as an actor. I thought Get Out was ridiculously overrated and thought his performance in it was too. But as Fred Hampton, Kaluuya utterly disappears into the role and creates as charismatic and compelling a character as has graced screens all year. Kaluuya’s Hampton vibrates with a natural magnetism and intensity that is glorious to behold.

As great as Kaluuya is, and he is great, LaKieth Stanfield actually has the harder job and does equally outstanding work. O’Neal is a tortured and tormented soul, and Stanfield masterfully shows us all his shades. Stanfield’s subtle, complex and detailed work is most definitely Oscar-worthy, and is a testament to his impressive skill and craftsmanship.

Other performances don’t fare quite as well as Kaluuhya and Stanfield though. Jesse Plemons, an excellent actor, does the best he can with a terribly under written role as an FBI agent, and Martin Sheen, also an excellent actor, is so dreadful as J. Edgar Hoover it is like he’s acting in a different, and much worse, movie.

The biggest issue with the film is that its secondary narratives, one which involves Hoover and the other involves Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson, lack a dramatic cohesion and power, and they distract from the main story and scuttle much needed momentum. The Hoover angle is distractingly cartoonish and the love story between Hampton and Johnson is uncomfortably lifeless, as Dominique Fishback is, to put it mildly, underwhelming in the role of Johnson.

Other issues with the film are that Shaka King’s direction was not quite as deft as I would have preferred. The script and the editing also could have been a bit tighter, but with that said, the film definitely has an undeniable energy to it and pulsates with a power that is impressive.

One final issue was the sound mixing. I watched the movie on HBO Max and the sound mix was utterly abysmal. Much of the dialogue, Daniel Kaluuya’s most of all, got lost under the music in the mix. This could be a function of HBO Max, which unfortunately is a horrible technical streaming service, or it could be I am going deaf, or it could be the sound mixing was atrocious…who knows…but it was irritating.

Predictably, most critics are using the film to connect the more recent Black Lives Matter movement with the revolutionary Black Panther movement of the 1960’s spotlighted in the film.

This is an intellectually egregious and mind-numbingly vacuous interpretation of the movie and its narrative.

The film isn’t about our current manufactured myopia regarding race, it’s about power and the great lengths those with it will go to subjugate those without it and maintain the status quo.

Infamous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, embarrassingly portrayed in the movie by Martin Sheen in an obscenely amateurish prosthetic nose, deemed the Black Panthers “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” for among other reasons because their free breakfast program for kids wasn’t just for black kids but for all kids.

In response Hoover unleashed COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) and its dirty tactics on the Black Panthers just as he had done previously to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and other leftists.

As highlighted in the film, the Black Panthers/Hampton were seen as direct threats to the power structure of the U.S. because they worked to bring all poor and working class people together, be they black, Native American, Latino and even Confederate flag-waving whites, against a common enemy, the ruling class, which subjugated and abused them.

Hampton, MLK and Malcolm X weren’t targeted by COINTELPRO’s massive surveillance and infiltration operation and ultimately assassinated under extremely suspicious circumstances because they were standing up just for black people, but because they were working to bring all peoples together to fight against the corrupt and criminal political power exploiting poor and working class in America and across the globe.

In comparison to the towering revolutionaries of Hampton, King and Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter are shameless courtesans to the establishment.

The FBI obviously don’t see BLM as a threat, hell it is such a collection of useful idiots the feds probably started it in the first place. The power structure’s greatest fear is that poor and working class black and white people will stop directing their anger at each other and start directing it at Washington, Silicon Valley and Wall Street. BLM is a critical tool to thwart that impulse and keep the proletariat separated by race…conveniently divided and conquered.

This is how something as innocuous as “All Lives Matter” is transformed into a racial slur instead of a rousing rallying cry. BLM gives away its establishment protection game by so aggressively making enemies out of potential allies, proving they’d rather separate people than bring them together for a clear common cause – stopping police brutality.

There are other signs that BLM is the establishment’s controlled opposition.

For example, when a protest by QAnon clowns at the capitol building turned riot it was immediately labeled an “insurrection” and false stories about it were propagated throughout the mainstream media and the feds hunted down the perpetrators, but these same feds and media supported the BLM “mostly peaceful protests” that attacked police stations and government buildings and took over portions of major cities like Portland and Seattle and turned other cities into looted, chaotic, burning madhouses for months.

Another example is highlighted in the film when Hampton belittles the idea of a school name change as some kind of substantial victory. BLM specializes in this sort of self-righteous symbolism, empty sloganeering (Defund the Police!) and toothless grandstanding that intentionally doesn’t address the actual conditions under which poor people suffer. It is all style over substance, as BLM would rather bring down statues than hunger, homelessness or homicide rates.

What makes Judas and the Black Messiah so poignantly tragic is that it shows that the FBI, which the left now adores, have always been the frontline workers for American fascism and their victory over genuine dissent has been spectacular.

This is why we now have vapid, race-hustling racial grievance grifters like Al Sharpton instead of intellectual giants like Malcolm X and MLK. And why we got the “hope and change” charlatanry of Barack Obama, a maintenance man for the status quo who dutifully bails out Wall Street while Main Street crumbles, instead of the revolutionary Fred Hampton. And why we are fed the lap dog of Black Lives Matter play-acting at defiance while being whole-heartedly embraced by the corporate and political power structure, instead of the bulldog of the Black Panthers putting genuine fear into the establishment.

The Black Lives Matter contingent think they’re Fred Hampton, but they’re frauds, phonies, shills and sellouts, just like Bill O’Neal. And that’s why I recommend Judas and the Black Messiah…not just for the film’s cinematic dynamism or the standout performances of Kaluuya and Stanfield but because it rightfully exposes those bourgeois BLM bullshitters.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 29 - One Night in Miami

In this week's episode of everybody's favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I take a look at director Regina King's One Night in Miami. This episode includes a discussion on the difficulty of turning plays into movies, Barry's bold recasting of the movie Airplane! and me melting down over the current state of film criticism.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Ep. 29 : One Night in Miami

Thanks for listening!

©2021

The Little Things: 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 derivative and abysmally dull movie that is devoid of any redeeming qualities.

The Little Things, written and directed by John Lee Hancock, is a neo-noir cop movie set in 1990 that tells the story of Joe Deacon, a Kern County Deputy Sheriff, who returns to his L.A. roots and teams with L.A. County Detective Jim Baxter to try and find a serial killer. The film, which premiered on Friday January 29th, 2021 in both theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max, stars three Academy Award winners, with Denzel Washington as Deacon, Rami Malek as Baxter, and with Jared Leto as Albert Sparma, the suspected serial killer.

In 1995, David Fincher’s neo-noir cop movie Seven, starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, became a smash hit and propelled Fincher, Pitt, Kevin Spacey and Gwyneth Paltrow into the stratosphere of the Hollywood A-List. In an interesting what-could-have-been twist, Denzel Washington, who was already a mega-star in 1995, turned down the role in Seven which eventually went to Pitt. One can’t help but wonder how different the movie and the history of Hollywood, would’ve been if Denzel and not Brad were the centerpiece of Seven.

It seems Denzel thinks about that too, since he chose to do The Little Things, which is a very cheap knock off of Fincher’s iconic 90’s noir masterwork. Unfortunately, The Little Things is no Seven, hell…it isn’t even a decent episode of Law and Order, if such a thing exists.

The Little Things is a painfully derivative, cliche ridden, visually stale, dramatically stilted, narratively incoherent mess filled with ridiculously preposterous character choices and even more preposterous plot twists…but besides that how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

The trouble with The Little Things is most definitely writer/director John Lee Hancock. Hancock’s filmography, which includes such notable pieces of mundanity as The Rookie, The Blind Side and Saving Mr. Banks, is a who’s who of forgettable films. Hancock is one of those Hollywood company men who make a very good living churning out middle of the road drivel that is pointless and meaningless. Hancock’s summit is mediocrity, and he never clears base camp with The Little Things.

If you thought that with a cast of three Oscar winners you’d at least get some interesting performances…you’d be very wrong.

Rami Malek is absolutely atrocious in the film as the wrapped too tight detective Baxter. Malek is so uncharismatic, dull and lifeless it’s quite remarkable. Malek’s stilted and uncomfortable performance is filled with so many bizarre side glances and preening it feels like he has either never acted before or can only act as Freddie Mercury.

The great Denzel Washington is also out of sorts, and never finds a rhythm or purpose to propel his character. It is jarring watching Denzel, one of the best actors and movie stars of his generation, flail so fruitlessly and wander so aimlessly through a film so obviously beneath him.

Thankfully, Jared Leto really stretches himself and plays a wild-eyed weirdo who may or may not be a serial killer. I am kidding of course, Leto is forever playing weirdos and this one is his least interesting. There isn’t anything remotely compelling about this forced and contrived performance.

In conclusion, much to my shock and chagrin, The Little Things is a frustrating and aggravating viewing experience that was an utter chore to sit through. I’d rather be tied up and slashed to death by a second rate serial killer than watch this third rate movie. I cannot imagine anyone with any semblance of taste or half a brain in their head would ever enjoy this movie in the least.

©2021

Promising Young Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This flawed, very dark comedy has a certain cinematic vitality to it that is compelling, and it also features a stellar performance from the beguiling Carey Mulligan.

Promising Young Woman is a #MeToo revenge fantasy that is both galling for its hatred of men but glorious for its artistry

****This article contains spoilers for the film Promising Young Woman****

Sometimes a movie says something you intensely dislike, but it says it so well you have to tip your cap. A case in point is the darkly comedic #MeToo revenge fantasy Promising Young Woman,

The film, written and directed by Emerald Fennell, tells the story of Cassie (Carey Mulligan), a med-school dropout consumed with grief and anger over her best friend’s rape and death.

In search of cathartic revenge, Cassie spends her time trolling bars pretending to be drunk to the point of incapacitation so that predatory men will attempt to prey upon her. Once they try and take full advantage of her she transforms to reveal herself to be a sober social vigilante shaming men for their repulsive behavior towards women.

Not surprisingly considering the subject matter, Promising Young Woman seethes with vicious misandry that is as disturbing as it is relentless. The film is an unabashed girl power polemic and propaganda piece that espouses the imaginary boogeyman of a pervasive “rape culture” that has only ever existed in the warped minds of Woman’s Studies majors and feminist fanatics. 

The film’s approach re-imagines the misogynistic tropes of Hollywood’s old male dominated storytelling by replacing it with an aggressive man-hating that manifests itself as every male character in the film being an utterly irredeemable predator, a sniveling coward, or both.

In this way it is like a feminist dark comedy version of an old Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sly Stallone, Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood movie where one identity group, be it blacks, Mexicans, Russians or Arabs are reduced to stereotypes and are all the bad guys, except in this movie every guy is the bad guy.

Another movie that I kept thinking about while watching Promising Young Woman was Falling Down, the flawed but intriguing 1993 Michael Douglas film directed by Joel Schumacher. In Falling Down Douglas plays William Foster, a rampaging regular guy who keenly feels that modern life is unjust toward him. Promising Young Woman is the #MeToo version of Falling Down in that it takes a person’s frustrations at perceived injustice and pushes it to absurd extremes.

Besides finding all men deplorable, Promising Young Woman film does have some other flaws. For instance it runs about a half hour too long in an attempt to find a satisfying conclusion, but the ending is ultimately unsatisfying because it tries so hard to be satisfying. 

The film’s yearning for ultimate girl power catharsis also transforms it from biting satire into pure revenge fantasy, which ironically ends up neutering the film’s feminist/anti-male social commentary. 

When Cassie finally gets her revenge at the end of Promising Young Woman, this actually proves the alleged problem of a dominant patriarchal rape culture is just an imaginary dragon slain by Cassie in a Quixotic fantasy. But if the film had stuck to its artistic guns and let Cassie fail and be left to stew in her rage, fury and failure until the end of time, then the movie would’ve succeeded in highlighting the prevalence and power of the patriarchal rape culture its premise so adamantly claims.

It may come as a surprise after reading what I’ve already written that while I found the cultural politics of Promising Young Woman to be as repulsive as the film finds my gender, I also found that the movie possessed a rage-fueled vitality and artistry that at times was intoxicatingly entertaining, which is a credit to first time feature director Emerald Fennell.

My appreciation of the film is also a testament to the beguiling work of Carey Mulligan. Mulligan gives an incisive and insightful Oscar-worthy performance that is stunning to behold for its dynamism and detail. Mulligan masterfully imbues Cassie with a seething and righteous fury that animates her every action and it results in a gloriously magnetic performance.

Supporting actor Bo Burnham is also terrific as Ryan, a man with a crush on Cassie. Burnham, a comedian and director himself, is compelling as he tries to be both charming and passive in Cassie’s presence. The chemistry between the two actors comes across as grounded and genuine, and it elevates the film considerably.

It may seem odd that I am praising a film that has such a pronounced cultural and political perspective that I find distasteful and with which I vehemently disagree. But unlike so many writers and critics of today who find it impossible to tolerate anything or anyone in life that doesn’t agree with them fully, I am not only able to tolerate things I disagree with, I can actually appreciate them.

Promising Young Woman is both a testament to the worst totalitarian and draconian instincts of modern feminism and the #MeToo movement but also a glorious monument to Emerald Fennell’s bold direction and Carey Mulligan’s mesmerizing acting.

I recommend you see the film and judge it for yourself, and even though it viciously judges all men, audiences should have enough integrity to honestly judge it on its merits, not just on its pernicious cultural politics.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

One Night in Miami: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A flawed film but worth seeing because it boasts strong performances, most notably from Kingsley Ben-Adir.

One Night in Miami, which is streaming on Amazon, is generating critical adoration for its powerful performances and for its supposedly timely social commentary on race and racism in America.

The movie, written by Kemp Powers and directed by Regina King, tells the story of a fictionalized meeting between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown in a Miami hotel room in 1964 immediately following Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston to become Heavyweight Champion of the World.

The movie is adapted from the play of the same name and features a series of long conversations and monologues talking about “the struggle” for civil rights and about how “black people are dying in the streets…you must choose a side.”

Unsurprisingly, critics are calling it “timely” and that it “shines a light on present-day America” because of the Black Lives Matter protests last Summer.

These are culturally cheap, socially easy and intellectually shallow lessons to glean from One Night in Miami. The movie strikes me not as an opportunity to highlight how much racism allegedly still exists in America today, but instead as a testament to the staggering amount of progress made in the last 56 years.

The civil rights movement of the 20th century dramatized in One Night in Miami was one of the most extraordinarily successful endeavors in American history.

From 1964 to 2008, black people went from being second-class citizens protesting for voting rights to successfully voting for a black man for president. That black man, Barack Obama, won both of his presidential elections resoundingly.

The Civil Rights Act became law in 1964, and although it certainly didn’t happen overnight, over the course of the last 56 years anti-black discrimination has receded in America to the point where it is now deemed legally, morally and socially repugnant.

Case in point is an early scene in the movie where Jim Brown visits a family friend, an older white man played by Beau Bridges, in his home town in Georgia in 1964. After some lemonade and congratulatory conversation on the front porch, Brown offers to help the man move a piece of furniture inside the house. The man declines, telling Brown without a hint of shame that they “don’t let niggers” into their home.

That scene is so shocking and jarring because it is inconceivable in modern day America.

Cassius Clay, who shortly after the events dramatized in the movie becomes Muhammad Ali, is a perfect example of the massive change in American perspective from 1964 onward.

In 1964, Clay/Ali was reviled by most Americans for being a loud mouth, malcontent and Muslim. By 1974 he was celebrated as an iconic hero for his courageous victory over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. By 1996 he was a living legend and avatar for the very best of America as he carried the torch for the U.S. at the summer Olympics in Atlanta.

Objectively, by nearly every measure, discrimination has been so reduced as to be nearly non-existent. Subjectively though, the ghosts of oppression still haunt black minds and guilt still infects white minds. This transforms the fight against racism from an external struggle against discrimination to an internal one against perceived prejudice (which still exists among all races) and that is a much more complex, complicated and confounding battle to wage.

The chains of slavery are long gone, as are the legal discriminations of the Jim Crow era…and yet the need to project the subjective issue of prejudice into a struggle against the phantom of an external “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” in order to identify as both a noble victim and brave resistor is extremely powerful and intoxicating.

There is a certain sense of cos-playing in the current “anti-racist” movement. It is an existential yearning for purpose and meaning by trying to emulate the greats of the civil rights movement who succeeded in changing the country.

Every woke poseur, be they white or black, thinks they’re John Brown, Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton all rolled into one. They aren’t, they’re puffed up toddlers ranting and railing against the imaginary monsters hiding under their bed.

The subjective, self-serving yet self-defeating woke hyper-racialization of recent years has turned demands for equal treatment into the cries for special treatment, and has transformed MLK’s dream of judging people by the content of their character into racism, and judging people by the color of their skin into enlightenment.

This immoral madness puts us on a downward trajectory that only leads to calamity in the form of a catastrophic conflagration.

As for One Night in Miami, I recommend it as it is a flawed but captivating film that boasts two Oscar level performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X and Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke.

Near the end of the movie there’s a scene where Sam Cooke sings his civil rights anthem, “A Change is Gonna Come” on the Tonight Show.

The song’s soulful chorus is, “it’s been a long, long time coming, but I know, a change gonna come”.

Thanks to men like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke and countless courageous others, change has come… and One Night in Miami is an excellent opportunity to acknowledge it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Pieces of a Woman: Review and Commentary

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 27 - Wonder Woman 1984

In this tension-filled episode Barry and I discuss the much anticipated Wonder Woman 1984. Highlights include shared frustrations over the movie‘s missed opportunities, multiple mispronunciations of Gal Gadot’s name and an enraged me viciously assaulting Barry over a misunderstanding.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 27 - Wonder Woman 1984

Thank you for listening and Happy New Year!!

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 26 - Mank

In this episode of everybody’s favorite cinema podcast, Barry and I debate David Fincher’s polarizing new film Mank. Topics discussed include Gary Oldman’s brilliance, Fincher’s frustratingly complex genius and an obscure old movie named Citizen Kane.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Ep. 26 - Mank

Thank you for listening!

©2020

Pixar's Soul: A Review and Commentary

Pixar’s first “black-led” movie ‘Soul’ isn’t about being black, it’s about being human

Pixar went to great lengths to make sure Soul would be acceptable to black people, but that won’t stop the woke from conjuring racial criticism of it.

Soul, the new film from esteemed animation studio Pixar that premiered on the streaming service Disney + on Christmas Day, has gotten a lot of attention for featuring the first black protagonist in Pixar’s history.

The film tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a good-hearted jazz musician (who happens to be black) making a living teaching music at a New York City middle school.

On the day Joe’s life is about to change following an audition with a famous saxophonist searching for a piano player, things end up taking an unanticipated twist.

What follows is a very existential and mildly entertaining metaphysical magical mystery tour through life, death, art and New York City. 

In this era of aggressive wokeness and cancel culture, Pixar and Disney went to great lengths to make sure Soul was not deemed racist and was acceptable to black people.

According to the New York Times, “Knowing their work would be minutely scrutinized, the director Pete Doctor, the co-screenwriter Mike Jones and the producer Dana Murray, who are white, set out to create a character who would be believably Black while avoiding the stereotypes of the past.”

So the question is how could these artists, who are members of a race (white) so despicable the New York Times refuses to capitalize it, believably create a character whose race (Black) is so superior that it is always capitalized in the New York Times?

As the Times informs us, the first step in this Herculean task was Pixar’s vice president for inclusion strategies Britta Wilson building a “Cultural Trust” made up of the company’s black employees.

The second step was that the production “talked to a lot of external consultants and black organizations...”

And finally the production brought in black writer Kemp Powers as a screenwriter who then got promoted to co-director, the first black director in Pixar history.

If all of that corporate pandering, from having a vice president of “inclusion strategies” to a “Cultural Trust” to hiring racial consultants, seems transparently ridiculous, repulsively shameless and downright griftery, you are not alone. But thankfully the film somewhat succeeds despite, as opposed to because of, all of this human resources inspired nonsense.

Ironically, the end result of all of Pixar’s gratuitous genuflecting to black people is a film that is strikingly color blind in a gloriously unwoke, old-fashioned and beautifully rational Martin Luther King-esque kind of way, as Joe’s race is actually entirely incidental to the story in Soul.

To the film’s great credit it doesn’t tell a black story, it tells a human story. Soul transcends race, or any of our other superficial differences like ethnicity and gender, and highlights the fact that we are not “white” people and “black” people, but rather, just people…all of us filled with hopes, fears, dreams and heartbreaks.

The funny thing though about Pixar being so scared of being called “racist” that it bent over backwards to make Soul acceptable to black people, is that it wasn’t black people it needed to be worried about…it was the woke.

Case in point, Kirsten Acuna, a non-black, woke film critic for the Insider, was deeply disturbed by Soul’s racial politics, so much so that the rather harmless film left her “cringing up until the very last minute”.

Acuna’s specific woke complaints contain too many spoilers to share in detail, but one of her non-spoiler issues was that “Pixar’s first Black-led film should celebrate a Black man’s experience and solely focus on his dreams and desires. Instead, Joe’s life takes a backseat in order for a white woman to figure out what she wanted from life.”

Contrary to Acuna’s complaint, there is actually no “white woman” character in the movie at all. Even though the alleged offending character, “22”, is voiced by white actress Tina Fey, a major premise of the movie is that “22” is a spiritual entity capable of taking any form.

Acuna was also dismayed that Soul has a 97% critical score at Rotten Tomatoes, declaring that the majority of critics who have reviewed the movie are white, and “shouldn't at least half of the reviews for Pixar's first film with a Black lead come from critics of color?”

So if we studiously apply Ms. Acuna’s race-based test for film critics, then the obvious question becomes…why didn’t Ms. Acuna let a black critic write a review of Pixar’s first black-led film instead of writing one herself?

This is why wokeness is so insidious and why trying to appease it is a Sisyphean venture, because it is an inherently irrational, emotionally fueled exercise in grievance seeking and virtue signaling…case in point – the vacuous and vapid woke fools like Kirsten Acuna lamenting Soul’s allegedly troublesome racial politics.

As for my opinion, Soul wasn’t as great as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn’t bad. It’s an at times entertaining, thought provoking, visually gorgeous and interesting movie.

My biggest issue with Soul was that it wasn’t quite as philosophically profound as it could have been, but to my surprise and to its credit, it also wasn’t heavy-handed and politically preachy…and for that I was very grateful, and you should be too.

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A mildly entertaining movie that takes a unique look at life, death and art. Not perfect by any stretch but compelling enough to keep you engaged.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Just when you thought 2020 couldn't get any worse - along comes 'Wonder Woman 1984'

 Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Wonder Women 1984 is the horrendous, man-hating, militaristic, imperialist movie no one wanted but that 2020 deserves.

On Christmas Day the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 (WW84) premiered in theatres and on the streaming service HBO Max. The film, co-written and directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, is the sequel to the smash hit 2017 film Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman (2017) wasn’t a perfect movie by any stretch, but it was a well-crafted, thoroughly entertaining superhero origin story. The film featured a star making performance from the gloriously gorgeous Gal Gadot and tapped into the anti-Trump feminist zeitgeist of the time and was handsomely rewarded with a hefty $822 million box office.

As for Wonder Woman 1984, it is the exact opposite of Wonder Woman as everything good about the original is bludgeoned to death in the sequel.

In Wonder Woman, Gadot’s character, Diana/Wonder Woman is forced into a fish-out-of-water scenario and must adapt to the rigid confines of feminine etiquette in 1918, a task rife with comedy for an Amazonian warrior princess. This played to Gadot’s strengths as an actress and her impassioned naivety came off as charming and magnetic.

In WW84, the fish-out-of-water is Steve (Chris Pine), Diana’s resurrected boyfriend…and that falls entirely flat and fails miserably. The predictably unclever lowlight of which is a 1980’s fashion montage that features a recurring American flag fanny pack.

Diana is no longer naïve in WW84 but the bearer of burdens, and this shift brutally exposes Gadot as being a wooden, severely limited, remarkably dead-eyed and dull actress.

As for the plot of WW84, it is so incoherent as to be inconceivable. At one point a tertiary character yells out “what the hell is going on here!” and I completely concurred with that sentiment. I had almost no clue what the hell was happening most of the time in this movie, but thankfully the characters were so poorly written and dreadfully acted that I didn’t care.

As for the film’s politics…if you like white male hating movies that feel like two and a half hour long commercials for American and Israeli militarism and imperialism...Wonder Woman 1984 is the movie for you.

Wonder Woman (2017) succeeded because it wasn’t heavy handed in its cultural politics, but no such deftness and delicacy is on display in WW84.  

The film makes perfectly clear that white guys, Steve the lone exception, are irredeemably evil and painfully one-dimensional. To prove this point there are endless scenes of both Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Diana being sexually harassed by 80’s guys, all of them white except for an Asian guy who is apparently white guy adjacent.

White guys are even revealed as the reason why the film’s main villain, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal)- a Latino, is bad. A flashback shows his villainy being born when he was bullied as a child by…you guessed it…evil white guys!

Another group held up as evil are Middle Easterners. There’s an “Egyptian” Emir who’s so bad he wishes for and receives a giant wall that encircles his Caliphate-esque kingdom of Bialya. The giant wall sprouts up and cuts off water to poor people and essentially imprisons them…which sounds a lot like Israel’s West Bank wall used against Palestinians…but of course in a supreme bit of Orwellianism in action, in Wonder Woman 1984 the bad guys creating the wall aren’t Israelis but Arabs.

The film’s unsubtle and unsurprising politics are made shamelessly clear when Gadot, who as a former Miss Israel (2004) and a former soldier in the Israeli Defense Force is a walking avatar for Israel, fights a convoy of heavily armed Arabs, and saves Arab children from being killed by those same evil Arab men.

Ultimately, if you love America’s belligerent foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and in relation to Russia…you’ll definitely connect with WW84.

Repulsive politics aside, this film is just appallingly directed by Patty Jenkins, as it is humorless, tedious and devoid of any drama, tension or notable action.

Jenkins made a name for herself with Wonder Woman, and has since signed a deal to direct some Star Wars movies, but her dismal work on WW84 has exposed her, just like it did Gadot, as an extremely limited one-trick pony.

Jenkins’ inability to shoot a decent fight scene, and to exploit the 80’s for comedy and cultural relevance, are calamitous comic book cinema crimes of negligence.

Jenkins doesn’t even plumb the plethora of popular 80’s music in order to set tone and place and appease her nostalgia-craving audience, a tactic used to great success by recent tv shows like Stranger Things. Unbelievably there isn’t a single 80’s song in the entire film, and that is the most monstrous moviemaking malpractice imaginable!

WW84 saves the worst for last as in its climactic scene Gadot gives a monologue directly to the camera meant to be profound and poignant that is pretentious and patronizing…which is eerily reminiscent of Gadot’s other 2020 misfire, the “Imagine” viral video. In that disastrous effort she and her fabulously wealthy celebrity friends condescendingly sing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem in a tone-deaf show of faux solidarity with those poor little people suffering during the pandemic.

A testament to how unbelievably unbearable this year has been is the fact that the best Gal Gadot movie released in 2020 was “Imagine”. It’s entirely fitting that this awful, dreadful, no-good year should end with a movie as awful, dreadful, and no-good as Wonder Woman 1984.

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully tedious and idiotic movie that pales in comparison to the first Wonder Woman from 2017.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Midnight Sky - It's the End of George Clooney's World as We Know it...and I Feel Fine.

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The Midnight Sky is so dreadful it makes you wish the earth were uninhabitable…especially for George Clooney

Christmas season is when movie studios put out prestige films and big box office contenders. In normal times, people flock to theatres during the holidays because they’re off work and it gives them something to do with family or, in some cases, to avoid family.

This year with coronavirus closing many theatres, the studios are still using the holidays to roll out their biggest movies but now they’re using streaming services to supplement or replace theatres. For instance, on Christmas day the Pixar animated film Soul debuts on Disney + and the highly anticipated Wonder Woman 1984 premieres in both theatres and on HBO Max.

Not to be outdone, Netflix’s early entry into the big movie holiday sweepstakes, The Midnight Sky – a film with a $100 million budget directed by and starring George Clooney, was released on December 23rd.

I’m sure Clooney and Netflix were hoping that The Midnight Sky would be the comeback vehicle to launch him back into the pop culture stratosphere…but unfortunately it is neither a crowd-pleaser nor an art house gem, and thus this cinematic rocket crashes and burns on the launch pad.

 Set in 2049, The Midnight Sky tells the story of Augustine (Clooney), a scientist dying of cancer in an outpost at the Arctic Circle who must protect a stranded young girl after an ecological apocalypse while also trying to warn an incoming space crew to stay away from earth and to start civilization over again on a moon of Jupiter. If that sounds ridiculously convoluted or just plain ridiculous to you, you aren’t alone.

Despite boasting a top-notch cast that includes Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler and Demian Bechir, there is no genuine drama to be found in this muddled misfire of a movie.

I get what Clooney was going for with The Midnight Sky. Ever the good Hollywood liberal he wanted to make a big budget, prestige movie with a diverse cast that dramatized climate change. I’m willing to bet Clooney at least considered casting Greta Thunberg as the little girl in the movie just so he could more emphatically make his point and signal his limousine liberal virtue.

The problem is that this movie is so painfully predictable, and so full of saccharine sentimentality and maudlin melodrama that watching it makes you yearn for any disaster, ecological or otherwise, to strike as soon as possible in order to end your misery.

The film attempts to be a family drama, a space drama, an adventure story and a race-against-the-clock thriller, and it fails miserably at all of those things. Ultimately it tries so hard to be everything it ends up being a whole bunch of nothing.

It also features a dramatic climax so predictable yet cringe worthy it made me roll my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a seizure.

I’m old enough to remember when George Clooney was at the top of the Hollywood heap and a highly respected actor, director and producer.

He was admired for being a tv and movie star but also for producing a daring live tv version of Fail Safe, directing the Oscar nominated Good Night and Good Luck, and for his Oscar winning acting in Syriana. He was also respected for starring in some ambitious movies, like Three Kings, Solaris, Michael Clayton and The American, which were notable artistic ventures for a big movie star.

But it has been quite a while since Clooney has acted in a movie that mattered, and his directing career has been on a similarly downward trajectory.

His first directorial feature was Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), a quirky and somewhat endearing little movie, followed by Good Night and Good Luck (2005), which garnered him a Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. After that there’s been a precipitous decline.

Leatherheads (2008), The Ides of March (2011), The Monuments Men (2014) and Suburbicon (2017) are all forgettable movies rightfully condemned to the bottom of the bargain bin at a Walmart check out counter.

Sadly, The Midnight Sky might be the very worst of them all.

In my mind Clooney has always been a sort of a poor man’s Warren Beatty, a pretty faced womanizer who wanted to be taken seriously so he used partisan politics to mask his inherent frivolousness and intellectual vapidity and vacuity.

Beatty is by far the better artist, actor, director and political animal than Clooney could ever hope to be…but that hasn’t stopped gorgeous George from using the Beatty blueprint and using it well, as Clooney’s career rewards have far exceeded his limited talent. But Clooney’s recent recurring failures, The Midnight Sky included, have exposed him to be a Hollywood emperor with no clothes.

Of course, we should shed no tears for George Clooney as he is insanely rich and lives a delightfully comfortable existence…but the writing is on the wall and in the bottom line business that is Hollywood, if Clooney doesn’t churn out a hit or award winner soon, it will be his career that suffers the apocalypse instead of earth. 

The bottom line is that The Midnight Sky is a mess of a movie you shouldn’t waste one second of your time on. My Christmas gift to you is that I watched this piece of garbage so you don’t have to. Merry Christmas to everyone!

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This is a disastrous disaster movie.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020