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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 17 seconds

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

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

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

You would be wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Just When You Thought Celebrities Couldn't Get Any Worse, the "I Take Responsibility" Video Comes Out

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 21 seconds

In response to America’s racial unrest, Hollywood celebrities once again feel the need to flex their virtue signaling muscles with a nauseating, self-serving video.

Unfortunately for us, Hollywood never lets a good crisis go to waste.

First there was the coronavirus pandemic.

Hollywood bravely responded to that calamity with Wonder Woman herself, Gal Gadot, and a cavalcade of her clueless celebrity friends putting out a video of themselves “singing” John Lennon’s saccharine anthem Imagine.

The world responded by collectively throwing up in its mouth.

With Imagine, Gadot and company appeared to have the Cringe-Worthy Video of the Year Award all wrapped up.

But then there was the police murder of George Floyd, an unarmed and handcuffed black man in Minneapolis, followed by protests, riots and looting across the country.

A new collection of entertainment industry nitwits has responded to that catastrophe with an anti-racism video titled ‘I Take Responsibility’.

Ladies and gentleman, the race for the Cringe-Worthy Video Crown has a new front-runner.

‘I Take Responsibility’ features Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, Kesha, Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux, Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard, Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and Aly Raisman telling us they “take responsibility” and “stand against hate”.

The unintentional comedy of the video is absolutely off the charts, as it is littered with sub-textual ironies like the fact that it is shot in black and white (apparently it doesn’t see color!) and is entirely devoid of any racial or ethnic diversity.

One of the more hysterical moments is when these Hollywood dopes repeatedly tell us that they “take responsibility” for “every not so funny joke, every unfair stereotype”.

What about the funny jokes and the fair stereotypes? Who is going to take responsibility for those? Wouldn’t a video made by the people taking responsibility for the funny jokes and fair stereotypes be much more enlightening and entertaining than this dour diatribe?

Other lowlights of ‘I Take Responsibility’ are the egregiously brutal performances.

Aaron Paul, who is one of the worst actors of his, or any other, generation, strains so hard to be credible he appears to be actually moving his bowels on camera. And if you listen closely enough when he speaks, you can actually hear the wind whistle through the vacant and cavernous void where his brain should be.

Debra Messing only makes a brief appearance and seems to have been abruptly awoken from a nap to record her lines. I understand why she is so tired, as she looks like she was up all night haunting houses. Yikes.

The talented Sarah Paulson brings much-needed gravitas to the festivities in the form of ridiculously oversized glasses. As everyone knows, it is a scientifically proven fact that people who wear oversized glasses are both serious and incapable of racism…especially when they have an adorable lisp.

Academy Award winner Julianne Moore appears in the video and nobly casts hyperbole aside and tells the unvarnished truth when she adamantly declares “black people are being slaughtered in the streets!”

I’d be willing to bet that not only are the streets where Ms. Moore lives devoid of slaughtered black people, they are most likely devoid of all black people.

Stanley Tucci and Justin Theroux get in on the act by not acting at all. They are so flat and dead eyed they could’ve, and should’ve, been reading from the phone book.

Speaking of reading…by far my favorite part of the video is the fact that these actors and actresses, who literally memorize dialogue for a living (and they make a very good living), apparently care so little about “taking responsibility” and “standing against hate” that they cannot be bothered to put in the least amount of effort and memorize their idiotic mini-monologue.

This cornucopia of clowns may have set out to highlight how “not racist” they are, but instead, by obviously reading their lines, they only proved how entitled and lazy they truly are.

As I watched this train wreck I couldn’t help but wonder…who is the target audience for this thing?

The answer is self-evident, as the video is made solely for the people in it and their fellow privileged Hollywood elites who enjoy watching masturbatory displays of faux, me-first moralism.

As a not-so-proud resident of Los Angeles and an active member of both the entertainment business and the creative community, I do hereby declare that I do NOT take responsibility for anything these mindless morons vomit out onto the world.

They claim to stand against hate…how impotently and insipidly trite of them.

In contrast…I stand against virtue signaling. I stand against moral preening. I stand against the vain, vacuous and vapid pandering of elitist prigs. I stand against the shameless self-indulgence and self-righteousness of Hollywood narcissists too enthralled by their own sense of superiority to see that they are utterly and ridiculously absurd.

In conclusion, I think I speak for every sentient being in the universe when I take a knee and plead with these imbecilic celebrities to pretty, pretty please…from now on, just…Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 29 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Comedians Must Never Apologized if Comedy is to Surivive in the Age of Cancel Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Jimmy Fallon, Leigh Francis and other feckless comedians cowering to appease cancel culture are committing artistic suicide. They should look to comic masters for inspiration and courage.

As America and the U.K. have devolved to become little more than a diabolically sensitive human resources department devoted to cancel culture, comedy has become a decidedly tricky proposition.

It is within this stifling comedy climate that the question has often been raised…should a comedian ever apologize for offending someone?

None of the greats, such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Hicks, Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle, have ever, or would ever, apologize.

It would seem to me that if a comedian isn’t offending somebody, they probably aren’t doing it right, and being unapologetic about that is a basic requirement to achieve comedy greatness.

For instance, in a recent interview on the BBC, legendary Scottish comedian Billy Connolly weighed in on this topic in regards to his allegedly controversial anti-religious routines back in the 1970’s. Connolly declared, “I refused to apologise and I refuse to this day to apologise.”

In contrast, this week comedian Leigh Francis and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon both bent the knee and tearfully apologized for offending with past comedy bits.

Francis apologized for having worn latex facemasks in 2002 to portray black celebrities like Michael Jackson, Craig David and Trisha Goddard, while Fallon apologized for having worn blackface while imitating fellow comedian Chris Rock in a short skit on Saturday Night Live…TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Performative Groveling

One can think blackface is a bad idea while also being repulsed by both Leigh and Fallon’s performative groveling in order to desperately avoid being canceled by time-traveling P.C. police retroactively enforcing the woke doctrine of today on comedy bits of yesteryear.

Fallon’s apologizing is like a dog neutering itself, leaving it sans testicles and, although it still has teeth, consistently lacking the instinct to bite.  

Fallon has long been a comedy lap dog though, so it was no shock he put his tail between his legs and whimpered out a mea culpa for having made a mess on the comedy carpet twenty years ago.

Unlike the greats, who are fueled by the need to be respected, Fallon is desperate to be liked – a poison pill for any comedian. Fallon’s overwhelming need to be liked is what compelled him not only to apologize, but don blackface in the first place.

Another albatross around Fallon’s and other vulnerable comedian’s necks are the big corporate dollars upon which they have become addicted.

In recent years TV hosts Bill Maher and Samantha Bee have also genuflected in apology to the cancel culture clan in hopes of avoiding financial decapitation at the hands of their corporate overlords.

Fallon, Maher and Bee kept their cushy jobs, but apologizing never guarantees you avoid cancel culture’s axe.

For example, arguably the most successful comedian in the world right now, Kevin Hart, lost his gig hosting the 2018 Oscars even after he apologized for homophobic tweets he wrote back in 2009.

D-List hack Kathy Griffin apologized for the photo of her holding a bloody, decapitated Trump head in 2017, but she still lost her job hosting CNN’s New Years Eve celebration.

Loss of Integrity

For any comedian, apologizing is like committing seppuku, it may seem like an honorable thing to do, but it only ends with their integrity in a pool of blood with a knife sticking in the belly of their artistry.

The biggest reason not to apologize is that the apology strips the comedian of their edge, defiant power and artistic bravado, and only reinforces the conventions, norms, boundaries and limitations that comedians are supposed to be pushing back against.

The admission of error is a submission to the constrictions created by the perpetually indignant captains of cancel culture and will inevitably lead to self-censorship and a stifling of the comedian’s creative impulse.

All is not lost though, as the suffocating self-righteousness of cancel culture may snuff out the less hearty of comedic talent, it also makes for the perfect foil for those with the courage and skill to navigate the minefield.

For example, last year the P.C. police came for the scalp of Dave Chappelle after his controversial stand up special Sticks and Stones hit Netflix.

In the special, Chappelle insightfully eviscerates all sorts of woke dogma…and socially conscious critics loathed him for it, sticking the show with a 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences though, couldn’t get enough and rated the show a blistering 99%.

Comedy unafraid to offend

Chappelle’s success is proof that intelligent and unapologetically cutting comedy that isn’t afraid to push, probe and offend is something audiences appreciate even when the hypersensitive scolds don’t.

As evidenced by Chappelle’s and also Bill Burr’s recent success at hysterically breaching the woke barricades in their Netflix specials, the more rigid the boundaries and delicate the sensibilities of a society, the more target rich an environment it becomes for comedians with the talent and testicular fortitude to exploit it.

Unlike Chappelle, Burr and their great comedy forefathers, the apologetic comedian, like Fallon, is the comedian who gives audiences what they want instead of giving them all that they have, who gives rote answers instead of raising unruly questions, and who spoon-feeds audiences instead of challenging them.

The apologetic comedian is the worst thing any comedian can ever be…safe. And safe comedy is bad comedy.

As Ricky Gervais explained last year, “as a comedian you can’t please everyone. If you try you’ll end up pleasing no one and saying nothing.” Sounds like an apt description of the feckless Jimmy Fallon.

The bottom line is this, apologizing may make a comedian a good person, but it will definitely make them a very bad comedian.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Space Force Crashes on the Comedy Launch Pad, but Still Manages to Accomplish Its Propaganda Mission

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

Space Force, the new Netflix comedy from Steve Carell and the creators of The Office, fails miserably as a comedy but is a smashing success as a piece of soft propaganda for the expansion of American militarism into space.

I am a rabid fan of the American version of The Office and have been re-watching the series during the coronavirus lockdown as a way to escape the relentless bad news.

The show doesn’t always work as distraction, as its impetuous, erratic and dim-witted lead character Michael Scott (Steve Carell) is often frighteningly reminiscent of President Trump during his inadvertently hilarious coronavirus press conferences, but even then the show consistently makes me laugh.

When I saw that the creator of The Office, Greg Daniels, and Steve Carell were launching a new sitcom on Netflix titled Space Force, which stars Carell as General Mark Naird, first commander of Trump’s newly formed wing of the U.S. military - Space Force…I was thrilled.

Then I watched it. 

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster had more laughs.

Space Force, which aspires to be Dr. Strangelove but feels like Dr. Doolittle, is a comedic marvel in that it boasts an absolute murderer’s row of comedy talent that includes Carell, Lisa Kudrow, John Malkovich, Fred Willard, Jane Lynch, Patrick Warburton, Kaitlin Olson, Michael Hitchcock (who is one of the most under-rated and best comedy actors of our time) and Don Lake, but miraculously fails to ever actually be funny.

The show fails as a comedy for a variety of reasons, the most glaring of which is that instead of being a mockumentary like The Office, a style that would have greatly enhanced the off-beat humor, it uses a conventional and rather stale single camera set-up.

The show’s flaccid funny bone was very disappointing but understandable, as comedy is a hard thing to pull off (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!). But what was most striking to me was that the show’s impotent humor cloaked a slick, subtle and very effective piece of soft propaganda promoting American militarism.

The entire premise of Space Force is based upon the notion that American militarization of space is a benign endeavor…and anyone with half a brain in their head and a passing familiarity with history can understand that American militarism, be it on earth or anywhere else, is most definitely not a benign endeavor.

The show even admits that the militarization of space is a malignant and malevolent move…but of course, only when China does it.

John Malkovich’s character Dr. Adrian Mallory clearly articulates this philosophy when he explains why America needs its military in space because, “not every country in space believes in good for all”. That gem was unintentionally the funniest line in the whole show.

You see in the world of Space Force, Americans in general, and the American military in particular, are certainly a little bit goofy, but ultimately, at their heart, are a good and deeply humane people who are unquestionably moral and ethical.

Sure, the show takes some shots at American politicians, including it’s unnamed and unseen Trumpian president, who is an impulsive twitter addict who would gladly start a war just for the clicks, but its adoration of the American military and its leadership, who are seen as rational, reasonable, moral bastions who are, believe it or not, opposed to war, is relentless.

A perfect example of the show’s insipidly slick pro-military American bias is when love interest Kelly King un-ironically explains to General Naird how inherently good he is by saying, “you literally couldn’t do the wrong thing”.

On the show China is seen as the world’s nefariously aggressive, deceptive and expansionist power that repeatedly makes provocative maneuvers meant to bully and intimidate those poor, honest and heartfelt Americans. Thankfully what Space Force lacks in laughs it makes up for with cringe-worthy level historical amnesia and China hating.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a piece of American propaganda if there weren’t some anti-Russian sentiment thrown into the red, white and blue stew too.

The lone Russian character on the show, Yuri, is, like all Russians in American entertainment, a conniving and manipulative schemer who is “on Putin’s payroll”.

Yuri’s insidious plan to destroy America involves dating General Naird’s teenage daughter and plying her with vodka so he can get inside information on the general…how Russian of him!

I can understand that some may think it absurd that some mindless sitcom like Space Force is an insidious piece of propaganda, but that is why it is so effective.

Beyond the flag-waving and saber rattling, the power of the show’s propaganda is found in its seemingly mild assumptions, such as the U.S. military and the militarizing of space being noble and worthy ventures. Space Force normalizes these notions and conditions Americans to unconsciously accept them without challenge.

It also conditions them to put their blind trust and faith in American military leaders at the expense of elected officials. Like me, you may loathe Trump, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi, all targets of the show’s comedy, but at least in theory they are held accountable by elections.

The bottom line is that Space Force turns America’s military expansion into space, an abhorrently grotesque idea, into a sort of soft-edged farce, and in doing so, tacitly endorses it.

If history is any guide, future generations are going to learn the hard way that American militarization of space is, like the show Space Force, no laughing matter.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

'Hoaxed' Exposes the Mainstream Media's Relentless Bias…and Its Own

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

Mike Cernovich’s documentary about the media’s disregard for truth is a missed opportunity due to its inability to fully break free from the heavy chains of partisan politics.

Hoaxed, the movie about the fake news phenomena in the mainstream media, produced by right-wing firebrand Mike Cernovich, has not generated much heat since it was released nearly a year and a half ago in January of 2019.

The establishment press, the target of the film’s ire, has not responded to it with the usual tactics of belittling or obliterating the film with scathing reviews…in fact, they haven’t reviewed it at all.

Cernovich believes that the media ignored Hoaxed, directed by Scooter Downey and Jon du Toit, because it is “high art”. I personally would assign more malevolent motives to the media’s maneuvers, because I can assure you that Hoaxed may be a lot of things, but high art is not one of them.

Sadly, Hoaxed, despite its compelling theory regarding the corporate media’s nefariousness and disregard for the truth, stumbles in its execution, as it is a rather uneven and scattered polemic dramatically weakened by its lack of thematic focus.

As a cinematic exercise, the movie is not quite slick enough to generate gravitas, but a little too slick to take seriously.

Hoaxed makes the case that the mainstream media are not meant to inform the masses but to keep them uninformed and in conflict. As someone who writes often about media manipulation and propaganda, I wholly concur with the film’s thesis.

The problem though is that the movie cannot maintain its focus on that premise alone and ends up wasting too much time wandering down side streets and alleyways wallowing in its own partisan and ideological bias.

In this way, Hoaxed, which boasts a who’s who of media outsiders such as Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones, Luke Rudkowski and James O’Keefe, often feels like fan service for those already in Cernovich’s camp, which is a shame, as the movie’s message about the mendacity of the media needs to be heard across the political spectrum.

That said the film definitely has some insightful sequences, most notably those featuring feminist director Cassie Jaye, and Hank Newsom, a Black Lives Matter activist who does not fit easily into stereotypes.

The Newsom sequence comes in the last twenty minutes and makes the extremely compelling case that the corporate media do not care about black lives or white lives, just about “the show” and generating ratings through manufactured conflict.

Other notable sections deal with both the media’s flexible ethics when deciding to use photographs of dead children as propaganda tools, the perils of Antifa and the imperative of free speech, topics I have written about at length.

These sequences are factually damning, and due to their simplicity, elegant in their execution, which should’ve been the blueprint for the entire film.

Unfortunately, the movie does not stick to that approach, as evidenced by the awkward “Pizzagate” section, which is irritatingly incoherent and frustratingly muddled.

Another stumble comes in the form of a rambling case against communism by Stefan Molyneux. The validity of his arguments aside, conjuring the boogeyman of communism has nothing to do with the topic at the heart of Hoaxed, and thus distracts and dilutes the narrative.

The biggest negative is the conflating of the actions of the mainstream media just with Democrats, instead of simply with the depraved elite of both parties.

At times the film is at cross-purposes with itself, such as when it highlights the media complicity in deceiving the public to support both of the Republican led Iraq Wars, a fact which flies in the face of the film’s common refrain that the media solely push a liberal/Democratic agenda. I think it would have been wiser, and more accurate, if the film stated that the media are not just cheerleaders for the Democratic agenda, but for the establishment agenda.  

Prior to watching Hoaxed I knew little about Cernovich, having never read or watched his work. I believe my ignorance on the controversies surrounding Cernovich was actually an asset as it helped me to simply review Hoaxed, as opposed to reviewing Cernovich.

All I knew going in was Cernovich was considered an alt-right firebrand and provocateur. The film taught me that Cernovich has disavowed that alt-right label, and rejects any white supremacy and neo-Nazism supposedly associated with it, but also that he really is a firebrand and provocateur, and relishes the role.

In my opinion Cernovich’s provocative and self-promoting nature, an example of which is his being both producer and de facto star of Hoaxed, does diminish the film and its thesis to a great degree, even as it elevates him…a problem common to performative and participatory style documentaries.

Ultimately, like the corporate media it rightfully despises, Hoaxed all too often trades fidelity to truth for the glory of its own ego and the familiarity of the partisan swamp, much to its detriment and to my disappointment.

If you really want to break the chains of your mind and exit the cave of media manipulation and propaganda, I recommend you skip Hoaxed, which is just another set of illusory shadows dancing on the wall, in favor of reading Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal work on the subject.

Manufacturing Consent will arm you with intellectual tools that will empower you to crack the code of the corporate media, unlike Hoaxed, which does little more than mimic the media’s dishonest framing and distortions of the truth for its own purposes. 

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Mike Tyson’s Comeback is a Perfect Example of America's Delusional Culture

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 32 seconds

Like America in the thrall of its contrived American Dream fairy tale, middle-aged Mike Tyson has deluded himself into believing his own hype, while forgetting the reality of his past.

In recent weeks, 53 year-old former Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson has released a series of seconds-long boxing videos that show him slimmed down and throwing crisp punch combinations into the mitts and body protector of his trainer and hinting at a comeback. In typical over-reaction, some Americans immediately responded by declaring that Iron Mike could win the title.

The hysteria surrounding Tyson’s mini-videos is par for the course in the land of the American Dream, where people live in a diabolically delusional culture that loves manufactured “reality shows” but is impervious to reality.

The fact that Tyson hitting pads for ten seconds is not proof of his ring worthiness should be self-evident since, unlike real boxing opponents, the pads aren’t actively trying to avoid getting hit or, more importantly, attempting to render Tyson unconscious.

It also takes a willful ignorance of boxing history and biology to ignore the fact that at the age of 38, Tyson got brutalized in his final fight by journeyman Kevin McBride, and he is not going to be a better boxer at 53 than he was at 38.

America’s magical thinking regarding Tyson is fueled by its pernicious addiction to the narcotic of nostalgia.

The rose colored glass of the rear view mirror has distorted American’s perception of who Tyson really was as a fighter.

Tyson was, unquestionably, one of the most talented boxers and dynamic athletes to ever be heavyweight champ, but the cold, hard truth is that he was never, ever a great fighter.

Tyson became “The Baddest Man on the Planet” and the youngest champion in Heavyweight history, by intimidating and destroying a series of tomato cans in spectacular fashion. But Iron Mike shrunk and withered whenever he went up against any worthy opponent, like Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis or even just less talented fighters who weren’t afraid of him, like Buster Douglas.

Tyson was a Wizard of Oz fighter, like the Tin Man, he had no heart, like the Lion he was a coward, and if he does go through with this comeback, he’ll score the hat trick by being as brainless as the Scarecrow.

The current Tyson renaissance reminds me of the recent nostalgia-fueled rehabilitation of George W. Bush by the mainstream media.

Like Tyson and the little gesture of his short videos, all Bush had to do was give candy to Michelle Obama at a public event and he was transformed into a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi, as the media assiduously wiped clean from the American consciousness of all his grievous misdeeds.

The narcotic of nostalgia has forced Americans to forget a plethora of both Tyson’s and Bush’s failings. Like the fact that Iron Mike didn’t take Buster Douglas seriously and got summarily knocked out because of it, just like the lightweight Bush didn’t take seriously warnings about Bin Laden, which resulted in the catastrophe of 9-11 and 2,996 dead.

Or that Tyson bit off more than he could chew…including an ear…in his two humiliating defeats to the lion-hearted Evander Holyfield, which was similar to Bush’s emotionally fueled imperial fever dreams that killed millions in his egregious Iraq War fiasco.

Or that Lennox Lewis badly exposed Tyson’s boxing malfeasance in their lopsided match-up, much like Hurricane Katrina exposed Bush’s true governing incompetence at the cost of 1,833 lives.

Or the humiliation of the last days of their careers, when Tyson fell to the forgettable Danny Williams and Kevin McBride and Bush drove the American economy off the cliff with the housing collapse.

The power of America’s nostalgia induced amnesia is so great that even the moral and ethical atrocities of Tyson’s rape conviction and Bush’s torture and spying programs seem forever lost down the collective memory hole.

Crisis always reveals character, and both Tyson and Bush repeatedly showed their utter lack of it when they needed it most. Meanwhile, intentionally obtuse or cognitively dissonant Americans who deny that fact reveal their own deranged character.

Tyson fanboys on the internet, and Bush cheerleaders in the media, do nothing but reveal their own sycophancy, depravity and lack of integrity when they give voice to their hallucinations and wax nostalgic regarding the alleged halcyon days when Iron Mike ruled the ring and Dubya commanded the West Wing.

The truth is that Americans, in general, and Tyson and Bush fans in particular, can never, and will never, wake up from the delusional, nostalgia-addled, manufactured reality show that is the current American Dream.

The actual reality, that the aging Tyson, a rapist and bully who even at his greatest wasn’t that great, is the perfect symbol of America, a decadent and decrepit empire in steep decline, is much too painful a truth to confront and bear.

On the bright side, if Tyson does come back to fight a real heavyweight and not some fellow geriatric pugilist, he will get knocked out in short order. So, at least he’ll still be able to believe in the contrived fantasy of the American Dream…because as George Carlin once said, “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you got to be asleep to believe it.”

 A version of this story was originally published at RT.

©2020

Be Like Mike? Unlike Michael Jordan, the ESPN Documentary 'The Last Dance' is Anything but Great

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds

The Last Dance is a piece of journalistically compromised, sycophantic, corporate propaganda that mindlessly fawns over its subject.

Michael Jordan is arguably the greatest basketball player of all-time, and the much-hyped ESPN ten part documentary on his career and his final championship season with the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance, which comes to a close this Sunday night, claims to reveal the man behind the legend.

I’ll save you the suspense and let you know how the movie ends…the Bulls win a sixth championship and Jordan is never challenged…not on the basketball court, or in the documentary.

You see The Last Dance isn’t so much a documentary as a piece of 90’s nostalgia porn that serves as an exercise in sports media genuflection in the form of an epic, 10-hour infomercial for the Jordan brand.

The film’s alleged claim to fame is that it reveals never-before-seen footage of Jordan during the Bull’s 1998 championship run. The problem is that Jordan himself controls the rights to this painfully banal and contrived footage, and in order to use it, producers Michael Tollin and Jon Weinbach, as well as ESPN and Netflix, had to make Jordan’s production company, Jump 23, a co-producer on the project, which means that His Airness got the last word on what does, and does not, make the final cut of The Last Dance. The result of which is more shameless hagiography than documentary.

As a business decision, ESPN and Netflix undoubtedly made the right one, as the film is being devoured by sports starved fans in the age of coronavirus, and is a runaway success with sky-high ratings.

As a journalistic decision, though, the The Last Dance traded away any semblance of journalistic integrity for the golden goose of access. Whether it is embedded journalists with troops in a warzone, or the press making deals in the halls of power, access to power is always acquiescence to power.

Evidence of which is that the The Last Dance doesn’t try to “Be Like Mike” with his trademark tenacity, instead it goes remarkably soft on its subject, and delicately dances around his pronounced shortcomings.

The Last Dance feels like one of those interviews with a politician where they are asked, “What are your greatest weaknesses”? And the politician answers, to much eye rolling, that they “work too hard and care too much”.

The docu-series reduces Jordan’s compulsive gambling and toxic bullying of teammates into simply being the result of his maniacal competitiveness. You see…according to The Last Dance, even Jordan’s personal failures are because he is so great.

The film lays it on particularly thick when teammate B.J. Armstrong claims the notoriously bullying Jordan wasn’t exactly a good guy. Jordan self-pityingly responds, in essence, that his being considered “not a nice guy” is the heavy price he had to pay for his greatness. Jordan then breaks down crying and dramatically declares the interview over. Of course, the hapless director, Jason Hehir, doesn’t dare resist his boss.

There is another telling sequence in the film dealing with Scottie Pippen’s “quitting” on his team in the final 1.8 seconds of a playoff game in 1994, when coach Phil Jackson calls on Toni Kukoc for the final shot instead of Pippen. Jordan comments in the doc that the “quitting” incident "Is always going to come back to haunt him (Pippen)…”

What is so striking about that sequence is that Jordan wasn’t playing on that Bulls team, he had “retired” at the end of the ‘93 season, supposedly because he was exhausted dealing with the difficulties of superstardom and the omnipresent media. What did Jordan do in 1994 to escape dealing with fans and the press? Did he go into seclusion? Go fishing? No. He went, with great fanfare, and played minor league baseball, and then 18 months later returned to basketball after the Bulls failed to win a title without him.

According to Jordan and the decidedly deferential The Last Dance, Pippen quit on his team for 1.8 seconds is forever tarred by it, while Jordan, who quit on his team for a full 18 months, is beyond reproach.

The docu-series doesn’t have the journalistic courage to challenge the myth of Jordan at all. If it attempted to be even mildly adversarial it might highlight that, unlike Jordan, fellow NBA greats like Magic Johnson (5 titles), Bill Russell (11 titles) and Tim Duncan (5 titles), weren’t jerks to their teammates, but inspirations.

Or that, unlike say Magic Johnson or Larry Bird, who won titles early in their careers, Jordan had to wait until all the great teams of his time, such as the Celtics, Lakers and Pistons, had aged out of their prime before he could go on his championship run in a greatly watered-down NBA due to expansion in the 90’s.

It also fails to notice that Jordan’s greatest moments during his reign came against lowly positional rivals like John Starks, Craig Ehlo and Bryon Russell…not exactly Hall of Famers.

The bottom line is this, Jordan is undeniably one of the most aesthetically and athletically dynamic icons in sports history, but The Last Dance isn’t an investigation or even contemplation of the man and his legacy, but rather a cultish coronation that unquestioningly embraces previously manufactured mythmaking. That’s not sports journalism, it’s self-serving sycophancy, and NBA fans deserve much better.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Covid-19 is Deadly, but It Will Never Kill the Relentless Stupidity of Wokeness

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 16 seconds

As the ‘woke’ reaction to coronavirus has shown, even a pandemic won’t slow down the incessant political correctness of woke culture.

The coronavirus pandemic is a very scary and unsettling time for all of us. Everyone one I know is worried about their health, their finances or both.

Every cough or sniffle feels like a potential calamity and every missed paycheck and new bill coming due like the onset of economic ruin.

No one knows if or when life will get back to normal and we can resume working without fear of infection and with it the possibility of death. All of this uncertainty is extremely unnerving.

But thankfully there is something that can anchor us to our carefree, pre-coronavirus past…something persistent and reliable that, like herpes, will stick with us through thick and thin. I am, of course, referring to the idiotically self-defeating, painfully myopic and infuriatingly insipid, politically correct philosophy known as wokeness.

Like the ever-resilient cockroach surviving and thriving in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, that strain of vacuous thought known as wokeness is proving itself to be immune to the Covid-19 contagion.

In those halcyon days before the disease ravaged the U.S., the ‘woke’ narrative was that coronavirus was a human problem, not a Wuhan problem.

Social justice warriors resolutely decreed that coronavirus was not to be attached to ethnic identity and declared that blaming the disease on China or Chinese culture - with its penchant for wet markets and eating bats, was racist, and somehow a slur against Asian-Americans. Of course, only the most in-bred troglodytes believe that Asian-Americans go to wet markets and eat bats and would blame Asian people for the Chinese government’s abysmal failure.

Diminutive, two-bit hack comedian Bill Maher ran afoul of the woke brigade last weekend when he went against this specific politically correct talking point in a much-publicized, and shockingly accurate, rant on his HBO show, where he lambasted those who would deny empirical facts blaming China because it might trigger idiot racists to be racist. This quickly resulted in a cavalcade of woke panties once again getting all in a bunch.

It seems though that woke dogma is shifting now that the deadly coronavirus has spread like wildfire throughout the U.S., either that or these pandering nitwits are just brazenly and shamelessly hypocritical.

For example, the newest decree handed down by the politically correct twitterverse and vapid dopes in the mainstream media is that coronavirus is racist because it “disproportionately” effects black people.

Apparently coronavirus isn’t about identity…unless it is.

The aptly named Charles Blow of the New York Times has become the standard-bearer for this new race-infused woke storyline. Blow, like all social justice hammers that see the whole world as a white racist nail, acrobatically twists logic, the English language and statistics to fit this theory of Covid-19 as the ”Brother Killer”.

In Blow’s latest column, creatively titled “The Brother Killer”, he states that black men are particularly at-risk of coronavirus because they make up larger percentages of the vulnerable prison, homeless and poor population than their percentage of the overall U.S. population.

Blow writes “For these (black) men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre-existing social conditions as pre-existing medical ones.”

If Blow, and the rest of his woke minions, wanted to be accurate and weren’t blinded by race and flaccid identity politics, that sentence should read, “for poor people of all colors, the devastating effects of the virus are about pre-existing economic conditions.”

The calamity of the coronavirus isn’t about black men in prison, in poverty or living on the streets….it is about PEOPLE stuck in those conditions being susceptible to the disease.

The coronavirus does not care about race, ethnicity, gender, nationality or sexual orientation…just like the ‘woke’, it only cares about propagating itself.

Blow ends his piece with his usual straw man racial calisthenics when he writes, “History has shown that we are callously comfortable averting our gaze away from (black) men like these. We construct racialized rationales that allow us not to care, to say that they courted their fate, that pathology is at play, that one reaps what one sows.”

In what social justice warrior fever dream did Charles Blow conjure up people not caring about coronavirus and shaming its victims? The entire country has shut down in a quixotic attempt to contain the pandemic and minimize its spread, and no one but the most barbaric sociopaths feel anything but pity and sympathy for the poor souls who’ve lost their lives to the disease.

Are the adherents of wokeness, like Charles Blow, correct that alarming numbers of black people are dying from coronavirus? Yes. But it is also true, and equally unjust, that white, Latino, Asian and Native American people are dying in alarmingly large numbers. In other words…a lot of HUMAN BEINGS are dying of coronavirus…regardless of their racial or ethnic background. The Covid-19 pandemic is not a racial tragedy, but rather a human tragedy.

The cold, hard reality is that coronavirus has killed over 30,000 Americans of all races and ethnicities, and more than 130,000 people from nations across the globe. The disease could very well kill me, or you in the coming days, weeks, months and years. But rest assured, no matter how bad it gets or how long Covid-19 rages, it will never, ever kill wokeness – the indestructible cockroach of belief systems.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

UFC 249 is Cancelled. Can We Now Direct Our Bloodlust at the Elites Who Deserve It?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 48 seconds

With no more live sports to use as an outlet for our anger and frustrations, maybe now we can focus our fury towards the big fight that really matters…the one against the ruling elite.

Last Thursday night Mickey Mouse and the suits at Disney put the ever ornery and defiant president of the UFC, Dana White, into a rear-naked power play/money choke hold and forced him to tap out and shut down UFC 249 due to Covid-19. Thus ended our last and best hope of live sports in the age of coronavirus…at least for now, and probably well into the near future.

I totally understand why Disney forced UFC 249 to shut down, and why every other sport is closed for business too, it is the logical and safe thing to do during a pandemic. I’m just trying to come to grips with how mentally devastating it is not to have any live sports to watch.

First the virus took away the NBA and NHL, then college basketball’s March Madness, followed quickly by baseball’s opening day and I wouldn’t be surprised if even the juggernaut of football ends up on the chopping block too.

Things are so bad they’ve even closed the bars here in Los Angeles so I can’t watch the drunks flex their beer muscles and square off in comically ineffective combat on the sidewalk at closing time. Hell, I can’t even go to the gym and watch myself fight to a respectable draw with my old nemesis - the heavy bag, because of coronavirus.

Sports are cathartic, and combat sports in particular give us a psychological release from the more primal impulses we all carry in our psyche. Watching two combatants enter the ring/octagon and put it all on the line helps us to live vicariously and not channel our own animal instincts by pummeling our idiot neighbor who plays his music too loud…even though that idiot neighbor most definitely deserves a serious pummeling.

UFC 249 was to be headlined by an intriguing bout between current Lightweight Champion, Khabib Nurmagomedov, and former interim champion Tony Ferguson. Coronavirus circumstances and confusion led to the undefeated Khabib bailing out of UFC 249 and being replaced by Justin Gaethje even before Dana White officially put the kibosh on the event. The Khabib-Ferguson pairing has seemingly forever been a star-crossed match-up as UFC 249 is the fifth fight between the two to be cancelled over the last four years.

As much as I wanted to see Khabib back in action, I have to be honest, I am so desperate to watch any fight or sporting event I’d settle for a septuagenarian slap and tickle duel between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at this point…just as long as they keep their shirts on.

In order to satiate my thirst for sport I’ve re-watched a cornucopia of old UFC battles featuring George St. Pierre, Anderson Silva, Chuck Liddell and even Khabib’s bitter rival Conor McGregor. I’ve also indulged in the entire canons of boxing greats like Ali, Arguello, Ray Leonard, Hearns, Hagler, Tyson, Holyfield, Pernell Whitaker and the villainous Floyd Mayweather. I even re-watched the first Gennady Golovkin – Canelo Alverez fight and tried to comprehend how anyone could score it 118-110 for Canelo…I still haven’t figured it out.

The depressing truth is the only new fight left for me to watch nowadays is the fight against coronavirus…and that is not in any way, shape or form an entertaining fight.

Sadly, we are losing this one-sided bout against Covid-19, as everyday more and more people are dying brutal deaths at its cold hands.

In addition, small businesses and the working class are being economically destroyed by this insidious disease, all while the fat cats and oligarchs are once again using a crisis to socialize their losses and privatize their gains through copious corruption-fueled, tax-payer funded bailouts.

While I lament the loss of sports, I am also well aware that it is a frivolous distraction meant to anesthetize the populace so they placidly accept without complaint the malignant ruling corporatocracy that continuously oppresses and depresses them.

Sports have long been a way to reduce, or at least distract us from, the stress and tensions of everyday life, which are only heightened during our communal coronavirus lockdown.  Maybe, just maybe…the absence of sport as a release valve for our anger and anxieties will bring about a breaking of the stranglehold of the status quo. With the masses here in America no longer able to cathartically release their pent up rage by watching two gladiators square off in a brawl, maybe they will cultivate that fury and direct it with laser focus at the ruling class that exploits and brutalizes them.

Americans versus Washington and Wall Street! The people versus the politicians and the corporations! That would be a fight I’d truly love to witness…and engage in.  

Who am I kidding? I know that once sports comes back from its coronavirus exile it will numb us all back into complacency almost as quickly as Khabib will put Ferguson to sleep once they finally meet in the octogon.

Until then, I’ll have to quench my bloodlust by dreaming about beating the daylights out of my idiot neighbor who plays his music too loud. Like those bastards in Washington and on Wall Street, he really does deserve a beat down.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 14 - Hell or High Water

This week on Looking California and Feeling Minnesota we go with Barry's next choice for a must see (rewatch) movie while on quarantine…2016’s Hell or High Water (currently playing on Netflix). Come join us in breaking down this extraordinary modern masterpiece that is remarkably relevant to the current political moment.

LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA: EPISODE 14 - HELL OR HIGH WATER

Thanks for listening and please stay safe and healthy!

©2020

Coronavirus Thoughts and Musings

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

With the coronavirus currently kicking us all in the ass and with Dear Leader announcing that the “self-distancing” protocols will stay in effect for at least another month, now seems as good a time as any to throw out some thoughts regarding this entire viral nightmare that has become our reality.

One of the benefits of being stuck in self-imposed isolation is that it gives one time to reflect and ponder on things. What follows are some of my reflections and ponderings.

PSYCHOLOGY OF A PLAGUE

The psychology of coronavirus is pretty fascinating to observe, in others and in myself.

In the weeks leading up to March 12th, when all hell broke loose in America when the NBA and NHL postponed their seasons over Covid-19 marking a new stage in the seriousness of the pandemic, I spoke to a bunch of people living across the U.S. to ask them what they thought about the coronavirus story.

At that time, every single person I spoke with told me that the coronavirus story was overblown or media hype. Not a single one of them took it even remotely seriously or adapted their lifestyle or began preparing for a prolonged pandemic.

I bought into the coronavirus story pretty early and was genuinely concerned about it, enough so that I stocked up on food and supplies back in February. When I spoke with people about coronavirus, I did not try to convince anyone else to change their opinion, but instead only listened to their perspective. I was keenly aware that to challenge people on their coronavirus beliefs of the moment could be interpreted as “judging” them, which was not my intention. I was only aware that human psychology being what it is, if I pressed people on their beliefs that would only engender defensiveness and further strengthen the belief I was questioning.

What I discovered through these conversations was that the consensus of doubt appeared to be a manifestation of both denial and cognitive dissonance.

What further bolstered this finding was that when I stopped to examine my own journey regarding coronavirus, I quickly discovered that I too went through some stages of palpable denial fueled by cognitive dissonance.

Proof of my cognitive dissonance shows itself in the fact that my concern regarding Covid-19 was so striking that I actually prepared my home for quarantine back in February and at the same time even began lobbying my wife (unsuccessfully) to pull our young son from pre-school, but despite all of that I still engaged in foolish and dangerous behavior anyway.

For example, in the first week of March, even though I was deathly frightened to do so, I still went to two concerts. On March 4th I took crowded public transportation to the Staples Center and saw Kiss, and then four days later went to the Saban Theater to see Buddy Guy. I was hyper-aware of the risk, and was vigilant in avoiding touching things and my face and every fifteen minutes or so doused my hands in Purell, but still, going to those concerts was incredibly reckless.

My thinking when deciding whether to go to these concerts or not was this…”well, I already paid for the ticket so I don’t want that money to go to waste.” This thinking, which my good Irish friend Liam called “Potato Famine Mentality”, is utterly insane. In my mind I was risking my life to go to these concerts, but still went out of not wanting to “waste money”. This is denial in action and shows the power of my own cognitive dissonance.

On March 9th, the day after I attended the Buddy Guy show, consensus was finally reached in the Politburo of my household and so we pulled my son from school, and my wife stopped going to work. This was one full week before all of LA and LA schools were shut down and three days before the NBA and NHL shut down. So basically my family has officially had a one week head start on wrapping our head around the very difficult-to-grasp concept of quarantining. From this vantage point it has been enlightening to see other people go through the same mental gymnastics we did, just a week or two after us.

For instance, days after I pulled my son from school both LA and New York City began debating whether they should shut down schools. The arguments they used were, like my Potato Famine Mentality, utterly insane, such as “kids don’t die from the disease” or “parents can’t stop working to stay at home with kids” or “kids get their meals from school”. These statements may be true but they are entirely irrelevant when dealing with a deadly pandemic. LA and NYC schools were victims of their own cognitive dissonance and stuck in denial because to acknowledge reality was too heavy a burden to bear. The officials in LA and NYC were simply incapable of wrapping their heads around the gravity of the situation because it was in their own personal best interests to not do so. Thankfully, they eventually came to their senses and a week after I made the same decision, they closed schools.

President Trump, the federal government and some state governments, have gone through that same roller coaster ride of denial, until reality crashed upon their heads and it could no longer be denied. Trump, ever the American id, sometimes goes through masturbatorial episodes of cognitive dissonance and denial even in the course of a press conference or in the answer to a single question.

The biggest lesson I learned from my struggle with cognitive dissonance and denial was that people really are entirely resistant to the concept of their own vulnerability and massive upheaval and change.

For example, baby boomers seem to be in deep denial about the dangers of coronavirus, and have been very slow to grasp the dire nature of the situation. Added on top of that is their denial of the reality that they are, in fact, elderly. It seems the vast majority of that generation are oblivious to the danger of Covid-19 and to the fact that they are not invincible, and have acted recklessly and selfishly in an act of adolescent defiance. You’d expect the delusion of invincibility from teenagers whose brains haven’t even fully developed yet, but not from 70 year olds with a lifetime of experience.

The baby boomer’s delusions of invincibility as well as their coronavirus denial fit nicely into American’s overall persistent inability to grasp that things can and will change, and will do so in a hurry. The one basic rule of life is this…things will not always be the way they are now. The aggressively delusional nature of our entire culture is stunning to behold when you step back and take a good look at it….and right now we all have time to step back and take a look at it.

Speaking of the delusional nature of our culture…

THE POLITICS OF A PANDEMIC

The coronavirus is a black swan event that is obliterating expectations across our culture and throwing everything, be it the economy, politics, entertainment, sport, you name it…into chaos.

As I argued in my last piece, crisis is always an opportunity for change, but the things that need to change in America won’t, and the things we shouldn’t change will…but for the worse.

Which brings us to the presidential election. My first thought regarding the election is I wonder if it will even happen.

There have been some epidemiologists saying that they believe that Covid-19 is a seasonal disease. This is good news and bad news…the good news is that it means that the disease will recede in the summer which will give people a much needed break from isolation.

The bad news is that being seasonal means it will return in the fall…right around election time. So if it returns in early November, that means that polling places could be a prime place for transmission and the pandemic could intensify over the winter beyond the nightmare through which we are already living.

If coronavirus returns earlier than that…say in early October, that could be even more troubling, as there is a distinct possibility that the election could be “postponed”. I know that sounds alarmist…but does anyone think that Trump would hesitate for one second to postpone/cancel the election if it were to his benefit? Does anyone think the Republicans in the Senate and the House, or conservatives on the Supreme Court would challenge him on that? No way.

It would also be difficult for Democrats to make a compelling case against this action since they will no doubt spend the campaign slamming Trump for having not done enough to prevent the coronavirus crisis in the first place or to fight it when it arrived. Trump would of course frame the “postponed” election as a preventative measure and would then turn the issue onto Democrats who are being reckless with America’s health.

Of course, this is all just speculation, and I hope the virus is soon eradicated and life returns to some semblance of “normalcy”. But normalcy seems much farther away than tyranny at the moment.

As far as the candidates go, due to coronavirus, they are not as set in stone as we might think they are. Both Trump and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden, are in their 70’s and not exactly the picture of health. It is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that Trump or Biden or both, could get sick and ultimately die from the disease….or something else.

Trump dying from Covid-19 (or another health issue), would, depending on the timing, presumably put Pence on the ballot. It would also kick off a furious civil war within the Republican party that would obliterate any chance for their victory in November. Trump and his personal ambition are the foundation of the Republican party right now, and without his cult of personality, the party will crumble.

Even Pence being the VP choice is tenuous at the moment. Even though he is one of the most aggressive sycophants of the Trump era who has brought shameless ass-kissing to new lows, I could totally see Trump just kicking him to the curb for Nikki Haley or someone else.

Even though Trump has been excruciatingly awful in his handling of the coronavirus crisis and in leading the country through it, his poll numbers are skyrocketing (for him at least) so he may not have to cancel the election to win it. Trump is greatly aided by the fact that the Democrats seem to be rolling the dice with Joe Biden, who looks as though he reeks of formaldehyde. it is hysterical to me that Democrats chose to make their decision in the primary on “electability”, and landed on Biden, who is an absolute disaster of a candidate. He is obviously suffering from dementia, and appears to be having a stroke almost every time he is on camera.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis Biden was totally MIA. In recent days he has come out of hiding and everyone now wishes he was back to being MIA.

Biden persistently appears like a doddering old man who has just awoken from a very long and disorienting nap. Even with the absurdly soft treatment he gets from the media, the incoherent Biden still looks so physically and mentally frail that it is painful to watch.

Beyond Biden’s age and health limitations, he is also just a dreadful politician, and always has been. He is exactly what we don’t need or want at this moment. He is a corrupt establishmentarian who believes in absolutely nothing except his own advancement. A brief glimpse at his long track record reveals a target rich environment where selling out isn’t just a recurring theme, but the only theme.

It is very apparent to me that Trump is not up to running the country, but it is also very apparent that Biden is not up to running for president. I think even the dipshits at the DNC can see that he is not up to a grueling campaign. I believe there is a decent chance that at, or before, the convention, Biden steps down, or is pushed…in fact I’d put the odds of Biden being the nominee in November at less than 50%.

There is a lot of speculation afoot that the current “savior of the moment”, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, or as I call him, Rudy Giuliani with a Prostate, may be foisted upon the nation at the convention. I have an intense dislike for Andrew Cuomo, who is an absolute piece of shit and one of the biggest assholes we have in public life - quite an accomplishment.

Governor Cuomo is out there now bitching and moaning about a lack of hospital beds and supplies in New York needed to fight the plague of coronavirus, but it is his policies, including gutting medicaid - which he is still doing even during a pandemic - that have closed hospitals and removed 20,000 hospital beds from the state. Once again a politician makes it rain outside then complains about the weather.

Andrew’s brother Chris, who just tested positive for Covid-19, is a CNN host and may very well be the dumbest human being to ever walk the face of the earth. I sincerely hope that Chris recovers in full, if only because I hope to meet him one day, call him “Fredo” and then beat the few brain cells he actually has out of his stupid, dopey head.

It has been well established that Chris Cuomo is Fredo Corleone…but make no mistake, that does not make Andrew Cuomo - Michael Corleone…or even Sonny or Tom. No, Andrew Cuomo is Phillip Tattaglia…and just like Tattaglia, Andrew Cuomo is a skeezy pimp.

Besides Cuomo as a Biden replacement, there have also been rumblings that Hillary Clinton would, like a nasty strain of chlamydia, resurface once again. This is unlikely, but considering it is such a catastrophically bad idea, the DNC might just do it.

Regardless of who the candidates are, there is one thing we can count on…the American people are going to get fucked over six ways to Sunday by whichever douchebag wins.

PLAYING PANDEMIC DURING A PANDEMIC

Ten years ago this April 14th, my good friend Ben Morris died from cancer. Ben’s death was a staggering blow to all of us who loved him.

Ben battled the disease for over two years before it took his life. In those years, where he was more or less stuck in his brother Jem’s apartment in Los Angeles or at his parents house in Seattle, Ben became interested in, and sort of obsessed with, high end board games.

Ben, Jem and I would play these pricey board games for hours and hours on end. Games like Catan, Puerto Rico, Die Macher, Princes of Florence and many others were on the menu for our marathon sessions.

Board games were perfect for us because playing them was a social act, we could converse and joke and actually look at one another as we played, unlike with say video games, where there is very little human connection.

Ben and I got so into board games we actually designed our own, which I have to admit was a pretty cool game. Sadly, a mutual friend (former friend actually) stole the idea after Ben died and is now trying to sell it as his own. Rest assured, if I ever see this cunt again I am going to kick him in the mouth so hard his teeth will fly out his asshole, and then I’ll decapitate him with a wooden spoon and throw his empty fucking head into a septic tank.

Sorry…I got distracted by rage…what was I talking about? Oh right…board games.

Anyway, one game that Ben really got into when he was sick was Pandemic. Pandemic is a board game where you work as a team to try and stop a series of disease outbreaks across the globe. It is a pretty cool game.

Ben went through a period during his illness when he was obsessed with Pandemic…so much so that he would play solitaire games of it for hours on end. The psychology of someone battling cancer being obsessed with a game where you are trying to stamp out disease popping up across the globe is fascinating. It seemed obvious to me that Ben was using Pandemic as an avatar for his own battle to stamp out the disease in his body.

Which brings me to today and the coronavirus pandemic.

When Ben died Jem gave me a lot of the board games we all used to play. Not being much of a social entity, I have not played the games a great deal over the last decade. But when the coronavirus pandemic hit I immediately thought of Pandemic and went to try and find it. I couldn’t though. The game is somehow missing from my collection. So I searched online and found a video version of it instead that only cost $4.99…which is a huge bargain since high end board games can run $50 or more. So I bought Pandemic online and began to play it on my own.

I can now fully understand how the fear of dying from a disease can fuel an obsession with Pandemic. There is an urgency and profound meaning to every game I play. When I lose and the pandemic runs out of control over the earth, my heart sinks as I ponder the chance of that happening in the real world. My mortality doesn’t just feel inevitable, but impending.

When I actually win the game, which is maybe 1/3 of the time, I find myself being much, much more optimistic about the coronavirus pandemic and how bad it will get and how soon it will end. After wins I find myself gravitating to more positive news regarding our own pandemic…away from death counts and toward cures, vaccines and optimistic timelines and such.

I think my current fascination with the game Pandemic is just another extension of the denial I mentioned earlier. In the coronavirus pandemic we all feel hopeless and helpless and there is nothing we can do…but when I play Pandemic it feels like I am doing something. The thing I am doing is, every time I win at least, purging my anxiety, and when I lose it is an exercise in embracing humility in the face of a gargantuan existential problem.

Beyond that, I have no further insights on coronavirus at the moment, so I will conclude my rambling by telling you to stay safe, stay healthy and stay alive.

©2020

Lost Opportunities and Dastardly Deeds in the Age of Coronavirus

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 27 seconds

On March 17th, I published an op-ed titled “Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better, But America Never Will”, that made the argument that while everything should change because of coronavirus, but nothing would change because of corruption. This week the Republicans and Democrats did me the great favor of once again proving me correct when they passed a gargantuan $2 trillion “stimulus” bill that is really just a massive bail out and corporate coup, all while fucking over the middle, working and lower class people of this country.

The coronavirus is the iceberg that has hit the U.S.S. Good Ship Lollipop as it wandered lost in the fog of its own decadence. The delusional, the duped and the damned are left in shock, stunned that such a calamity could actually befall The Greatest Nation on Earth® they thought was invincible.

What the ruling elite are doing with this bailout bill is once again stealing from the poor in order to try to reinflate a bubble, in this case the post-2008 bubble, which is actually a bubble on top of a bubble on top of a bubble going all the way back to Reagan. What ends up happening when you reinflate bubbles is that they become more and more unstable and more and more untenable, and when they burst it takes more and more effort to reinflate them until there is nothing left in the lungs to exhale. Eventually U.S. economic policy will be reduced to bailouts that are the equivalent of a corpse giving CPR to another corpse.

For example, when the tech bubble of the late 90’s burst it was propped back up with the housing bubble. The housing bubble burst in 07/08 and that was propped up with the stock buy back bubble of 2009-2020, which has now burst upon the rocks of reality revealed by the coronavirus. The stock buyback bubble is what they are trying to reinflate with the yet another bazillion dollar corporate handout.

The bottom line is this, our economy is as fundamentally unstable as a one-legged stool and as crooked as a dog’s hind leg and has been for decades. The Reagan/Clinton casino banking model has always been just another Titanic, and this trillion dollar bailout package is nothing more than the hoarding of deck chairs by the rich as they throw the poor into the icy Atlantic of inescapable poverty to try and keep their financial monstrosity afloat for just a few glorious seconds longer.

As long time readers know, it wasn’t just last week that I was a bringer of bad news. In 2015 in a review of the Ridley Scott film The Martian, I wrote about how our economy was fatally flawed and that a tsunami was coming. I did the same thing in my 2016 review of The Big Short, where I wrote, “The house of cards is coming down whether we are ready for it or not…it isn't a matter of if…it is a matter of when. You can either prepare for the coming tsunami* or not, that is up to you…but what you cannot do this time around...is say that no one told you it was coming.”

CRISIS AS OPPORTUNITY

I have always maintained that crisis is an opportunity…for good or for ill. The coronavirus pandemic presents a unique set of problems, and the correct answers to those problems could possibly transform our country and society in extremely positive ways. The problem though is that our political class is so riddled with the cancer of corruption that any chance of good coming from this is basically nil, and the odds of bad things coming from it are so high they are off the charts.

With that in mind I decided to put together a little list of things that should or could have happened in response to coronavirus to save this country and its people…but never will. I’ve also compiled some terrible things that most likely will happen that are even worse than the $2 trillion bailout we just had rammed into our collective anus.

No doubt these lists will infuriate most everyone for one reason or another, but as you can imagine I am pretty used to that.

HEALTH CARE AND HEALTH INSURANCE

Coronavirus has shown that our deplorable health care and health insurance system is not just a health crisis, it is a national security crisis, and yet we have two political parties dedicated to preserving the corporate status quo that fails Americans and leaves the nation vulnerable.

Health care must be made not only a human right, but a national security priority.

Pandemic preparation must be as great a priority as our military preparation, as coronavirus has proven that we are much more vulnerable to invasion by illness than by enemy.

The for-profit health insurance industry must be eradicated from the face of the earth. In order to do this health care must be classified a national security priority so that funds from the bloated Pentagon budget can be diverted for a massive rebuilding of our medical infrastructure. This infrastructure includes building more hospitals, building a medical manufacturing base and training more nurses and doctors, as well as implementing a Medicare-for-all, single payer insurance system.

The implementation of single payer healthcare will also have the benefit of releasing working Americans from the indentured servitude that is employer based health insurance and the corporate slavery that is the abomination called Obamacare.

In terms of economics, having a robust national health care system and Medicare-for-all/single payer health insurance will create a safety net that will put American business and enterprise on equal footing with their competition across the globe. It will also free people from staying in jobs that mistreat them, thus giving more power to workers, and will invigorate the entrepreneurial spirit, freeing people to start their own businesses knowing that they wont have to carry the burden of their employees health care or worry about not having health care themselves if their business fails.

Another instrument that would spur economic growth and entrepreneurialism would be a Universal Basic Income. As Andrew Yang showed in his Quixotic presidential campaign, it is a manageable program that could be funded simply by fairly taxing a behemoth like Amazon. It would also be good to see a stake through the heart of the trickle down thinking that has brought the U.S. to this point in its demise. Some “trickle-up” economics would be a wise change of pace.

ECONOMICS, TRADE AND IMMIGRATION

Another national security crisis is the globalism and free trade that has decimated the working and middle class in America so that corporations and the investor class can increase their wealth and power.

Free trade is a national security crisis because our supply line runs through China and other nations, which leaves America, its citizens and military, weakened and defenseless since we rely on the Chinese for many of our medications and medical supplies. This is the equivalent of relying on Japanese manufacturers to build the engines of our fighter planes during World War II.

It is simply untenable for any nation to rely upon others for vital goods, be it weapons, food, energy or medical equipment. For the U.S. to be so intertwined with China and other countries is good for investors, but bad for America.

I don’t think we should go to war with China or be belligerent towards them, but I do think we need to unwind our economic relationship with them so that it benefits American workers and companies, and solidifies our national security.

China always behaves in its best national security interest, so why don’t we?

Immigration is another national security issue highlighted by coronavirus. If we were an actual country in control of its borders, and had even the the most basic competent leadership, we should have shut the borders down the second the disease began to pop up around the globe. But ever the buffoon, the orange shitbag Trump was afraid of acting decisively and spooking the markets that got spooked anyway, and he, as always, failed magnificently.

The reality is that illegal immigration leaves us exposed and it leaves the working class in America unprotected. I don’t blame illegal immigrants for trying to come here from the third world shitholes they’re trying to escape. Much of the reason why those third world shitholes are third world shitholes is because of malignant and malevolent American empire, colonialism and meddling.

That said, when the third world migrates to the first world, the first world deteriorates into the third world. Drive around the streets of Los Angeles and you’ll notice something pretty quickly, this is unquestionably a third world city. 60,000 people live on the streets in the shadow of multi-million dollar homes, where they all shit and piss and where many steal and shoot drugs…and the LAPD are basically mandated to not do a single thing about it.

The cheap and easily exploited labor of illegal immigrants creates third world conditions by depressing the wages of working and lower class Americans and enriching the corporate and investor class, thus expanding our extreme wealth disparity. To deny this is to be willfully ignorant and blinded by sentimentality.

What needs to happen is that our border must be closed and illegal immigration stopped entirely, and legal immigration must be put on hiatus for the next 5 years. If we don’t get our immigration situation under control we are doomed. The best way to do this is to punish companies that use illegal/undocumented immigrants…and don’t punish them with fines, punish their managerial class with actual jail time. The market for illegal labor will then quickly dry up, and American workers (of all ethnicities and races) will have more leverage to demand higher wages and better working conditions.

Temporarily stopping legal immigration and eliminating the often-exploited H1B visas for “skilled workers”, would force American companies to solely hire American workers, thus elevating the standard of living in…AMERICA.

Now, the counter-argument is that this will lead to corporations moving overseas for cheaper labor. Good for them. But the way to stop that is to put exorbitant tariffs on all products made outside of the U.S. All of them. If a product isn’t made by American workers, it should cost an arm and a leg to sell it in America…and missing out on the American market would be a death knell for most any company.

Manufacturing simply must be returned to America in full in order to maintain our nation. If a product isn’t made here…BY UNION EMPLOYEES… then it must not be allowed to be profitably be sold here. Protectionism must be our top priority, regardless of what it does to the smoke and mirrors bullshit of the stock market or the investor class.

If we don’t rebuild our country from the working class on up…our boom/bust economy will continue to collapse and reinflate and collapse again until we have wheelbarrows full of worthless paper we used to call money.

In addition to all of that, while we are building a plethora of new hospitals across the country we should also be building government run housing in order for the homeless to have shelter and be accessible to receive much needed health, mental health, addiction and employment services.

Now…will any of these things listed above, that seem not-so-pie-in-the-sky when compared to the magical trillions of dollars the government just conjured up to hand out to corporations, actually happen?

No.

Coronavirus has shown us that the ruling corporate class in America would rather we all die than implement a single payer, non-profit health care system. They would rather have cheap labor from illegal immigrants than a secure border. They would rather have their profits from globalist free trade than protect Americans from the vulnerability of a supply chain that runs through China and other nations. They would rather bail out the wealthy corporate and investor class than hard working Americans who have been struggling just to survive for decades.

That is the ugly, awful, cold, hard reality.

Speaking of terrible things…

CIVIL LIBERTIES

The coronavirus pandemic is much, much, much worse in scope and scale than the catastrophe of 9-11, and as i explain above our response must be much, much, much more aggressive if we ever hope to save this country.

Of course, after 9-11, Bush and company went to work to turn the crisis into an opportunity, so they quickly moved to strangle civil liberties with the Patriot Act, rev up the military industrial complex for some heavy doses of corruption, and invaded Iraq…not to mention put into place a torture regime. All not good.

As evidenced by the bipartisan coronavirus stimulus bill, the same corrupt and tyrannical forces will exploit this coronavirus crisis for their own nefarious ends. The money train has already left the Washington station with its final destination the pockets of millionaires and billionaires as well as those who hold the levers of power.

The next step is the rise of the implementation of the police state and the reduction of civil liberties. What is so ingenious about the civil liberties angle is that people are imprisoning themselves under house arrest and shaming anyone who disobeys. This is an Orwellian stroke of genius for the police and surveillance state.

Another benefit of more than half the U.S. population in confinement is that there is no opportunity for any type of meaningful protest like an Occupy Wall Street or anti-Iraq war marches or even the right-wing Tea Party protests.

I am not saying that people should violate the stay at home orders, or that this is not a legitimate health crisis, but I am saying it is extraordinarily convenient for the ruling powers that the social dynamic now in place is that to leave your home is an immoral act that could kill you or others.

In keeping with this theme of tyranny, the Department of Justice has asked Congress for the power to eliminate Habeas Corpus during emergencies…with coronavirus already officially being designated as a national emergency.

The government will always try to expand its powers when the population is scared and right now the population is scared both for their health as well as for their financial well-being. People are ripe to be manipulated and propagandized to accept just about anything in order to “feel” safe.

In addition,the technology companies in Silicon valley are teaming up with governments across the globe to figure out a way to track every person to see where their have been, who they have talked to and what they have done in order to “track the virus”. Ummm…yeah…that sounds totally benign.

Some states are now even saying they will stop cars and knock on doors to identify people, and decide who may or may not have been to states with high infection rates. States are also closing their borders to travelers from certain areas. Freedom of movement in these allegedly United States of America is no more.

Another wonderfully Orwellian maneuver is that many local governments, like mine here in L.A., are forcing the closing of gun shops. Yes, the last thing we need when our government, led by a voracious authoritarian tyrant, is declaring a state of emergency and moving to impose draconian restrictions on the entire population, is an armed populace.

So as a result of coronavirus we have the federal and state governments eliminating our First, Second, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. What could possibly go wrong?

As Orwell told us, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever”. Well America, the future is now….better get used to the taste of boot leather.

©2020

The Coronavirus Pandemic is Bad, but the Epidemic of Incessant Celebrity Attention Seeking is Much, Much Worse

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 33 seconds

A bevy of house bound celebrities have turned a global calamity into a stage 5 narcissism outbreak, where they compulsively spew their mindless thoughts and feelings upon the rest of us.

Coronavirus is a terrible malady that is killing people and the economy, but it isn’t the most pernicious pandemic afflicting the globe right now. No, the most diabolical disease currently in circulation is the dreaded Celebrivirus.

The onset of the Celebrivirus starts with a steady stream of verbal diarrhea gushing forth from empty-headed, self-absorbed, attention-starved celebrities, which is quickly followed by convulsive puking and rage headaches from the rest of us.

The most recent outbreak of Celebrivirus began with a plethora of Covid-19 related videos from a cavalcade of self-aggrandizing stars.

For instance, the consistently empty-headed Matthew McConaghey thought now was a good time to espouse his incoherent optimism regarding coronavirus.

The Typhoid Mary of Celebrivirus, Madonna, that aging taut-faced tart, rose from the grave that is her moribund career so that the she could, in the nude of course, benevolently inform us that Covid-19 has, in fact, made us all equal.

The perpetually petulant Serena Williams publicly lamented that she was “stressed” over the coronavirus. Poor Serena doesn’t have to worry about losing her job, or being evicted, no she’s stressed because she is safely tucked away in her mansion with her husband, daughter and her gobs of money.

Serena explained, “I don't hang out with anyone, and when I say anyone I mean my daughter. She coughed, I got angry and gave her a side-eye. I gave her that 'angry Serena' and then I got sad.”

Shock of shocks that Serena’s number one priority is the well-being of Serena, and not the health of her toddler daughter. Serena has a boatload of tennis championships, but it seems like the title that will forever elude her is Mother of the Year.

The Celebrivirus that forced McConaghey, Madonna and Serena to compulsively share their idiocy, has also mutated into song version.

Self-adoring U2 front man Bono caught the Celebrivirus bug and decided to share with humanity an original song he conjured related to Covid-19. Yikes…this song is pretentious EVEN FOR BONO, the Crown Prince of Pretension. Note to aging restless rockstars recording shelter-in-place mediocrity: At least make it remotely decent before you drown us in pompous indulgence*.

The most egregious of all the Celebrivirus videos came from Gal Gadot of Wonder Woman fame, who recruited a bunch of her patronizing and condescending celebrity friends like Kristen Wiig, Jamie Dornan, Mark Ruffalo, Amy Adams, Sarah Silverman, James Marsden, Natalie Portman, Sia, Labrinth, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Kravitz and Will Ferrell, who looked like he had just ingested his body weight in cocaine, to sing a truly nauseating version of John Lennon’s iconic kumbaya knock-off “Imagine”.

On the best of days “Imagine” is a cringe-worthy number, but in the hands of these smug and self-satisfied jackasses it rockets into the stratosphere of saccharine dreadfulness.

If John Lennon were alive to see this cloying, celebrity fueled monstrosity he would beat Mark David Chapman to the punch and shoot himself in front of the Dakota Building just to end his own mortification and misery.

The fact that these filthy rich stars, not a single one of which is not a multi-millionaire, chose to un-ironically sing the lyric, “Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can, no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man”, when there are millions of people potentially facing evictions from their apartments, foreclosures on their homes, losing their jobs and life savings, not to mention the fear of getting sick and dying, is a staggering testament to their delusional fantasism and fatuousness.

Yes Wonder Woman and friends, people can imagine life with no possessions because most of them live a life with few or no possessions…especially now since the ranks of the unemployed are swelling from the coronavirus depression.

It is easy for these inane imbeciles to sing about a world of no greed or hunger because they are rich and nourished. I wonder if they hum “Imagine” to themselves as they drive past the filthy hordes living in cardboard boxes on the street?

It would have been less offensive if Gal and her cornucopia of celebrity clowns started a band named The Marie Antoinette’s then wrote and performed their new song titled “Let Them Eat Cake”.

These oblivious buffoons are so in the thrall of the Celebrivirus they actually thought their syrupy crooning from the security of their golden-gated castles would ingratiate them to the masses rather than inflame hatred.

When I watched these various vacuous and vapid Celebrivirus videos, I didn’t have the insipid “Imagine” playing in my mind. No, my soundtrack was Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” with its wishful lyric, “when I am king, you will be first against the wall, with your opinion which is of no consequence at all”. 

On the bright side, at least the Celebrivirus is bringing ordinary people together out of common animosity toward these despised narcissistic nitwits. I know hate is supposed to be bad, but I think in this case it is healthy and helps to keep our collective immune system robust.

As for a cure for the dreaded Celebrivirus, scientists have found only one…and that is for celebrities to simply keep their moronic mouths shut. In other words…there is no cure.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

*This quote courtesy of my good friend…and an even better poet - The Irishman.

©2020

Coronavirus Will Eventually Get Better But America Never Will

Estimated reading Time: 3 minutes 27 Seconds

Regular Americans can no longer numb themselves with sports and gluttony, freeing them to clearly see the malignantly craven ruling class that exploits and despises them.

Anyone who has eyes to see can clearly make out that America is an addled empire in steep decline that is firmly entrenched in its bread and circuses stage.

The problem now though is that due to COVID-19, there is a shortage of bread, as supermarket shelves are bare, and the distraction of the circus of sports has been indefinitely removed from our culture, so Americans are left with little to distract them from cold hard reality.

With no brawls or ballgames to watch, and the fear of potential hunger gnawing at their bloated bellies and brains, and with social distancing leaving them isolated with little but their thoughts as company, Americans will now find it harder and harder to ignore the truth about their country and its deplorably corrupt media, financial, government, education and health care systems, that is staring them right in the face.

As the old adage goes, crisis reveals character, and the coronavirus contagion is a crisis of epic proportions that is revealing America to be utterly devoid of any redeeming character whatsoever

If America were a sane, healthy and rational country this would be a great opportunity for change to occur…alas, it is not. America is an insane, unhealthy and irrational nation, and so any genuine change is inconceivable.

For example, this crisis has once again revealed the house of cards that is the smoke and mirrors American economy. The American economy has long been rigged through financialization, where stock buybacks and accounting shenanigans inflate the stock market but create nothing of substance for the masses except the illusion of prosperity. Here in America the economy long ago stopped working for regular folks as evidenced by the fact that despite productivity soaring, for the last forty years wages have remained stagnant while and the cost of living has escalated.

The American Way has devolved to become bizarro-world Robin Hood, where the rich steal from the poor and give it themselves. Proof of this is that this COVID-19 crisis will undoubtedly be used, just like the 2008 housing collapse was, as a way for the malignant narcissists in Washington, Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms to come together to assure that losses are socialized and their profits privatized. Casinos, cruise lines, airlines, hotels and of course, the scoundrels on Wall Street, are no doubt already lining up for their taxpayer funded handout from the incompetent boor in the White House.

Bailing out working and middle class Americans though is an absolute non-starter for the ruling elite. The upper crust will throw around vacuous catch phrases, like the deliciously ironic “moral hazard”, to make their argument, which is pretty rich considering the vermin on Wall Street and their cronies on Capitol Hill are so morally bereft it is a hazard to all of humanity.

Coronavirus is not nearly as deadly as the cancerous corruption that is endemic in our oligarchic corpotocracy. For proof of that look no further than Nancy Pelosi’s emergency “sick pay” bill, that exempts companies of over 500 employees from paying sick pay and has a boatload of special exemptions for businesses below that threshold that leaves all but 20% of workers eligible for benefits. The holes in Pelosi’s sick pay bill are bigger than the gaping void where her brain and soul should be.

The egregious economic divide in America was also highlighted by the COVID-19 debate over whether to close schools amidst the crisis. The reason this debate raged on well past the rational time to act is that our education system is not a system of learning but rather a glorified daycare and food delivery service.

Proletarian parents are unable to stay home and raise their kids anymore because it now takes two working parents - usually working multiple jobs - to make less than what one working parent did forty years ago.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 70% of all students are below the poverty line and rely on the school system for the majority of their meals. In the wealthiest country on the planet, that is absolutely disgraceful. The virus of structural economic inequality is a much more long-term and deadly problem than coronavirus, and the ruling class and their shameless lackeys in the press, have no interest in ever honestly addressing or acknowledging it.

The corporate whores in Congress and the White House (of both parties) also gleefully inform Americans that universal, single payer health care, which every other industrialized nation in the world already has, is a pipe dream and impossibility.

They tell us they could never ever pay for something so decadent and luxurious as health care, but then they magically pull $1.5 trillion out of their gold plated assholes in order to stave off a collapse of their own making. It is amazing how the Lords of Finance can make money miraculously appear in order to get things done when it is their exorbitant wealth on the line and not ordinary Americans health and well being.

Coronavirus is a crisis that is revealing the ugly truth about America and the malignant character of its ruling class. The coronavirus crisis is going to get worse before it gets better, but hopefully it will eventually get better. America, on the other hand, will only get much worse, and there is no hope that it is ever going to get any better.

A version of this article was published at RT.

©2020

The Official Coronavirus Quarantine Veiwer's Guide

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 03 seconds

BORED IN CORONAVIRUS QUARANTINE? HERE ARE THE BEST EPIDEMIC MOVIES TO CRANK UP YOUR PANIC!

The best way to prepare for Covid-19 and endure quarantine is obviously to watch as many pandemic related movies as possible. Here is a list of the very best ones to catch.

Coronavirus now seems on the precipice of an outbreak here in the United States. Even before Los Angeles was hit with any cases, here in La La Land we made the decision to preemptively panic.

For example, hand sanitizer is liquid gold in Hollywood right now. Drug stores are stripped so bare that hand sanitizer currently costs more per gram than cocaine…or at least that’s what my cocaine dealer told me.

Since we all seemed destined for quarantine, be it mandated or self-imposed, I thought I would do my part to prepare readers for how to survive the coming Coronapocalypse by putting together a quarantine viewers guide.

Here is a list of pandemic themed movies graded on a scale of one to ten for how similar they are to the real world circumstances of Coronavirus.

OUTBREAK (1995) – Outbreak is a decent movie about an Ebola epidemic, most memorable for a scene where a guy coughs in a movie theatre and infects everyone. That visual is pretty unnerving and will make you glad you are watching in a plastic quarantine bubble and not at the Cineplex.

Coronascore: 4/10 Coughs are really scary these days.

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011) – Tells the story of a viral based drug meant to treat Alzheimer’s that goes wrong and kills or turns humans mute while making apes super-smart and able to talk.

There has been no news about apes being susceptible to Corona, but they do say that dogs can get it. No word yet on if the infected dogs gain the power of speech…but I wouldn’t be surprised. Thankfully, they lack opposable thumbs so that is a war we can definitely win.

Coronascore: 5/10, the Coronavirus scare has not made anyone smarter yet.

12 MONKEYS (1995) – This mind-bending meditation on time travel and destiny tells the story of a group of eco-terrorists who release a deadly virus into the world in order to eliminate humans, and the band of survivors who travel back in time to stop them.

Corona probably wasn’t released by eco-terrorists, but since China imposed quarantines satellite photos show its pollution has come to a screeching halt…hmmm, makes you wonder.

Coronascore: 6.5/10. Think about it.

28 DAYS LATER (2002) – In 28 Days Later a highly contagious virus is accidentally released upon the world turning people into hyper-kinetic zombies.

Corona may not directly lead to zombie-ism, but the panic around it sure turns people…like me… into mindlessly frantic and fearful beings who attack old ladies in drug stores to obtain a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer!

As for Corona being “accidentally” released into the public, maybe by a biological weapons facility in China, I have heard crazier conspiracy theories…that’s for sure.

Coronascore: 7/10. If the virus doesn’t start a zombie apocalypse, at least it will prepare you for one.

WORLD WAR Z (2013) – Another entry where a virus turns people into zombies…this time who are attracted to sound. In order to overcome the zombie hoards Brad Pitt travels the globe looking for a vaccine. He eventually finds one and hope is restored to humanity. I have considerably more confidence in Brad Pitt solving Corona than the U.S. government.

Coronascore: 7/10…same as above plus Brad Pitt.

ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971) – In this film a satellite falls to earth carrying an alien organism, which upon contact with humans crystallizes their blood. I have yet to read of any blood crystallization regarding Corona…but to be fair I am not a big reader.

Scientists have praised Andromeda Strain because “it accurately details the appearance of a deadly agent, its impact, and the efforts at containing it, and, finally, the work-up on its identification and clarification on why certain persons are immune to it."

For scientific accuracy I give it a Coronascore of 8/10.

CONTAGION (2011) – The gold standard of pandemic movies tells the story of a virus that starts with a bat in China and then spreads across the planet due to an inter-connected global economy. Sound familiar?

Contagion also has the distinction of killing off super annoying actress Gwyneth Paltrow. The filmmakers knew audiences would love Gwyneth’s demise so much they even put it in the trailer.

The superbug in Contagion is much more potent than Corona, but the movie’s depiction of the struggle of health officials to contain and identify the virus and the ensuing collapse of social order all seem to be spot on if Corona gets really bad.

Coronascore: 9/10…It even has a bat!

In conclusion, while I am not “technically” a doctor…here is my very cinematically informed opinion of what will happen with Corona.

I believe some guy will Corona cough in a movie theatre and then Gwyneth Paltrow will fall ill and her Goop inspired vagina scented candles won’t save her.

The virus then mutates and turns people into mute hyper-zombies attracted to sound and gives apes extreme intelligence and the power of speech, which predictably leads to a zombie-ape war.

Then a time traveling space ship, hopefully piloted by Charlton Heston, lands carrying a space virus that wipes out the zombies and apes, leaving behind a rag-tag bunch of surviving humans, led by Brad Pitt, who live in the eco-utopia that is now earth.

Either that or this whole Corona thing blows over and we all live happily ever after…at least until the next pandemic comes along and scares the living hell out of us once again.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

The Invisible Man: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This movie starts off well but spins out of control and becomes ultimately a whole lot of silliness. Even if you are a big horror fan, you can wait to see it for free on a streaming service or cable.

The Invisible Man, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, is the story of Cecilia Kass, a woman in an abusive relationship whose controlling ex-boyfriend goes to remarkable scientific lengths to torment her. The film stars Elisabeth Moss as Cecilia, with supporting turns from Aldis Hodge, Storm Reid, Harriet Dyer and Michael Dorman.

The Invisible Man is H.G. Wells’ iconic story of a mad scientist who tries to play God and turns himself invisible, this film version however is set in modern times and turns the story on its head by giving the viewer not the perspective of the scientist, but that of his long suffering girlfriend trying to get away from him.

The trailer for The Invisible Man was terrific and while I am not much of a horror film aficionado, I was excited to see it. The film’s opening sequence lives up to the trailer’s promise, as it is extremely well-done and directed, and immediately captivates the audience by throwing them directly into the tension. The problem though is that the opening sequence is scuttled by its illogical conclusion, as the film quickly deviates from a real-world setting into make-believe movie-dom, thus defusing the tension and knee-capping the suspension of disbelief. Things go down hill from there.

The first half of the film is a decent thriller, and director Whannell effectively uses long, slow pan shots that hold on seeming nothingness, as well as natural sound and a paucity of music, to convey an ominous sense of tension.

In the second half of the movie though, Whannell abandons this successful restrictive directorial approach for more conventional movie making and the film and its narrative spiral out of control and stumble into a morass of melodrama.

Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay, made the fatal error of not committing entirely to his perspective choice, namely having the audience see the world through Cecilia’s eyes. By breaking perspective and periodically showing things from other viewpoints besides Cecilia’s, the connection between audience and Cecilia, and spell of the movie, are broken, and thus we are left with a rather mundane movie of little impact.

Whannell’s other error is that he expands the story beyond the bounds of its natural power. This film, about an abusive relationship, needed to stay within the intimate confines of that relationship, and eschew the wider world, which dilutes the claustrophobia and terror of the premise. Whannell’s failure to contain things neuters the drama as well as the film and its feminist message.

I genuinely like Elisabeth Moss as an actress, as she is a highly skilled and compelling screen presence, but with The Invisible Man she repeats herself and comes perilously close to caricature. Since 2017 Moss has played Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, and won an Emmy for doing so, but her Offred and her Cecilia seem to be the exact same person.

Cecilia, like Offred, is the noble female victim who finally “stands with fist” and fights back against the deplorable patriarchy that has its hands around her neck. The seams of Moss’s work are definitely showing as she spends a lot of her time on screen in both A Handmaid’s Tale and The Invisible Man, not blinking so that her eyes well up with tears, and then blinking so that the tear gracefully falls down her cheek. She also locks her jaw and steels her eyes in an act of defiance that always feels a lot more faux than formidable.

Moss certainly has greatness within her, but I wish I could see her get lost in a performance rather than being forced to see her act.

The rest of the cast are fine, if underwhelming.

Aldis Hodge is a very likable actor and does the best he can with his under written and rather illogical character James.

Stormy Reid is another likeable screen presence but she too is handed a thin character that doesn’t amount to much.

Michael Dormand and Oliver Jackson-Cohen fall pretty flat in their roles which needed to be much sharper for the premise of the film to work.

The Invisible Man is obviously a #MeToo allegory about the patriarchy and the “gaslighting” of women, and that is actually a pretty fascinating take on the story. The feminist politics of the movie and the portrayal of an abused woman’s PTSD work very well in the first half, but they do lose steam and coherence in the second half.

Another troubling thing of note in the movie is its racial politics, which can be boiled down to this… The Invisible Man movie doesn’t hate all men…just the white ones. It is made very clear throughout that The invisible Man wants all white men to vanish. Not only is every single white man in the movie is bad, but every bad person in the film is white. Every single one. The villain, his brother and even some throw away small characters are the token evil white men.

I have no issue with the villain and his brother being white…but what I find disturbing is the film’s decision to paint all of the even mildly prominent white male characters as bad.

For instance, there is a scene where Cecilia goes for a job interview and her interviewer is a nerdy white guy. The scene and the nerdy white guy character are not very important…which is why it is so striking that the choice was made to have this nerdy white guy sexually harass Cecilia. Instead of just a throw away character with meaningless dialogue, this choice of having him be a predator sends a clear and undeniable message, that all white men are intrinsically evil. The choice to have this sexually harassing nerd be white is also no accident. He could have been any race or ethnicity…but he was specifically white.

Further proof of the film’s anti-white racial politics are seen when James, who is a black cop, sits down with a white cop to speak with Cecilia. Cecilia won’t speak freely with the white cop in the room, so James asks him to leave. You may think that this scene makes sense devoid of the cop’s race as Cecilia is friends with James and wants to confide in him…this is true…but just like the sexually harassing nerdy architect, the choice here is subtle but very deliberate. They could have had the other cop be of any race or ethnicity they wanted…he could have been black, Asian, Latino…a woman…but they didn’t, they made him white and once again reinforced the message that not all men, but just the white men, cannot be trusted.

Of course Aldis Hodge’s character, James, is black and is a really good guy…a great father and friend who is patient and kind and never even considers being inappropriate with Cecilia.

The only reason I bring this up is because it struck me as being such a blatant piece of racist misandry (with racism defined as - "prejudice, discrimination or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity” and misandry defined as “dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against men”) as to be propaganda. I would certainly mention the same thing if other races, ethnicities or genders were universally painted with such a negative brush by a film.

Regardless of this questionable ideology, I would still have been all on board with The Invisible Man if it had just been consistently good, and sadly, it isn’t.

In conclusion, The Invisible Man never lives up to the hype, to its trailer or to its source material, and thus squanders a golden cinematic opportunity. I do not recommend spending your time and money seeing this film in the theatre, but if you are interested in seeing it at all then you should check it out on Netflix, cable or a streaming service when it becomes available.

©2020

Good Riddance to Harvey Weinstein, A Repugnant Pig Who Brutalized Both Women and Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 seconds

Harvey Weinstein has ruled Hollywood for the last three decades, harassing colleagues not only over sex, but also art; assaulting not only women, but also movies. His long and thuggish reign is finally over.

The first blockbuster that Harvey Weinstein produced was Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In that movie there is a male rapist named Zed, who gets his comeuppance at the hands of one of his victims, crime boss Marsellus Wallace. Once Wallace escapes Zed’s clutches, with the help of Butch (Bruce Willis), he promises to extract revenge on Zed by getting “medieval on his ass”.

“Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead,” Butch tells his girlfriend Fabienne,  after he returns with Zed’s chopper as a trophy.

Zed is Harvey Weinstein…grotesque and vile…and about to get payback for his depravity.

Unlike Zed, Weinstein isn’t dead…but his iron grip on Hollywood certainly is. With Weinstein’s conviction today on one count of sexual assault and another on rape in the third degree, he is either going to prison or into exile, with any chance of a return to the film business he so dominated for the last thirty years, long gone.

As the Weinstein era officially comes to an end it is worth looking back on the good, the bad and the very ugly of it all.

It is sort of amusing that Harvey’s most notable accomplishment is that he was the unwitting father of the #MeToo movement. It was when his degenerate, lascivious and predatory behavior over the course of his remarkable career finally became public in 2017, that #MeToo was born.

Weinstein’s also culpable for instigating the relentless campaigning for Academy Awards, a nasty sport that began in the 90’s and continues to this day. His most striking victory at the Oscars came in 1998 when he willed Shakespeare in Love over the Best Picture finish line ahead of the odds-on favorite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

In terms of cinema, Weinstein’s greatest legacy was that he was directly responsible for the glorious independent cinema movement of the 1990’s. The movie that started it all was, ironically, Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 Palme d’Or winning hit Sex, Lies and Videotape, produced by Weinstein.

Weinstein not only made the career of Oscar winner Soderbergh, but also 90’s cinema darlings and current Hollywood cornerstones Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow among many, many others.

Harvey’s business blue print was simple, he would take art house movies and market them aggressively. His brand was that of independent cinema with big bucks behind it…and it worked exceedingly well, especially in the 90’s.

Despite his success at elevating independent movies, Weinstein was also notorious for being a brutish bully and egotistical control freak when it came to the film’s he produced and distributed.

Weinstein was a pig in the china shop of cinema, and would often demand directors make enormous cuts to their films in order to get them to his preferred running time. He didn’t just do this with nobodies…he even strong armed cinematic masters like Martin Scorsese, whom he demanded cut 40 minutes off of Gangs of New York. Scorsese, like nearly everyone else in Weinstein world, acquiesced, and the movie and the art of cinema, suffered for it.

Like Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn an Robert Evans before him, Weinstein was the archetypal over-stuffed movie mogul. But with Weinstein’s conviction, his time in Hollywood is thankfully over, and it seems the movie mogul era itself is waning in Hollywood.

Yes, there will still be perverts and predators among Hollywood’s most powerful, that is unavoidable, but at least women will no longer be silent about it. And in terms of artistic freedom and directors being forced by power hungry Hollywood big shots to take a hatchet to their films, those days too are receding very quickly.

The obsolescence of Weinstein world-view is highlighted by the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon, who have a very different business model than the coarse and crass Weinstein approach.

These streaming services have very deep pockets and an insatiable hunger for new material, but unlike Weinstein, they offer artistic autonomy, not arrogant authoritarianism.

For instance, Netflix wanted to work with Martin Scorsese so they financed his last film The Irishman. That movie ran three hours and thirty minutes, and in the hands of Harvey Weinstein would have been, like Gangs of New York, butchered beyond recognition. Netflix, on the other hand, didn’t lay a glove on it, and let Scorsese do exactly what Scorsese does best…make the movie he wants to make…and the art of cinema was better for it.

The bottom line regarding Harvey Weinstein’s conviction is this…good riddance to bad rubbish. The women of Hollywood and the art of cinema are much safer today without Harvey Weinstein and his filthy hands pawing all over them.

Zed is dead, baby. Zed is dead. And we are all better off because of it.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

6th Annual Slip-Me-A-Mickey™ Awards: 2019 Edition

The Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards are a tribute to the absolute worst that film and entertainment has to offer for the year. Again, the qualifying rules are simple, I just had to have seen the film for it to be eligible. This means that at one point I had an interest in the film and put the effort in to see it, which may explain why I am so angry about it being awful. So any vitriol I may spew during this awards presentation shouldn't be taken personally by the people mentioned, it is really anger at myself for getting duped into watching.

The prizes are also pretty simple. The winners/losers receive nothing but my temporary scorn. If you are a winner/loser don't fret, because this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® loser/winner could always be next years Mickey™® winner!! Remember…you are only as good as your last film!!

Now…onto the awards!

WORST FILM OF THE YEAR

Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker - The geniuses at Disney decided it would be a good idea to strip the final film of the Skywalker saga of all dramatic consequences…well done shitbags! A mind numbingly incoherent movie that does away with death…and drama…and interest.

Knives Out - This is less a whodunit than a who-inherits-it. A film so full of white self loathing it should run for the Democratic nomination. It is nice to see director Rian Johnson ruining original films after he ruined his Star Wars movie.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix - One of the cheapest, least consequential and poorly made superhero movies in recent memory. Thankfully it is so flimsy you literally forget it as you watch it.

The Souvenir - This art house poseur is such a vacuous and pretentious piece of garbage it made me want to shoot heroin into my eyes. A truly awful film.

AND THE LOSER IS…Knives Out - If watching terrible over-acting, being completely bored to tears, and hating white people is your thing…then this steaming pile of shit is for you. This mess of a movie is so self-satisfied with its wokeness it is incessantly imbecilic to the point of absurdity. A glorious monument to everything that is currently wrong with Hollywood.

WORST PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR - Julie Hagerty - Marriage Story : Julie Haggerty is a tour-de-force of awfulness in Marriage Story. Haggerty didn’t light up the screen but made me want to light myself on fire every time she appeared. Haggerty’s forced and strained performance felt like watching someone have a stroke while you are having a stroke.

WORST SCENE OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story - Being Alive : You would be hard pressed to find a worse scene in cinema in recent history than the one in Marriage Story where Adam Driver gets up and sings “Being Alive” by Stephen Sondheim at a karaoke bar. Driver is a shitty actor…and this is a shitty movie…but this scene…which is interminable…is the apex mountain of pretentious shittiness. I have never wished harder for a random act of violence in a movie than I did watching this scene.

MOST OVERRATED FILM OF THE YEAR - Marriage Story : Establishment critics adore Noah Baumbach for some mysterious reason (I have a theory to explain it called the Elvis Costello Theory!). Marriage Story was Baumbach at his most pretentious and phony…and he brought the sycophantic worst out of his adoring critics. The praise for this movie is utterly baffling as this is an actively awful movie. The performances are dreadful, the writing trite and the direction amateurish…but besides that it was really good.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN CINEMATIC MALPRACTICE - JJ Abrams : Rise of Skywalker - It takes a special kind of asshole to take a gigantic dump on a beloved forty year old movie franchise…;and JJ Abrams is that asshole. Abrams direction on Rise of Skywalker is jaw droppingly atrocious. The decision to remove death from the Star Wars universe basically undermined the entirety of the previous collection of films. His inability to even tell the most rudimentary of stories, or to put together a coherent film…earns JJ Abrams his Special Achievement in Cinematic Malpractice.

P.O.S. HALL OF FAME

Jeffrey Epstein - Epstein gets his much deserved plaque at the POS Hall of Fame this year for being an insatiable pederast, sexual predator, Israeli spy and for not even having the common decency to kill himself. Epstein is dead of course, but if you think he actually hung himself I have a no-longer-a-Virgin Island to sell you, round-trip Lolita Express transportation included.

Epstein’s fortune, which he used to get close to people in power whom he then compromised by luring them to his underage sex parties, is a complete mirage, no doubt created by Israeli intelligence in order to give him cover as he plied his despicable trade.

Speaking of despicable…Epstein’s client list is a who’s who of scumbags. Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, John Kerry, Tony Blair…and even everybody’s favorite douchebag, Alan Dershowitz. No doubt many, if not all, of Epstein’s clients will soon be joining him in the POS Hall of Fame…and with any luck they’ll also be joining him in hell soon too.

If you want to understand the demonic cult at the heart of the ruling elite and powerful in America and across the globe…look closely at the Epstein affair. This is who these people are…and their brazen murder of Epstein, and the media’s allergy to actually taking the story seriously, reveals their depravity and arrogance.

P.O.S. ALL-STARS

Bret Bed Bug Stephens - Stephens has always been a gigantic piece of shit…but he raised his game this year with his chickenshit claims that people pointing out his awfulness were anti-semitic, which was quickly followed by his attempt to get one of said critics who called him a “bed bug” fired. Then Mr. Bed Bug wrote a repugnant piece boasting of his and his fellows Jews’ superiority over other peoples. I look forward to picking Mr. Bed Bug’s teeth out of my knuckles one day.

Chris “Fredo” Cuomo - Chris Cuomo is easily the dumbest person to have ever appeared on television…which is an astounding achievement. Cuomo, who hosts an unwatchable program on CNN, makes the POS All Stars this year by threatening some guy at a party who called him “Fredo”. Cuomo claimed that calling Italians “Fredo” was just like calling black people the “n-word”. Ok Fredo…oops…is it better if I call you a fucking numbnuts dago greaseball guinea wop twat? Or better yet…how bout when i meet you I don’t say anything and just gouge your eyes out and skull fuck you, you useless piece of shit.

And thus concludes another Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® awards. If you are one of the people who “won” this year I ask you to please not to take it personally and also to try and do better next year….because remember…this years Slip-Me-A-Mickey™® award winner could be next year’s Mickey™® Award winner!!

©2020

6th Annual Mickey™® Awards: 2019 Edition

Estimated Reading Time: The Mickey™® Awards are much more prestigious than the Oscars, and unlike our lesser crosstown rival, we here at The Mickeys™® do not limit acceptance speech times. There will be no classless playing off by the orchestra here…mostly because we don’t have an orchestra. Regardless… expect this awards show article to last, at a minimum, approximately 5 hours and 48 minutes.

The ultimate awards show is upon us…are you ready? The Mickeys™® are far superior to every other award imaginable…be it the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Grammy, the Pulitzer or even the Nobel. The Mickey™® is the mountaintop of not just artistic but human achievement, which is why they always take place AFTER the Oscars!

This year has been a fantastic one for cinema with a multitude of outstanding films eligible for a Mickey™® award. Actors, actresses, writers, cinematographers and directors are all sweating and squirming right now in anticipation of the Mickey™® nominations and winners. Remember, even a coveted Mickey™® nomination is a career and life changing event.

Before we get to what everyone is here for…a quick rundown of the rules and regulations of The Mickeys™®. The Mickeys™® are selected by me. I am judge, jury and executioner. The only films eligible are films I have actually seen, be it in the theatre, via screener, cable, Netflix or VOD. I do not see every film because as we all know, the overwhelming majority of films are God-awful, and I am a working man so I must be pretty selective. So that means that just getting me to actually watch your movie is a tremendous accomplishment in and of itself…never mind being nominated or winning!

The Prizes!! The winners of The Mickey™® award will receive one acting coaching session with me FOR FREE!!! Yes…you read that right…FOR FREE!! Non-acting category winners receive a free lunch* with me at Fatburger (*lunch is considered one "sandwich" item, one order of small fries, you aren't actors so I know you can eat carbs, and one beverage….yes, your beverage can be a shake, you fat bastards). Actors who win and don't want an acting coaching session but would prefer the lunch…can still go straight to hell…but I am legally obligated to inform you that, yes, there WILL BE SUBSTITUTIONS allowed with The Mickey™® Awards prizes. If you want to go to lunch I will gladly pay for your meal…and the sterling conversation will be entirely free of charge.

Enough with the formalities…let's start the festivities!!

Is everybody in? Is everybody in? The ceremony is about to begin...

Ladies and gentlemen…welcome to the fifth annual Mickey™® Awards!!!

Best Cinematography

Joker - Lawrence Sher : Sher was a relative unknown, at least to me, prior to Joker. His work on the film is truly remarkable as he composes really exquisite classical shots and juxtaposes them against fluid shots that in a thrilling dance with lead actor Joaquin Phoenix.

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - Robert Richardson : Richardson is one of my all-time favorite cinematographers. His work with Oliver Stone in the late 80’s and early 90’s was revolutionary (JFK for instance). He has proven himself to be a very flexible and adaptable talent and his work in this film is sublime. The last shot of the film, where Leo Dicaprio’s Rick Dalton walks up Sharon Tate’s driveway, is a glorious piece of cinematic myth making.

1917 - Roger Deakins : Deakins is Deakins. The guy is a master, as evidenced by his previous Mickey award for Sicario (2015) and he brings all his formidable talent and skill to bear on the “one-shot” structure of 1917. For all the gimmickry of the one-shot approach, what impressed me so much about Deakins work here is how he was able to continually frame such gorgeous shots while constantly on the move.

Ad Astra - Hoyte Van Hoytema : Hoytema is another of my favorite cinematographers working today. He is already a Mickey Award winner (Dunkirk 2017) and his work on Ad Astra is magnificent. He paints the film with a bleak palette and vivid contrast that accentuates the narrative and is gorgeous to look at.

The Irishman - Rodgrio Prieto : Prieto’s work on The Irishman is superb as he perfectly paints the film with a rather lush and nostalgic sense that contrasts well with his camera movement and framing.

Parasite - Hong Kong-pyo : Hong is someone I am not familiar with…but his work on Parasite is so precise it is a joy to behold. Hong’s greatest strength is in his camera placement, as he uses it as a a way to draw the audience into the narrative while also keeping them at a cool emotional distance.

And The Mickey goes to…Lawrence Sher - Joker : Sher pulls off the big upset going against heavyweights like Deakins, Richardson and Hoytema. Joker is beautifully and artfully photographed and Sher’s work was a major factor in the films artistic success.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Irishman - Steven Zaillian’s ability to contain and focus the sprawling story of Frank Sheeran while keeping things tight and dramatic, is impressive.

Joker - Todd Phillips was able to imbue comic book intellectual property with profoundly insightful political and social commentary. Wow.

The Two Popes - Anthony McCarten created multi-dimensional characters where others would have made card board cutouts. Too bad his director undermined his fantastic writing.

Transit - Christian Petzold adapted a book about the holocaust and made it about modern times. It is chillingly effective in subtly showing the similarities of the rise of fascism then and now.

And The Mickey goes to…Todd Phillips - Joker : Todd Phillips must have sold his soul to the devil because nothing in his prior career would give any indication he was capable of such intelligence and artistry. Now he has a Mickey™®! The world is a wonderful place.

Best Original Screenplay

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - Tarantino is an even better writer than he is a director…which is a staggering thought to contemplate considering his directing greatness. OUATIH is a crackling script that holds on tight…but not too tight that it loses its humanity. Extraordinarily well done.

Parasite - Bong Joon-ho’s script is a whirling and twirling piece of magnificence. As original and well-crafted a screenplay as you’ll find.

Ad Astra - James Grey’s script is the most psychologically mature and resonant of the entire year. It is an utter field day for anyone with any background in Jungian psychology.

A Hidden Life - Terrence Malick brings the spiritual struggles of a anti-Nazi crusader down to earth in the most glorious and profound way.

Ford v Ferrari - James Mangold gives us a rip-roaring script that covers a lot of ground but never loses its way.

And The Mickey goes to…Quentin Tarantino - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Tarantino’s ability to write characters, dialogue and story is unparalleled in modern cinema. Guy is amazing…now he has a Mickey™® to prove it!

Best Supporting Actress

 Margaret Qualley - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood: Qualley, a Breakout Performance Mickey™® Award winner (2017), makes good on her promise and delivers a deliriously intoxicating turn as one of Manson’s seductive minions.

Margot Robbie - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Robbie doesn’t say much as Sharon Tate…because she doesn’t have to. An effervescent and luminous performance that highlights her supreme craft and skill and proves she is way, way more than just a very pretty face.

Park So-dam - Parasite : Park is super sexy cool as the sister who poses as an art teacher. She imbues her character with a certain sense of almost spiritual fatigue cloaked in a devilish charm that is beguiling to witness.

Lee Sun-kyun - Parasite : As the mother of the rich family, Lee is wonderfully funny as her desperation to be worthy and perfect keeps wrapping her tight and unwrapping her too quickly.

Zhao Shuhzhen - The Farewell : Zhao’s turn as an ailing grandmother is delightful for its humor, humanity and power. Zhao’s Nai Nai is no wilting flower, she is both tough and tender…and reminded me so much of my late wee Scottish grandmother I was thoroughly enchanted.

The Mickey goes to…Margot Robbie - Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood. The usual suspects complained this film was misogynistic because Robbie’s Tate had a paucity of dialogue, but it’s a testament to her talent and skill that she was able to convey an affecting story with more than just words.

Best Supporting Actor

Brad Pitt - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In an industry with a paucity of genuine stars, Pitt gives the movie star performance for the ages…where women want to be with him and men want to be him.

 Joe Pesci - The Irishman : Pesci is usually plays combustible characters, but his Russ Buffalino is an imposing figure of self-containment. Maybe the very best and most subtle work of his career.

Al Pacino - The Irishman : Pacino brings Jimmy Hoffa to life with a vibrancy and dynamism only he could muster. A truly masterful performance.

Jonathan Majors - The Last Black Man in San Francisco : A finely crafted and glorious performance that is filled with a deep humanity and vivacity.

Sam Rockwell - Jojo Rabbit : Rockwell is an absolute joy to behold as he subtly but magnificently devours scenery as a down on his luck Nazi.

Song Kang-ho - Parasite : Song is the epicenter of Parasite as a man without answers trying to figure out the questions. He is blessed with a face that tells a story all its own.

The Mickey goes to…Al Pacino - The Irishman. Pacino has become a sort of parody of himself in his later years, but his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa was a perfect manifestation of self-defeating tenacity and combustibility that is one of the highlights of his superb career.

Breakout Performance of the Year - Julia Butters : Butters is mesmerizing as the whip smart child actor who works with Rick Dalton as he hangs on to his career by his finger nails. Butters is just a kid but has the presence and magnetism of someone twenty years older. I hope child stardom does not weigh heavy upon her…because down the road she has the opportunity to be very special.

Best Foreign Film

Transit - This is a close-up view of what fascism feels like…and it does not feel good.

A Hidden Life - A profound examination of the spiritual battle a man must wage to save his soul in Nazi Germany.

Parasite - A masterful contemplation of class and family dynamics set in Korea.

Rojo - A terrific under the radar movie that shows the corrosive effects of our old friend fascism as it descends upon 1970’s Argentina.

Shadow - A terrific Chinese Wuxia film with spectacular fights and inventive visuals.

And The Mickey goes to…Parasite - Exquisitely directed with an amazing cast. One of the very best films, foreign or domestic, of the year.

Best Actress

What a dismal year for female performances. I literally cannot think of any actresses worthy of even nominations never mind wins. After a very testy emergency meeting of the Mickey™ council, a compromise was reached.

The Mickey goes to…Florence Pugh - Midsommar. Pugh, a Breakout Performance Mickey Award winner (2017), is on her way to becoming a movie star and her two Mickeys will no doubt only accelerate her ascent.

Best Actor

Robert DeNiro - The Irishman : DeNiro does the very best work of the latter part of his career as Frank Sheeran, the cog in the wheel of the mafia and union who sells his soul to survive.

Franz Rogowski - Transit: Rogowski is just a phenomenal actor and his intricate work in Transit is transcendent for its humanity and honesty.

Robert Pattinson - High Life : Who knew Pattinson could actually act? In High Life he does surprisingly complex and detailed work as a man condemned to be lost in space.

Leonardo DiCaprio - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : DiCaprio has been among the biggest movie stars for decades now…but his performance as Rick Dalton is the very best of his remarkable career.

Joaquin Phoenix - Joker : As precise, dynamic and committed a performance as we’ve seen in years. Phoenix is the best actor of his (and maybe every other) generation and he proves it with Joker.

Brad Pitt - Ad Astra : :Pitt proves himself to be more than a pretty face with a powerfully subtle, skilled and nuanced performance as a man in search of his father. This is easily the very best acting Brad Pitt has ever done.

The Mickey goes to…Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix’s work in The Master (2013) was a gargantuan evolutionary leap for the craft of acting, and his performance in Joker is a powerful continuation of that evolution.

Best Ensemble

Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - DiCaprio, Pitt, Margot Robbie, Pacino, Bruce Dern…an absolutely loaded cast that all give top notch performances.

Parasite - This cast overcomes the language barrier and does exquisite work in bringing Bong’s twisted vision to life.

The Irishman - DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci do some very heavy lifting and elevate Scorsese’ late era masterpiece.

And The Mickey goes to…Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood - The very best of Pitt, Robbie and Leo is the very best of the Mickeys™®!

Best Director

Quentin Tarantino - Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood : Tarantino truly is one of the great directors of his time, and OUATIH is his very best film . Not a flaw to be found.

Martin Scorsese - The Irishman : Scorsese brilliantly turned this late era gem into a referendum on his entire stellar career and imbued the movie with an existential power than would have been missing in any other auteur’s hands.

Todd Phillips - Joker : Who knew that Todd Phillips, the guy who made The Hangover movies…was capable of such exquisite direction as Joker. This movie is so well conceived and executed it is astonishing.

Bong Joon-ho - Parasite : As detailed, specific and skilled a piece of direction as you’ll find.

James Grey - Ad Astra : Grey finally puts all the pieces together and makes the great movie he’s been striving for for years.

Terrence Malick - A Hidden Life : Malick is a master…and A Hidden Life is a monument to his talent, skill and spiritual inquisitiveness and intellect.

And the Mickey goes to…Bong Joon-ho - Parasite : All of the nominees did extraordinary work but Bong’s direction of Parasite was extraordinary. Parasite is an intoxicatingly detailed, precise and specific master class in the art and craft of film directing.

Actor/Actress of the Year - Brad Pitt : Pitt flexed his movie star muscles in Once Upon a Time and also proved himself to be a formidable thespian in Ad Astra. That sort of high level versatility earns him the Mickey™®. Now maybe women will find him attractive.

Best Comedy of the Year - Jojo Rabbit : Taika Waititi hysterically dons Hitler garb and brings an ecstatic Mel Brooks-ian humor with him to great affect. The film isn’t great...but the comedy parts of it certainly are.

Best Blockbuster of the Year - Joker . Avengers: Endgame was the obvious favorite in this category…and it is a fitting end to this phase of the MCU, but it got out beat by the scrappy lunatic from Gotham. Joker cost $60 million to make and grossed over a billion dollars, and actually made more profit than Endgame and is the most successful R-rated movie of all-time. That is a blockbuster by any standard. The fact that it was a real movie hidden within the cloak of a comic book story, makes it the most unlikely, but most delicious blockbuster in recent memory.

Best Picture

10. Transit - This is such a finely crafted and effective film. I can’t recommend it enough to people who think in the abstract about fascism. The suffocating sense of impending doom is palpable…and unnerving.

9. High Life This ingenious movie can be at times frustratingly French (even though it is in English), but I found it mythologically resonant and dramatically impactful.

8. The Last Black Man in San Francisco A fantastically interesting and entertaining film that tackles a serious subject but never panders or takes the easy road.

7. Ford v Ferrari Good old fashioned Hollywood movie making at its very finest. A captivating tale of men trying to accomplish something great…and overcoming the corporate overlords who kill everything worthwhile.

6. A Hidden Life Malick puts us into the shoes of a man who must choose between Hitler and God…and must face the consequences of his choice. A deliberate, contemplative and deeply moving film that should be required watching for any and all Catholics.

5. Ad Astra This movie is devastatingly profound and it is among the most insightful movies made in recent years about the psyche of men and the meaning of masculinity. It also boasts a great Brad Pitt performance.

4. The Irishman – Martin Scorsese turned the story of a mafia hitman’s regrets into a surprisingly poignant and existentially insightful referendum on his own spectacular career. Seeing Scorsese being Scorsese and meditating on what it means to be Scorsese…is glorious to behold.

3. Parasite – A startlingly original film and one of the most entertaining and interesting dramatic investigations of class struggle and social structure to come along in ages. A brave and unflinching movie that never pulls a punch.

2. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood – A fork in the eye of woke Hollywood, this film is the very best of Tarantino’s career as it is chock full of outstanding performances and crackling dialogue.

1. Joker - The best picture of the year….and also…

The Most Important Film of the Year - Joker

The fact that Todd Phillips, the guy whose previous claim to fame was making The Hangover movies, made the dramatically electrifying Joker is one of the great miracles of modern cinema.

Joker is a deeply profound and insightful film that eloquently and artistically expresses the palpable sense of despair and rage that permeates the consciousness and animates the intentions of the dispossessed in society. Disguising this sentiment within the cloak of comic book intellectual property was a stroke of genius.

The elites loathed Joker because it didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, but rather had the temerity to speak the ugly, unvarnished and unnerving truth.

For its efforts Joker made over a billion dollars…and now it earns the equivalent of that in prestige with the coveted Mickey™ Award for Best Picture.

Thus concludes The Mickey™® Awards…SEE YOU AT THE AFTER PARTY!

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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