Oliver Stone, JFK: Revisited and the Establishment Media

Oliver Stone’s JFK assassination documentary is being entirely ignored by the establishment media, which is a sign he might be on to something.

It’s telling that the MSM is celebrating strange, sexually charged movies at Cannes instead of even acknowledging Stone’s foray back into the troubling case of JFK’s murder.

Last week, Oliver Stone premiered his new documentary about the JFK assassination titled JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, at the Cannes Film Festival.

You’d think that Oliver Stone, the polarizing, two-time Best Director Academy Award winner, whose film JFK created such a furor it led to the US government passing the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, premiering a controversial JFK assassination documentary at Cannes would be very big news. You’d be wrong.

When JFK: Revisited premiered on Monday, July 12th, the mainstream media didn’t praise it or pan it, they pretended it didn’t exist.

The New York Times vast coverage of Cannes consisted of eleven articles, most focusing on the more salacious content, such as Benedetta, a steamy story about lesbian nuns, Annette, a musical where Adam Driver sings while performing oral sex on Marion Cotillard, and Titane, where a woman has sex with a car and lactates oil, but not once has JFK Revisited ever been mentioned in the supposed “paper of record”.

The same is true of The Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and every mainstream outlet I searched, as none of them acknowledge JFK Revisited exists at all.

The only media mention of JFK Revisited I found was in trade papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and in the British press in The Times and Daily Telegraph. Their reaction to the film was split, with Variety and The Times giving negative reviews and THR and the Daily Telegraph praising it.

Considering that Cuba, intelligence agency nefariousness, and conspiracy theories are making headlines, and that the small critical assessment of the documentary is split, it’s curious that the media is maintaining the status quo by endorsing sexual depravity at Cannes instead of pursuing truth by debating JFK Revisited.

I’m kidding, it’s no surprise that the American myth making media who bequeath to us the official narrative from which “respectable” people will never deviate, are tossing JFK Revisited down the memory hole and lavishing praise on horny nuns and coital Cadillacs.

You see the establishment love to distract the masses and hate conspiracies…except for the ones they love.

JFK assassination conspiracies are rejected outright as unserious despite a plethora of damning evidence because they indict the establishment itself. Half of the talking heads on cable news are former (wink-wink) intelligence community members, and the vast majority of journalists are lapdogs for the intel agencies, so they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them in service to the truth about the JFK assassination.

This same anti-conspiratorial press spent four years breathlessly belching up every half-assed Russia conspiracy story they could conjure, including Russiagate, claims of Russia using microwave weapons or hacking into power grids and voting machines, and shouted them from the rooftops 24/7 until they become presumed true despite a complete lack of evidence.

As Noam Chomsky would say, this is how deceptive propaganda is effectively disseminated and consent is manufactured, through “controlled market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship”. “Serious” people prove their seriousness by believing those absurd officially sanctioned anti-Russia conspiracies because they are deemed “serious” and are propagated by other “serious” people, while “unserious” conspiracies like JFK, 9-11 and the lab leak theory, are ridiculed, and those believing them demeaned as “conspiracy theorists”.

This is why the establishment loathes Stone so much, because he flipped the script in ’91 by using his considerable cachet in the wake of his massive Hollywood success, to make a movie about the JFK assassination that obliterated the official myth of the Warren Commission and presented a compelling counter-myth.

To get a taste of how much the establishment despises Stone, go read Stone’s JFK: The Book of the Film, which features the movie’s 97 reactions and commentaries about the movie.

Unlike his adversaries, Stone prints those who disagree with him, as evidenced by articles featured in the book such as “Does JFK conspire against reason?”, “Hollywood Wonders if Warner Brothers Let JFK Go Too Far”, “Oliver’s Twist”, “The Paranoid Style” and “The Plot to Assassinate the Warren Commission”, to name but a few.

The hysteria that JFK triggered among the elites in ‘91 is perfectly encapsulated in a tale told by late film critic Roger Ebert, who claimed Walter Cronkite gave him a “tongue-lashing” and said he should be “ashamed” of himself for praising the movie.

Stone became more of an establishment pariah when he interviewed Fidel Castro in 2002 and Vladimir Putin in 2015-2017. Stone spoke with America’s enemies instead of just mouthing the mindless official mantra, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the media who believe there’s only one narrative, and we can’t complicate it by listening instead of yelling.

Stone’s history of being a firebrand and his loyalty to truth above the official narrative, is why JFK Revisited is being intentionally ignored. Any press is good press, even a bad review spreads awareness of the product, so hitting the ignore button is the best way for the establishment to silence Stone and maintain the JFK status quo.

And thus far the media blackout is working as intended, as JFK Revisited has yet to secure a distributor here in the American market which is desperately hungry for content.

I haven’t seen JFK Revisited so I have no idea if it tells the truth regarding the JFK’s assassination, but I do know that the establishment media is addicted to lies and allergic to truth, which makes me think Oliver Stone might be on to something.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Space Jam: A New Legacy - A Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: YIKES!

Space Jam: A New Legacy is just more proof that LeBron James is no Michael Jordan.

This dreadful kid’s movie is a piece of desperate, shameless, self-aggrandizing marketing masquerading as entertainment.

Space Jam: A New Legacy starring LeBron James arrived in theatres and on the HBO Max streaming service on Friday.

The movie, a sequel of sorts to Michael Jordan’s 1996 blockbuster Space Jam, tells the story of LeBron and the Looney Tunes characters having to win a basketball game against the villain Al-G Rhythm (Don Cheadle) and the Goon Squad, a team of computerized NBA and WNBA superstars, in order to save his family from some sort of eternal damnation.

It should come as no surprise considering LeBron’s meticulous, corporatized self-promotion in recent years, from his vociferous support of Black Lives Matter to his pandering to China, that Space Jam: A New Legacy is nothing but a relentless and shameless two-hour commercial for the LeBron brand and Warner Brothers’ intellectual property.

The original Space Jam was wildly popular back in 1996, raking in $250 million at the box office, no doubt because Michael Jordan was such an iconic and beloved figure at the time.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is no Space Jam. Watching Space Jam 2 is the cinematic equivalent of stepping barefoot in a pile of dog mess baking on a sidewalk during a heatwave. It’s so bad it makes the entertaining but middling original look like a cross between Citizen Kane and Star Wars.

The biggest problem with Space Jam 2 is that LeBron James, no matter how hard he tries…and he tries very hard, is no Michael Jordan. Jordan had an undeniable charisma and magnetism to him, both on and off the court. Even basketball fans who loathed the Bulls, still loved and admired Jordan back in the day. The same cannot be said of LeBron, who is a much more polarizing figure, and whose game, while stellar, is considerably less aesthetically pleasing than Jordan’s. It also doesn’t help that LeBron doesn’t have the movie star good looks or charisma of Jordan either.  

There’s no denying his greatness on the basketball court, but LeBron is not exactly Le Brando in front of a camera. For someone who has spent their entire adulthood being filmed and who does copious amounts of acting on a basketball court, it’s stunning to behold how painfully uncomfortable LeBron is on screen. They would’ve been better off casting a cigar store Indian in the lead role as LeBron is so wooden in Space Jam 2 he should be checked for termites.

LeBron is certainly a big problem for the movie, that said, he isn’t the only problem.

The film’s director, Malcolm D. Lee, is Spike Lee’s cousin, and his work on Space Jam 2, and his previous filmography, speak volumes to the insidiousness of nepotism.

Space Jam: A New Legacy also boasts a budget of over $150 million and yet remarkably appears decidedly low-rent, as the 3-D versions of the Looney Tunes characters look like unconscionably cheap amusement park mascots.

And then there is the nadir of the film, the Porky Pig rap, the less said about that the better.

Space Jam 2 is supposedly made for kids, but even for them the movie is emotionally, narratively and comedically incoherent. It’s also littered with references they’ll never understand. For instance, there’s a bit about Indiana Hoosiers basketball coach Bobby Knight throwing a chair at a ref, something that happened in 1985. There’s also a plethora of references to older Warner Brother’s intellectual property, like Casablanca, Mad Max, Austin Powers, The Matrix and Training Day, not exactly stuff a ten-year-old will understand or care about.

As for parents, or self-loathing childless adults, who watch Space Jam 2, they’ll quickly discover that the movie is an instantly regrettable, headache inducing, sensory overloading experience in corporate marketing run amok.

And despite all of that awfulness, my overwhelming feeling at the end of Space Jam: A New Legacy, was that I actually felt bad for LeBron. I know that is idiotic as I’m just some clown reviewing his movie and he is a billionaire basketball god and burgeoning movie business impresario, but it’s true.

What struck me was that LeBron making a blatantly self-reverential, hagiographic movie where everyone tells him he’s the greatest basketball player ever, and where he incessantly declares what a tough upbringing he had, how hard-working and disciplined he is, and what a devoted father and family man he is, is not a testament to his ego but rather a monument to his insatiable insecurity and need to be loved. This is the inverse of Michael Jordan, who was loved and validated by fans because he never needed their love and validation.  

LeBron has everything…NBA titles, Hall of Fame credentials, millions of dollars, adoring fans, a great family, and yet he still desperately needs validation. He left Cleveland for Miami in search of it. He left Miami for Cleveland looking for it. He left Cleveland again and came to LA on his quest. He embraced Black Lives Matter hoping for it. He sold his soul to China in an attempt to attain it. And now he tries, once again, to mimic Michael Jordan by making Space Jam 2 in the hopes of securing it…but for LeBron, validation will remain ever elusive.

Space Jam: A New Legacy is not going to make anyone who watches it feel good, including LeBron James. The movie may fill his pockets with money but it won’t make him feel loved and validated because it can’t change the fact that he isn’t Michael Jordan, and he never will be.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Passion of Mel Gibson

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 44 seconds

Mel Gibson’s survived charges of sexism, racism and anti-Semitism… but it’s saluting Trump that could finally get him canceled

Woke Twitter is outraged at footage that shows the Oscar winner paying tribute to the ex-President at a UFC fight. In Hollywood’s eyes, this overshadows all his previous misdemeanors… and could deal a terminal blow to his career.

Mel Gibson, the movie star and Academy Award winning director, has long been a lightning rod for his problematic behavior and beliefs. But over the weekend he finally crossed the line and committed the most egregious of mortal sins in the New Hollywood… he saluted Donald Trump.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, let me fill you in. On Saturday, Trump attended UFC 264 in Las Vegas, and as he entered the arena Mel happened to be nearby and gave the former president a salute.

This ugly incident was caught on video and people on Twitter dissected it like it was the Zapruder film to see if that was actually Mel Gibson – star of Lethal Weapon and director of The Passion of the Christ – and not some lookalike who’d been filmed.

After much detective work by intrepid internet sleuths, it was confirmed that it was indeed Mad Max himself who had the gall to salute the former president of the United States.

A gigantic tempest in the Twitter teapot ensued, with the legions of woke bravehearts putting on their war paint and declaring that the heretic Gibson must be drawn and quartered for his heinous behavior in the name of “FREEDOM!”

Not surprisingly, since they solely seem to function to make mountains out of molehills, the establishment media responded by churning out articles bemoaning Gibson’s indecency, some with headlines even declaring the salute to be “dramatic”.

I’ve never actually been a Gibson fan, not because of his political or religious beliefs, but because I consider him a ham-handed director and cheesy actor. Others may find that ham and cheese combo delicious, but it’s never appealed to me.

So, I come to bury Mel Gibson, not to praise him, but it’s curious that of his many sins against the supposedly pure people of Hollywood, it’s saluting a former President that may finally get him to Golgotha and foisted upon the cancel cross.

In the seemingly never-ending Passion of Mel Gibson, this new station of the cross pales in comparison to other, much more brutal ones.

In 2006, during a drunk driving arrest, Mel infamously called a female cop “sugartits” and touched the third rail of Hollywood by accusing Jews of being responsible for “all the wars in the world”.

Then in 2010, Mel is alleged to have punched his girlfriend in the face and knocked out two of her teeth – the same girlfriend who he said on an answering machine looked “like a f***ng pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n***ers, it will be your fault”.

It’s completely apropos of the utterly absurd and inane culture of the woke New Hollywood, where racial, sexual and ethnic quotas reign supreme and a new de facto Hays code regarding storylines and dialogue is celebrated, that the thing that may finally get Mel Gibson cancelled is that he gave a half-hearted salute to Trump at a UFC fight.

That Gibson was able to come back from his more unsavory previous public sins, but might not survive this one, points to how Hollywood previously didn’t really care what you said or did just as long as you kept the money train rolling. But now money seems at the very least secondary to social and political demands.

In the past, Gibson’s films, particularly the ones he directed, always made money for their investors and his partners, and thus his sins were washed away. For example, Braveheart not only made $213 million at the box office but won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture.

The Passion of the Christ was an independent production, and Gibson put up money for the $30 million budget. And despite the fact that the dialogue was entirely in Hebrew, Latin and reconstructed Aramaic, and that there was a concerted and under-handed effort to besmirch the film as anti-Semitic, it still made an astounding $612 million worldwide. Gibson alone made nearly half a billion dollars on that movie.

Gibson’s 2006 film Apocalypto, no surefire hit since all the dialogue, was spoken in the ancient language of the Mayans, made an astounding $120 million.

The most telling sign of the recent history of Hollywood’s fluidity regarding forgiveness and Gibson’s once-Teflon ability was that his 2016 comeback film, Hacksaw Ridge, a truly dreadful cinematic venture, not only made $180 million at the box office but, in what seemed like a very generous gesture, received six Oscar nominations, including one for Gibson as Best Director. 

The adulation heaped upon Gibson and Hacksaw Ridge, his first directorial effort after the 2010 allegations, seemed to finally put the ugliness of Mel’s racist, sexist and anti-Semitic statements permanently in the past. But now in New Hollywood, where social/political standing overrides finances and forgiveness is verboten, the simple gesture of a salute to Trump may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  

Ultimately, this clash between titanic assholes will probably result in every jerk getting exactly what they want. New Hollywood will cancel Gibson, forcing him to self-finance a sequel to The Passion of the Christ, causing a Twitter firestorm and generating free publicity, thus resulting in Mad Mel getting richer and giving another giant half billion-dollar middle finger to Tinsel Town. Twitter will get to be irrationally angry, New Hollywood will get to be self righteous, and Mel Gibson will get even more ridiculously rich.

The only losers in all this will be, as always, the rest of us.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Black Widow: A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The movie is a middling Disney money grab chock full of predictable Russophobic caricatures and #MeToo pandering that doesn’t propel the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s storyline forward.

This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for the movie Black Widow.

After a two-year, Covid-induced drought, Marvel is finally back in theatres with the much-anticipated Black Widow.

Black Widow was originally set to kick off Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe back in May of 2020, but Covid crushed those plans and Marvel fans have had to go to the streaming service Disney Plus to get their Marvel fix in the form of the series WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and Loki.

Black Widow, in case you’ve forgotten, is actually Natasha Romanoff, the former KGB superspy turned Avenger who is portrayed by Scarlet Johansson.

The movie Black Widow, which besides being in theatres is also available to stream on Disney Plus for a hefty fee, is set right after Captain America: Civil War and five years before all the unpleasantness with Thanos in Infinity War and Endgame because, spoiler alert, Black Widow actually dies in Endgame. Consider this movie to be cinematic CPR on Natasha Romanoff.

The fear heading into Black Widow was that it would be the wokest Marvel movie yet. That fear was formed when Ms. Johansson made some pre-release noise about how she was uncomfortable with how her character was “hyper-sexualized” in earlier movies, and also that this film was going to be Marvel’s #MeToo movie.

Adding to that sentiment were tweets from various kiss-ass woke media outlets triumphantly declaring that the film “passed the Bechdel test”, which measures size and substance of female representation in a movie, and “puts men in their place and makes them “squeem”, whatever the hell that means.

It seems an odd marketing strategy to alienate half of your potential audience by having friendly media outlets tell them if they watch your film they’ll “squeem” (which sounds uncomfortably like a cross between ‘squeal’ and ‘cream’) and be put in their place…but what do I know?

After watching the movie, I can report that Black Widow is a middling, rather unremarkable and unnecessary Marvel movie that contains a heavy dose of cultural and political propaganda.

The political propaganda is pretty derivative, just some good old fashioned Cold War Russophobia. Throughout the film Russians are painted as the shallow stereotype of innately ruthless, cold-blooded, heartless killers indifferent to human suffering. In one scene Natasha watches an old Bond film, Moonraker, as a sort of knowing wink from the filmmakers about the throwback Cold War caricatures.

The cultural propaganda doesn’t come in until the final act of the movie, which not surprisingly, is also when the whole venture goes completely off the rails with megadoses of Marvel monotony.

It’s in this third act that Marvel runs the #MeToo flag up the pole and turns the movie into a metaphor for breaking the iron spell of the nefarious patriarchy that brainwashes women and takes away their freedom and choice.

The bad guy, General Dreykov, played by a terribly miscast Ray Winstone who absolutely butchers his Russian accent, is meant to embody both the misogynist patriarchy and the inherent villainy of Russians. Dreykov has stolen little girls and trained them to be killers, and if they weren’t up to snuff, killed them. Dreykov is like a Russian Jeffrey Epstein in that he controls world leaders with his army of women, except he traffics in violence, not sex, and his island is in the sky, not the Caribbean.

In a literal sense, Black Widow must defeat Dreykov so as to free his army of mind-controlled females. In a metaphorical sense, she’s fighting to free all women from the prison of the patriarchy and to exact revenge for the abuse they have suffered at its hands.

I have to say Black Widow’s painfully obvious #MeToo metaphor didn’t make me “squeem” or feel put in my place, although it did make me throw-up a little bit in my mouth. And yawn profusely.

Whether it be the insipid Russophobia or the forced MeToo stuff, the overwhelming sentiment conjured by Black Widow is one of indifference. The movie, especially in the shadow of Infinity War and Endgame, just doesn’t seem to serve any purpose at all.

That isn’t to say there’s nothing redeeming about it. Some of the performances, particularly Florence Pugh and David Harbour, are quite compelling.

Pugh, who plays Black Widow’s sister Yelena, absolutely steals the show. Watching Pugh consistently out shine her more famous scene partner Johansson was glorious to behold. Pugh is a terrific actress, but the magnetism she displays in Black Widow reveals that she’s capable of being a gigantic movie star, much bigger than Scarlett Johansson.

David Harbour, who plays Black Widow’s father, the Russian superhero Red Guardian, is also terrific. Harbour is a dynamic presence and sinks his teeth into the Marvel movie inanity with gusto.

Other performances, most notably from two usually very good actors, Rachel Weisz and the aforementioned Ray Winstone, are uncomfortably sub-par, as is Scarlet Johansson’s bland and rather diffident portrayal.

The bottom line is, if you are a devoted fan of the Marvel formula with its forgettable fights, loud chases and snarky humor, you may enjoy Black Widow even though it is meaningless in relationship to the wider MCU canon. As for me, a fair-weather Marvel fan, I found it to be a rather tepid venture, devoid of any real purpose except to line Mickey Mouse’s coffers.

If you want to avoid the vapid cultural and political propaganda that permeates Black Widow, and keep your hard-earned money from the clutches of the Disney devil, I recommend you skip the movie, you really won’t be missing anything.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

America: The Motion Picture - A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 22 seconds

America: The Motion Picture is so stupid it actually thinks it’s smart, just like the country it parodies.

The movie is dreadful and relentlessly unfunny, but it’s unintentionally a perfect representation of the clownshow that is modern American culture.

America: The Motion Picture is a new animated feature film on Netflix that parodies the founding fathers and the American revolution.

The film, directed by Matt Thompson and written by Dave Callahan, boasts a stellar voice cast of Channing Tatum, Bobby Moynihan, Will Forte, Olivia Munn, Simon Pegg and Andy Samberg among many others, and some imaginative animation.

But the most distinguishing feature of America: The Motion Picture is also the most distinguishing feature of the country whose founding it parodies, and that is its condescending, blindly arrogant belief that it’s so smart despite the obvious fact that it’s so egregiously, relentlessly stupid.

Just to give you a taste of the absurdity and idiocy on display in this film, here’s a brief rundown of the plot.

George Washington and Abe Lincoln are best friends, and when Benedict “Cosby” Arnold, who is a werewolf, slaughters the signers of the Declaration of Independence, steals the document, and then murders Lincoln at the Ford Theatre, Washington vows revenge and to stop the British Empire from taking over the world.  Oh, and Washington has chainsaws that pop out of his arm like a founding father Wolverine when he does battle.

Washington then gets his team together, which include Geronimo, Thomas Edison – who is a Chinese woman, Sam Adams – who is a party hound frat bro, and Paul Revere – who is friendless and quite possibly a human/horse hybrid, to fight back.  

The plot staggers around like a drunken hobo from one extraordinary inanity, like King James coming to America on the Titanic to finish his super weapon, to another, like Paul Bunyan boxing with Big Ben as double decker buses transform into Imperial Walkers.

Of course, that all sounds incredibly stupid, but the stupidity is the point. The filmmakers are trying to not only make a parody of the American myth, but also satirize the historical ignorance of the viewing population.

As intentionally absurd as the plot of America: The Motion Picture is, the joke is that there are probably lots of people who will think, Washington’s Wolverine chainsaw hands aside, that it’s somewhat true, no doubt duped by the official “based on actual history” tag that opens the movie.

Polls show that only four out of ten Americans would have enough knowledge of history to pass an American citizenship test. The only state in the country that has a majority of residents who’d pass the citizenship test is…Vermont, and I’d be willing to bet a majority of Americans don’t even know Vermont exists.

The problem with America: The Motion Picture isn’t its endless adolescent humor, which includes a plethora of sex jokes, gay sex jokes and inter-species sex jokes, or that it makes fun of the founding fathers, anyone sensitive about sacred cows like Washington and Lincoln being comedically desecrated is ridiculous, but that it’s so condescending enough to think that only the “other side” is filled with ignoramuses.

This bias, which caricatures only the American myth believing fools, flag wavers and rednecks who spontaneously sing the national anthem at Walmart as the idiots, is the movie’s glaring ideological blindspot.

Yes, those that buy into the star-spangled myth are, in my opinion, worthy of being mocked, as they often reflexively take a short cut to thinking and buy into America’s militarism and belligerent foreign policy, and adorn themselves with buffoonish bumper sticker slogans like “these colors don’t run” and “love it or leave it”.

But let’s not kid ourselves, no side in the American cultural and political landscape has a monopoly on stupid. Too cool for school liberals are just as moronic as their conservative counterparts.

For example, it was liberals who screeched about Trump’s “war on the press” but then cheered Julian Assange’s imprisonment and torture. It was the liberals in the media that shouted down any talk of the lab leak theory as racist. It was liberal medical professionals and scientists who declared that gathering in crowds during Covid lockdown was deadly, unless it was to protest for Black Lives Matter. It’s woke liberal jackasses who think the solution to their imagined pandemic of anti-black racism is to force everyone to identify with their race – even though America is an overwhelmingly white country. It’s these same liberals that over-estimate police killings of black people by over 10x, 100x and some even 1,000x the actual rate.

And remember, it was the majority of Americans, both left and right, that, unlike me, wholeheartedly embraced the disastrous and murderous Iraq War, Reagan and Clinton’s financialization of the economy and free trade - which gutted the working and middle class, and who fell for not only Bush’s normalizing trade relations with China but also his post 9-11 War on Terror scaremongering, as well as Barack Obama’s smoke and mirrors marketing campaign known as Hope and Change.

The bottom line is that while Covid has slowed down, the pandemic of stupidity in America is accelerating at an astonishing rate across party, ideological, racial and class lines.

As for the dopey America: The Motion Picture, it’s a perfect representation of America because it’s so stupid it thinks it’s smart. By the way, the movie isn’t just dumb, it’s dreadful and gratingly unfunny, so like American lectures on “exceptionalism” and “democracy”, you can skip it. You’d be better served watching Mike Judge’s prescient 2006 film Idiocracy, which at this point feels like a documentary.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Obama's 'We the People' Netflix Series: A Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

Obama’s well-intentioned ‘We the People’ Netflix series aims to teach kids about the promise of America…the promise he failed to keep.

Like Obama, the series is more forgettable and phony than it is enlightening and entertaining.

On the Fourth of July Barack and Michelle Obama gifted the American public We the People, their new Netflix series aimed to give kids a fun and entertaining lesson in civics.

The series is a collection of ten short animated music videos featuring pop stars like H.E.R., Janelle Monae, Adam Lambert and Brandi Carlisle among others singing about such topics as The Bill of Rights, Taxes, The Three Branches of Government, Immigration and more.

The series is obviously an attempt to update the classic Schoolhouse Rock! animated shorts from the 1970’s that educated young Gen Xers on much the same topics with informative earworms like “I’m Just a Bill”.

The problem with We the People, especially in comparison to Schoolhouse Rock!, is that the songs are a dismal collection of entirely forgettable numbers and the animation is more high-end but much less effective.

With eye-rollingly banal lyrics like “little homie you better pay your taxes” from Cordae in episode 3 - “Taxes”, the entire series feels less like a useful educational tool for kids than a useful way for pop celebrities to signal their political virtue.

Speaking of signaling non-existent virtue, Barrack Obama, the man who used the Espionage Act twice as much as all other presidents combined in order to stifle the press during his presidency, producing a series that unreservedly cheers the constitutional protection of freedom of the press is, to say the least, shameless.

And when the lyric “the government works for you and me” was sung in episode two I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly gave myself a seizure considering Obama not only supported bail outs of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, but also protected bankers from prosecution. He also used extra-judicial means to assassinate American citizens, and left the hard-working people of Flint, Michigan drink poisoned water and be used as military target practice. Obama’s administration, like all the ones before and after, worked for Wall St., the military-intelligence-industrial complex and big moneyed interests, not little old you and me.

We the People is so thoroughly steeped in devout, Obama-esque establishment liberalism, both politically and culturally, that it’s rendered entirely blind to its own relentless bias.

For instance, in episode 5 “The First Amendment”, Brandi Carlisle sings the lyric, “there’s only one wall built with wisdom, it’s the wall between church and state!”.

Similarly, in the second episode “The Bill of Rights”, Adam Lambert sings positively about the entire Bill of Rights, but reserves a caveat solely for the 2nd Amendment when he notes “the right to bear arms, which were much different back in my day”.

I’m noticing a pattern here in who this show is targeting, and it ain’t gun advocates and those wanting a secure border.

Then there’s episode 4, “The Three Branches of Government” featuring the insidious Lin Manuel Miranda. This episode represents the executive branch with a black woman as president who belts out the refrain “checks and balances”. Poor old Joe Biden better check his balance or the Obamas and Kamala Harris will be more than happy to push him down a flight of stairs.

Episode 8 – “The Courts”, highlights all the court decisions that affect us as it follows a school girl through her daily routine. The episode ends with the young girl kissing her girlfriend at a protest rally, which is a bit rich considering Obama’s long-time resistance regarding gay marriage, and also unnecessarily explicit for a show aimed at 7-year-olds.

My least favorite episode, and that is saying something, is the final one, which features a poem by Amanda Gorman, the young poet who became a star at Biden’s inauguration. This episode “The Miracle of Morning”, is about recovering from recent difficulties (morning as mourning – get it?) and while it’s obviously about recovery from the pandemic, it also seems like it’s referencing recovering from the liberal trauma of four years of Trump.

Gorman is, like the insipid Lin Manuel-Miranda, one of those media creations that we’re all supposed to think is brilliant but who in reality is an absolute artistic charlatan.

Ms. Gorman’s poetry, both at the inauguration and on We the People, is such C level establishment pablum so devoid of insight or incite, that it makes readers gouge out their eyes so as not to see, and listeners to seek silence by throwing themselves into the sea. Anyone who has had to suffer through Ms. Gorman’s imbecilic and pedantically performative poetry will understand that joke.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of the series but I’m not the target audience, so I ran it by the few kids I know to get their reaction.

The six-year-old was overcome with indifference upon viewing a singular episode and exited without comment. The 13-year-old bailed halfway through the series with “peace out, this is dumb”, and the erudite and politically sophisticated 17-year-old found some of it annoying but none of it bad, and thought it useful for elementary school kids since the episodes were short and comparable to Schoolhouse Rock! My friend who works with kids in schools liked it too and said she’d recommend it to teachers to use in classrooms.

So maybe I’m just too jaded to appreciate We the People, but for me it was similar to Obama’s presidency in that it was vacuous, vapid and entirely self-serving. In other words, like Obama, We the People vacillated between being consistently disappointing and entirely forgettable.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Tarantino's Pact With the Weinstein Devil

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 36 seconds

Quentin Tarantino admits many Hollywood stars knew about Harvey Weinstein’s depravity, but like most people, their ambition kept them quiet

Quentin Tarantino said the quiet part out loud the other day when on Joe Rogan’s podcast he admitted that he “knew” of his longtime film distributor Harvey Weinstein’s aggressive sexual depravity.

Tarantino, who went on the Joe Rogan Experience to promote the novelization he wrote of his film ‘Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood’, made clear that in regards to Weinstein, he “didn’t know about the rapes or anything like that” but stated, “I knew he was –  you know – I chalked it up to the boss chasing the secretary around the desk. As if that’s okay. But I mean, that’s how I kind of looked at it. He was making unwanted advances.”

“Unwanted advances” is certainly a way of putting it, as Harvey made lots and lots of “unwanted advances” on women. So many in fact that he’s been sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape, and is still facing other charges. 

Tarantino tried to explain to Rogan how in hindsight, “…I wish I had talked to him…I wish I had sat him down and gone, ‘Harvey you can’t do this. You’re gonna f**k up everything.’”

I suppose that could be classified as a form of regret – misguided regret, but regret nonetheless. Maybe what Tarantino really regrets is losing Weinstein the golden goose: the guy who made movies big hits and Oscar nominations happen, rather than regret for not protecting women from Weinstein the predator.

Tarantino didn’t warn Weinstein that his illicit behavior was “going to f**k everything up” because Tarantino didn’t want to f**k up his fantastically prosperous relationship with the notoriously bombastic bully whom the director calls a “father figure”.

Weinstein didn’t just make Tarantino rich, he made him relevant, and in Hollywood that is the greatest gift of all. And the reason Harvey was immune from consequences for his actions for so long is because he made lots of other people rich, famous and relevant as well.

Tarantino said as much when he admitted that he wasn’t alone in keeping his mouth shut in order to keep the money and awards train running. The director told Rogan that the Hollywood heavy-hitters who say they didn’t know about Weinstein’s predatory behavior are full of it.

“Everybody who was in his orbit knew about it, there’s nobody who said they didn’t know who didn’t know… that includes all the big actors he palled around with… they all knew.”

There were a lot of people in Harvey Weinstein’s large orbit who owed the producer a great deal and who are implicated by Tarantino’s claim ­– Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Meryl Streep, Martin Scorsese, Oprah Winfrey, Lena Dunham and even Bill and Hillary Clinton to name a few.

These people, and many others, may have never seen first-hand Harvey do anything aggressive with women, but it’s impossible to believe they hadn’t heard about Harvey’s notorious behavior. Hell, I’m an absolute nobody and I’d heard about Weinstein’s disgusting reputation.

Weinstein’s depravity, like that of fellow scumbags Brett Ratner and Bryan Singer, wasn’t so much an open secret in Hollywood as a running joke. But since these three deplorables made lots of people money, people laughed instead of spoke up.

As easy as it would be to get indignantly outraged at the inaction of Tarantino, who despite his writing and directorial genius is an easy target, the reality is that, unfortunately, most people would keep their mouths shut, too, if put in a similar position.

The devil’s bargain Tarantino and so many others made with Weinstein is the same bargain many ‘regular’ people make for even less-substantial reasons.

The two most common side-effects of desperation and ambition are hypocrisy and a recurring blind eye turned toward what could stifle your ambition and agitate your desperation. As Orwell once wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” and the reality is that being able to see the truth and actually admit it to yourself in real time is extremely difficult when your livelihood or emotional well-being depends on you not seeing it.

This is why Bill Clinton supporters didn’t believe Juanita Broaddrick, but believe all of the women accusing Donald Trump of sexual assault. And why Trump supporters dismiss claims against him but believe Tara Reade, and in turn why anti-Trumpers dismiss Ms. Reade’s claims against Joe Biden. 

This isn’t to say that all sexual assault and rape claims are equal. We shouldn’t ‘believe all women’, as women are just as capable and likely to lie as men. Nor should we ignore due process to satiate our thirst for revenge.

We also shouldn’t celebrate the emotionalist-fueled, vapid and vacuous hysteria that is the #MeToo movement, which infantilizes women, removes from them even the slightest bit of agency, and weaponizes female regret at the expense of diminishing the suffering of actual rape victims.

What we should do is remind people, be they Hollywood stars tainted by their silence regarding Weinstein, or Trump supporters ignoring his sexual conduct or Biden voters brushing aside claims against him, that their loyalties lie not with the truth, but with their personal or political ambitions, and therefore they have no moral clarity and are to be distrusted.

In conclusion, once upon a time in Hollywood, an uncommon talent at writing and directing revealed his cowardice by keeping silent about a powerful producer’s sexual depravity, thus revealing himself to be a painfully common, and very flawed, human being… just like the rest of us. Sounds like an interesting movie idea. I wonder who’ll direct?

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cosby and Rumsfeld - Perfect Symbols of Degenerate America

Cosby is getting out of prison and Rumsfeld is dead, but like America, they’ll never regain their veneer of moral authority.

The once beloved comedian and the once adored Secretary of Defense, are the perfect representations of America’s hypocritical, corrupt, deceptive and destructive culture.

It’s telling that American icon Bill Cosby, the comedy superstar who went from beloved tv dad to reviled convicted rapist, had his rape conviction thrown out on a technicality on the same day Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration on 9-11 and during the Iraq War, who was the ultimate Washington establishmentarian, died.

Cosby, who was accused by 53 women of drugging and raping them, and Rumsfeld, who oversaw the murder of millions in the Middle East and the U.S. torture regime, seem to have avoided being punished for their egregious crimes, when state supreme court of Pennsylvania overturned Cosby’s conviction and Rumsfeld, who never faced any charges for his litany of war crimes, died of cancer in New Mexico.

Cosby and Rumsfeld seem to me to be a perfect representation of America and its diabolically twisted culture.

The only reason Cosby was able to prey upon women, and long evaded his comeuppance, was because he had deceptively created a role for himself as the safest man in America – the nation’s dad, the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Rumsfeld painted himself as a patriot and then did everything in his power to undermine American democracy with his embrace of the “unitary executive” philosophy, and wreak havoc across the globe in the name of spreading democracy.

Cosby’s massively successful, curse-free, soft edged stand-up comedy routines of the 1960’s led him to be a spokesman for such family friendly brands as Coke and Jell-O, and to equally clean roles in film and tv, most notably as the creator and voice of the 1970’s kid’s cartoon Fat Albert, and Cliff, the ugly sweater wearing patriarch of the Huxtable family on the 1980’s smash hit tv series, The Cosby Show.

Cosby, who would be the first to tell you he had a Doctorate of Education from the University of Massachusetts, a fact highlighted every week in the credits of The Cosby Show, also wrote books with titles like “Fatherhood”, “Love and Marriage” and “Childhood” to further reinforce his persona of being a gentle, loving dad.

Rumsfeld, who never failed to remind the fawning media that he was a military pilot in his younger days, was a major player in the Nixon, Ford and first Bush administration, and brought his insidious establishment powers to bear on the hapless wonder that was George W. Bush.

Of course, while Cosby was wearing the Dr. Jekyll mask of corporate American sainthood shilling for Coke and Jell-O and mugging for the camera on The Cosby Show, he was actually Mr. Hyde drugging and raping women. And while Rumsfeld was dazzling the media with his supposed military brilliance during the Iraq War, America was systematically torturing people, gutting Iraq and losing the war.

And now Cosby is going to walk because he was wealthy, the victim was greedy, the former prosecutor was deferential to the rich and powerful and the current prosecutor was blinded by emotion amidst the panic of the #MeToo movement, and Rumsfeld is going to avoid his comeuppance because the media adore dead establishmentarians and immediately cleanse all of their bad deeds from public memory.

This is why Cosby and Rumsfeld are such perfect representations of America.

Like America, which talks incessantly of peace but only makes war and touts democracy but deplores popular movements, Cosby and Rumsfeld are voracious predators hiding behind the mask of respectability who lectured the world about their faults but were oblivious to the cancer metastasized in their own soul.

And in the most American way possible, Cosby used his great wealth and fame to avoid accountability for his heinous sins by playing the rich man’s rigged game in a desperately corrupt system, and Rumsfeld avoided being held accountable for his crimes by embedding himself in the untouchable elite of Washington.

Cosby is so American he even became the poster boy for the recent hysteria of the #MeToo era, which was emotionally satisfying to many but is now being exposed as having a legally dubious foundation. This is particularly egregious in the Cosby case considering that it was good old American greed in the form of a payout via a civil suit that derailed the criminal conviction.

Rumsfeld will no doubt have the media slobber all over him and try to exalt him as some great American hero in the next few days. His Iraq War crimes, his failure as Secretary of Defense and as a human being, whitewashed.

Rumsfeld is dead, but Cosby is 83, and like the nation he once so enraptured, is decaying and on his last legs. Cosby and Rumsfeld may never be held accountable for their crimes but, like America, they’ll never escape the stench of their foul behavior. I suppose the silver lining in this ugly situation is that we won’t ever have to watch a self-righteous Donald Rumsfeld lecture us on “known unknowns” or watch Bill Cosby sell us Jell-O ever again because Rumsfeld and Cosby, like America, have forever lost their fabricated veneer of moral authority, not death, an overturned conviction or media self-deception, is going to bring that back.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Amazon Studio's Playbook to Ruin Cinema

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 42 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

ESPN's Corrosive Race Baiting

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 31 seconds

ESPN is addicted to a false racial narrative and it blinds them to basic facts.

Like the rest of the establishment media, the sports network’s obsession with race obliterates whatever was left of their credibility.

This past week two black ESPN on-air personalities made asses of themselves when they vomited out onto the public race-based nonsense devoid of any grounding in fact, which has become commonplace at the network.

On Wednesday, after it was announced the Boston Celtics were hiring Ime Udoka, a black man, as their next head coach, black ESPN basketball analyst Jay Williams, tweeted out “The first head coach of color for the celtics…& even more importantly…he is one talented individual who has paid his dues.”

Williams no doubt thought he was being a social justice stalwart with his edgy tweet, the problem was that he was egregiously wrong. The Celtics have not only had five black head coaches prior to Udona, the franchise was the first in NBA history to hire a black head coach, the great Bill Russell in 1966. Russell, KC Jones and Doc Rivers were all black Celtic coaches who won NBA titles leading the team, with Rivers doing so just 12 years ago.

Williams was called out on twitter for his error and in response claimed that he didn’t write the tweet. Maybe the culprits are the same mysterious, elusive and imaginary Russian hackers who wrote homophobic rants on MSNBC host Joy Reid’s blog those many years ago.

The other race-based bit of jackassery came from black NBA analyst Jalen Rose, who, when it was reported that white player Kevin Love was going to be a member of the USA Olympic basketball team, called his inclusion “tokenism” and a result of USA basketball not wanting to send an all-black team to the Olympics.

Of course, this assertion is utterly absurd as four of the last five USA basketball teams have been all black, and since 1996, only two white players, John Stockton and Kevin Love, have made the USA basketball team at all.

Williams and Rose are just marching in lockstep when it comes to pushing a racial narrative. Last year, black ESPN superstar Stephen A. Smith, the most bombastic bloviating blowhard buffoon in sports television, ranted after the Brooklyn Nets hired former two-time MVP Steve Nash, a white man, to be the head coach even though Nash had no coaching experience, that it was a function of “white privilege” and that “this does not happen for a black man”.

Once again, this was a racial narrative directly at odds with facts. Not only had black players with no coaching experience been hired by teams before, but it happened in Stephen A. Smith’s hometown of New York, when in 2013 the Nets hired Jason Kidd and in 2014 the Knicks hired Derek Fisher.

A brief glimpse of ESPN’s plethora of ‘debate’ shows like Pardon the Interruption or Around the Horn too reveals a fierce commitment to NOT debate topics but rather congratulate each other on social justice bona fides.

Even the coverage of actual sporting events is now marinated in racial and political narratives. I will never forget the absurdity of watching black side line reporter Malika Andrews doing a post-game report from the NBA bubble last summer on Scott Van Pelt’s late-night show. Andrews weeping as she claims she “prided herself on being objective” but it’s so clear the “system of objectivity in journalism is so white-washed”, and then wailing the asinine assumption that she could have been Breonna Taylor – the 26 year old killed by Louisville police in a raid where Taylor’s boyfriend fired on officers. Andrews’ unprofessionally blubbering “that could have been me” while Van Pelt soothed her paranoid delusions was the lowlight of a year of journalistic lowlights on the network.

This blatant pushing of biased and baseless race-based narratives is not only tolerated but mandated at the self-proclaimed world-wide leader in sports and its parent company, Disney, the wokest place on earth.

Williams, Rose, Smith, Andrews and the rest of ESPN talking heads pushing their racial nonsense are obviously willing to trade their credibility for a bit of social status and to kiss up to their corporate overlords. This is an annoyance to sports fans but let’s be honest, sport’s journalists without credibility are like clowns without dignity.

None of this is too surprising as this is what happens in a racial moral panic – and we are definitely in a racial moral panic, where people lose their minds, feelings override facts and narrative trumps truth.

This is how a collection of medical and scientific professionals sign a letter saying gathering in large groups during Covid is deadly – unless it’s to attend a Black Lives Matter protest. And how riots were deemed “mostly peaceful protests”. And how the lab leak theory became verboten in the establishment media because it was somehow anti-Asian. And how sharp increases in black on Asian violence was deemed a result of “white supremacy”.

From the 9-11 charade to the Iraq War/WMD fiasco to the financial collapse of 2007-2008 to the Covid calamity and the current racial hysteria, the establishment in America has, across the board, worked extremely hard to eviscerate its own credibility by egregiously obfuscating the truth and blatantly pushing their preferred, but fictional, narratives.

ESPN and the rest of the establishment media may bask in their current myopic decision to push racial propaganda instead of truth, but reality has a funny way of eventually asserting itself, and when it does, the whirlwind these charlatans will reap will be brutal, and well deserved.

©2021

Pentagon UFO Report Viewer's Guide

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 59 seconds

The Pentagon is releasing their UFO report, so now might be a good time to check with movies to see what to expect when we make contact.

This Friday the Pentagon is supposed to release its highly anticipated report on UFOs, or as the government now calls them, UAPs – unidentified aerial phenomena.

Similar to Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’m a long-time, self-confessed, tin-foil hat wearing UFO enthusiast/fanatic. As such I’m delusionally hoping the recent government and media pivot to taking UFOs seriously will lead to some sort of “disclosure”, where the truth out there will finally be revealed.

Of course, my more rational side knows that anytime you’re relying on the government or media for transparency or truth you’re playing a fool’s game.

Regardless of what the new UFO report says, the possibilities of what’s going on in our skies and under our seas span from the mundanity of mistaken perception combined with malfunctioning equipment to the momentous notion of extra-terrestrial/inter-dimensional visitors. Despite the alleged implausibility of it, my bet is on the latter, which means that aliens are indeed traversing our air space and ocean depths with technological aplomb and military impunity…so it might be a good idea to figure out their intentions.

As a film critic, I thought the best way to prepare for contact with our elusive galactic visitors the Pentagon cannot confirm or deny exist was to turn to movies as a guide, as our collective imagination has projected onto the silver screen and our culture a cavalcade of useful alien archetypes.

The Benevolent Aliens

Movies about human-alien contact that feature gentle aliens we’d be lucky to have visit us are very reassuring, and among the very best that cinema has to offer.

In this archetype, which features fantastic movies like E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Abyss, Arrival and The Iron Giant, the aliens are good guys and the villains are our aggressive and deceptive government.

In some of these types of films, like Starman, The Man Who Fell to Earth and Midnight Special, the alien can be a pseudo-Christ figure, and government bureaucrats a nasty combination of the Sanhedrin and brutish Roman soldiers.

These benevolent alien stories put us at ease because in them humans are still in power. These movies are philosophical in nature and posit that the problem isn’t the aliens, it’s our own corrupt human nature, something we foolishly believe we can eventually overcome.

The Malevolent Aliens

Hollywood has inundated audiences with a plethora of malevolent aliens with distinctly human-mindsets over the years as well, which may lead us to assume nefarious intentions on the part of actual visitors from space.  

For instance, in the less than stellar Independence Day, War of the Worlds (1953/2005), Edge of Tomorrow, Battle: Los Angeles and Starship Troopers, aliens, despite their non-human appearance, seem remarkably human in their militaristic behavior and thirst for blood and conquest. The malevolent alien archetype scares us because it renders us powerless and reflects our violent aggression back onto us.

The creators of these fictional aliens assume that extra-terrestrials share our depraved belligerence and can only be defeated by military force (and accompanying bigger budgets), which is not surprising considering Hollywood’s long-standing, fierce commitment to making shameless propaganda for the Pentagon.

A similar archetype is the vastly superior malevolent alien with a specific weakness. For example, in the taut thriller A Quiet Place the terrifying aliens are blind but have super-sensitive hearing…maybe too sensitive. In the often-over-looked M. Night Shyamalan gem Signs, the alien’s weakness is water, while in War of the Worlds it’s susceptibility to the common cold.

This specific archetype is actually religious in nature as it spotlights humanity’s desire to think they exist under God’s divine protection against the demonic evil of alien invaders, which is sort of amusing considering there are actually reports of some real-life military brass believing UFOs/Aliens are “demonic” entities.

The Hunters

To me the most terrifying alien archetype is that of the alien hunter whose prey is humans.

In Predator, the alien hunts humans for sport, and in the Alien franchise, the alien is a horrifying beast relentlessly hunting humans in order to propagate its species by incubating its eggs in our bellies. Alien in particular forces humans to consider the prospect of being moved down the food chain, and while that’s exhilarating in fiction, in reality it’s absolutely chilling.

The Shapeshifters

Another terrifying alien archetype is the shapeshifter that can assimilate and mimic humans. Films like The Thing (1983), Species, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956/1978) and Under the Skin all turn humans into potential aliens.

This archetype is unnerving because it makes us suspicious of other people and ourselves. Aliens might already be among us, and anybody, including us, could be an alien. That said, if aliens are seductresses that look like Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin) and Natasha Henstridge (Species), there are worse ways to die.

In conclusion, to be optimistic about alien visitation, watch E.T. For a realistic portrayal of how all this UFO stuff will go down, check out Close Encounters or Robert Zemeckis’ under-rated Contact. For a philosophical/religious alien experience dive into Arrival, Starman or The Iron Giant. For a tense thrill ride, go with A Quiet Place. To indulge the nightmare scenario, go with John Carpenter’s The Thing (1983) and Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien. To see a fantastic documentary that seriously examines the UFO phenomenon, watch Out of the Blue (2003). And to find the truth regarding UFOs, keep your eyes on the prize and to the skies, and trust absolutely no one.  

A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021

In the Heights is a box office bust...so let's ban the box office!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Whenever the woke diversity and inclusion agenda fails a test, it’s always the test’s fault – never the test-taker’s.

It started in 2020, when the Academy Awards put new rules into place that required future films to be diverse and inclusive in order to qualify for nomination. Now, to bolster that diversity and inclusion agenda, the woke enemies of merit in art and entertainment have set their sights on eliminating box office receipts as a measure of cinematic success.

In the Heights, a musical with an Asian director, Latino writer and all-minority cast, made a measly $11 million at the box office in its opening weekend, instead of the $25 to $50 million some delusional fools were projecting. It’s looking as if it will make considerably less in week two (it ultimately came in 6th on its second weekend with a paltry $4.3 million), but, apparently, we need to ignore its failure to sell tickets and laud its inclusivity aims.

In an LA Times article titled ‘How Hollywood’s box-office parlor game hurts movies like “In the Heights”, writer Ashley Lee declares that the film industry “will have to learn to define the ‘success’ of a film more broadly than in dollars and cents” if it wants to fix its “intractable diversity problems”.

This idea is reminiscent of colleges dropping the SAT and elite high schools dropping difficult entrance exams to boost diversity, or when the military or fire department weakens its physical entrance test to accommodate women.

This ‘equity’ approach, which is meant to result in equality of outcome, as opposed to equality of opportunity, beautifully sums up our narcissistic, petulant and coddled era, in which, if anyone fails a test, then it’s the test’s fault and not the test-taker’s.

As for Lee’s idea of dismissing the box office, it makes perfect sense, according to woke illogic, as once diversity and inclusion become the most important things about a movie – which the Academy Awards now claim they are – then, of course, box office receipts as a metric for success become obsolete.

To the woke, if a movie checks the right identity boxes, it’s already a smash, regardless of whether it makes money, is a highly crafted work of art or is entertaining.

Of course, this is all just more hypocritical woke preening, pandering and virtue signaling, as Lee and her ilk use the box office as a bludgeon as much as anybody when it suits them. For example, in a glaring case of ‘physician heal thyself’, the article bemoans the “parlor game” of box-office projections and expectations that, when not met, set a negative narrative around a minority-led film, but plays the same parlor game, linking to another piece that claims ‘“In the Heights” is the rare Latino blockbuster. Three Times writers on what that means’. That headline ran the day the movie opened and made presumptions about how it would be received that ultimately failed to materialise.

The box-office success of Black Panther, which made over a billion dollars, and female-led movies such as Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are often used as evidence by those who say diversity is the ticket to prosperity. Hell, In the Heights only exists in its current form because director Jon Chu had a blockbuster with Crazy Rich Asians, with its all-Asian cast, and writer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, with its majority-minority cast, raked in wads of cash.

Not surprisingly, considering its fatally flawed philosophical foundation, the rest of Lee’s vapid article is peppered with vacuous declarations about diversity and inclusion problems in Hollywood – most notably, “the vanishingly rare major studio movies with nonwhite leads”. I wonder if she actually watches movies, given, over the past 30 years, Denzel Washington and Will Smith were two of the biggest movie stars working in Hollywood, and, in the past decade, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, Michael B. Jordan and the late Chadwick Boseman have dominated major studio films.

In addition, in 2020 alone, Tenet, Sound of Metal, Soul, Minari, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, One Night in Miami and Judas and the Black Messiah all had “nonwhite leads” and were nominated for Oscars. And Will Smith’s Bad Boys for Life and Jumanji: The Next Level, starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart, ranked first and fourth, respectively, at the US box office for the entire year. This proves that, contrary to Lee’s inane claims, Hollywood’s use of “nonwhite leads” is neither “vanishing” nor “rare”.

I’m a cinephile who prefers the arthouse to the cineplex, so box office is not exactly something I hold up as a symbol of cinematic virtue. But, in the case of In the Heights and other examples of mainstream Hollywood entertainment that are designed to rake in money, using box office receipts to measure their success or otherwise is the only viable and logical metric. In La La Land, the only color that truly matters is green, so the notion of eliminating that particular measure of a film’s success would go down like a lead zeppelin…and definitely not like Led Zeppelin.

The reality is that the woke can rig the system to honour their trite version of ‘diversity and inclusion’ with Academy Awards, but if they want lasting power in money-hungry Hollywood, their movies had better make bundles of cash or their whole house of politically correct cards will come tumbling down right on their empty little heads.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

'In the Heights' and the Woke Albatross

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 34 seconds

The new movie musical ‘In the Heights’ is too woke for regular people and not woke enough for race-obsessed wokesters

The movie was relentless in marketing its diversity but is learning the hard way that you can never satiate the hunger of the woke beast.

In the Heights, the movie adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award winning musical about life in the Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City, was supposed to be ‘the movie of the summer!’

The film marketed itself as a “celebration” of diversity, and shamelessly boasted about its Latino writer (Miranda), Asian director (John Chu – Crazy Rich Asians) and all minority cast.

The film was aggressively marketed by Warner Bros., and was projected to rake in anywhere from $25 million to a staggering $50 million on its opening weekend, even though it was simultaneously being released on the streaming service HBO Max.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to blockbuster status… the movie embarrassingly underperformed. Despite rave reviews the movie made a measly $11 million and came in second at the box office to A Quiet Place II in its third week in theatres, it also fell flat on HBO Max.

Who would’ve thought that a rap-heavy musical that only has as its calling card its relentless diversity, and which features no stars but sells itself as the musical equivalent of a two hour and twenty-two-minute neo-liberal lecture on immigration and the DREAM Act, wouldn’t attract hordes of normal people to theatres or HBO Max?

Welcome to life in the Hollywood bubble.

The most hysterical thing about the In the Heights situation though is that in a delicious bit of irony, despite its supposed diversity bona fides, the film has come under attack from wokesters for its lack of “Afro-Latinx” representation.

During an interview Felice Leon of The Root challenged director Chu and cast members Melissa Barrera and Leslie Grace over the “white passing” and “light-skinned” cast and the lack of “black Latinx” actors in featured roles, and her criticism attracted much attention and support on Twitter and the media.

What makes this all so funny is that Lin Manuel Miranda, whose artistic talent at writing insipid raps and insidiously sappy tales is inversely proportionate to his over-sized ego, only became a cultural icon/pet of the establishment because he hungrily and wantonly embraced diversity, most notably with Hamilton.

The same is true of director John Chu, a filmmaker of gargantuan limitations whose only claim to fame is that he made a derivative rom-com (Crazy Rich Asians) but did it with an all-Asian cast.

With In the Heights, Warner Bros., Miranda and Chu were all trying to pander to the woke in order to line their pockets, and to see these proud politically correct poseurs squirm as they are hoisted by their own petard is, pardon the pun, in the heights of comedy.

As this glorious feast of woke cannibalism played out, Chu and Miranda both tried to assuage their attackers while barely concealing their own fury at being called before the tiny Torquemadas of Twitter as the newest woke inquisition raged.

Chu responded to the criticism by saying “…when we were looking at the cast, we tried to get people who were best for those roles…”. Uh-oh…that is a terribly “white” answer and sounds an awful lot like embracing meritocracy and not diversity.

Melissa Barrera, who plays Vanessa in the film, had an uncomfortably “white” answer to the lack of dark-skinned cast members too. Barrera said, “In the audition process, which was a long audition process, there were a lot of Afro-Latinos there. A lot of darker-skinned people. They were looking for just the right people for the roles, for the person that embodied each character in the fullest extent…”

I’m sure that Mr. Chu and Ms. Barrera’s newfound touting of meritocracy will quickly transform into a vigorous playing of the diversity card the second it works to their advantage.

As for the Patron Saint of Diversity, Lin Manuel Miranda, he originally replied to the uproar with a detached defiance saying, “it’s unfair to put any undue burden of representation on In the Heights”, which is woke-speak for ‘I am King of diversity how dare you question me?!’.

Of course, the mealy-mouthed Miranda, ever the craven eunuch, later changed his tune when the tide against him continued to rise, writing an embarrassing Twitter tome which started by his stating that he wrote In the Heights because he “didn’t feel seen” and ended with his tail firmly between his legs with, “I’m dedicated to the learning and evolving we all have to do to make sure we are honoring our diverse and vibrant community.”

The lessons in all of this In the Heights nonsense is two-fold. First, the film is “get woke, go broke” made manifest. Touting diversity instead of quality and entertainment as a main selling point for a movie, particularly a musical, is a sure-fire way to turn off regular people, particularly older ones, who are usually the audience for a movie musical.

Secondly, a business plan that puts placating the woke on the top of its list is doomed to fail. In the Heights is a corporate woke Frankenstein’s monster with its Latino writer, Asian director and all minority cast, and it still wasn’t enough for the woke. Nothing will ever be enough for the woke.

And if you like this ‘woke eating their own’ story about In the Heights…wait until December. That’s when the paleolithic woke pandersaurus himself - Steven Spielberg, premiers his remake of the Latino-themed musical West Side Story. It’s guaranteed to be ferventy woke but like In the Heights, not nearly woke enough to satiate the ever hungry woke beast.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Riz Ahmed says Hollywood under-represents and toxically portrays Muslims...but he isn't telling the whole truth

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 57 seconds

The Oscar-nominated British actor and the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the US’s University of Southern California (USC) have jointly published a study that’s long on complaints and short on facts.

Riz Ahmed, the first Muslim to be nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, is spearheading an initiative to increase the visibility of Muslims in film and eradicate toxic stereotypes in Muslim characters.

As evidenced by his stellar work in, among others, the films Nightcrawler and The Sisters Brothers, the mini-series The Night Of, and his Oscar-nominated portrayal in Sound of Metal, Ahmed is one of the finest actors around, and he seems to be a very thoughtful artist and man.

Unfortunately, on reading ‘Missing and Maligned’, the study by Ahmed’s Left Handed Films and USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, it becomes apparent that his noble venture is a deeply disingenuous one.

The study obviously started with its conclusion, that Muslims are under-represented in film, and then intentionally limited its investigation and cherry-picked its evidence to make it appear that its preconception was accurate.

The fatally flawed study focuses only on the top-200 grossing films from 2017 to 2019 in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. It also fails to look at those on any streaming service, such as Netflix or Amazon Prime, which are among the biggest producers and distributors, and didn’t examine representation in TV shows.

Its disingenuousness is clear when it declares that Muslims make up 24% of the world’s population, but represent only 1.6% of speaking characters in films. This is a deceptive statistic, as the Muslim populations of the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand combined actually constitute roughly 1.5%. In other words, Muslims are slightly over-represented in film in comparison to their population percentage in the countries measured.

The study also gets specific about these individual countries. For example, it decries the fact that the US films on which it focused featured only 1.1% of characters who were Muslim, despite the fact the US has a Muslim population of… 1.1%. It also finds but fails to highlight that Australia actually features more than twice as many Muslims in its films, at 5.6%, than there are Muslims in its population, at 2.6%. And, according to the study, the UK and New Zealand, with their 5.2% and 1.3% Muslim populations, represent Muslims in film to the tune of 1.1% and 0%, respectively.

But, again, limiting the metric to just these four countries as opposed to the English-speaking film industry’s target audience, the entire Anglosphere – the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand – is deceptive. For instance, if you tally the Muslim population in the Anglosphere, it is 1.5% of the overall population, which is slightly less than the combined percentage of Muslim characters in films in the four countries examined in the study.

The second part of Ahmed’s complaint, which focuses on the toxic stereotyping of Muslim characters, is certainly more compelling, given that vacuous ethnic caricatures are one of Hollywood’s trademarks, but even on this slam-dunk topic, the Annenberg/Ahmed study is shallow, vapid and lop-sided.

For example, in a section titled ‘Modern-day Muslim Characters are Rare’, it uses statistics that reveal that 48.9% of Muslim characters are shown in “present-day settings”. Is slightly less than 50% now considered “rare”? Indeed, the “rarity” claim is even more absurd, as the study also finds that 11% of those characters were featured in scenes “in the recent past”, meaning 59.9% were in scenes in the present or recent past and 40.2% were from “the historical or fantastical past”. These sorts of statistical and rhetorical shenanigans only undermine Ahmed’s credibility.

Another odd study topic, titled ‘Disparagement is Directed at Muslim Characters’, lists words and phrases directed at 41 primary and secondary Muslim characters, such as “terrorist”, “Paki” and “fundamentalist”. The obvious counter to this is that, if films did not show the sometimes vile treatment and harassment of Muslims, then Annenberg and Ahmed would instead accuse them of ignoring Islamophobia.

Further undermining Ahmed’s argument are statements from Ahmed himself. According to the BBC, “Ahmed recently said he enjoyed the fact that the religion and ethnicity of his character Ruben in ‘Sound of Metal’ was not mentioned at all in the movie.”

So, Ahmed wants more Muslim representation in film, but is glad not to be representing a Muslim in a film? Why didn’t he want Ruben to be Muslim? Wouldn’t that have normalized the featuring of a Muslim on screen?

As an Irish Catholic, I totally understand Ahmed’s frustration with under-representation and negative portrayal in film, as Hollywood seems incapable of portraying anyone of faith – regardless of which faith – as anything other than alien or villainous. But Annenberg/Ahmed needed to prove their intellectual integrity by diving into the uncomfortable topic of which ethnic or racial groups are over-represented on screen and even behind the scenes of the film industry.

The pat answer would be white people. They make up 76.3% of the US and 86% of the UK population, yet, in 2018, represented only 69.1% of characters in films. So, which group or groups should have their representation in film decreased to make room for the Muslims Ahmed fails to prove are under-represented?

Until Annenberg, Ahmed and the rest of those raising representation issues acknowledge and address that awkward question, they and their claims will be viewed as disingenuous and short on rigour. If they want to be taken seriously when it comes to under-representation and mis-representation, they need to do more than just churn out a deceptive piece such as ‘Missing and Maligned’, which misses the mark and maligns the intelligence of its readers.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.
©2021

Birds are Racist!!!

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 27 seconds

A bunch of loons have declared that bird names and bird-watching are racist.

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the dodo’s in the establishment media are once again pushing an absurd racism narrative.

Everything is racist…including birds. I learned that fact by reading an article in the Washington Post titled “The racist legacy many birds carry” by Daryl Fears.

The headline makes it seem as though racism is like avian flu and is spread either by racist birds or birds carrying the racism bug. As dumb as that sounds, it isn’t nearly as idiotic as what the actual article contains.

The aptly named author Mr. Fears lays an egg in his insidiously insipid investigation into racism in bird watching and how many birds, “bear the names of men who fought for the Southern cause, stole skulls from Indian graves for pseudoscientific studies that were later debunked, and bought and sold Black people. Some of these men stoked violence and participated in it without consequence.”

It’s difficult to read that quote without rolling your eyes so hard you give yourself a seizure and it’s even harder to read the whole article without wanting a murder of crows to peck your eyes out.

The article claims that birds being named after people who did awful things in history shows that “as with the wider field of conservation, racism and colonialism are in orinthology’s DNA”.

Most normal people don’t know and don’t care that the Townsend’s warbler and Townsend’s solitaire are named after John Kirk Townsend who dug up Indigenous skulls to study them and “prove the inferiority of Indigenous people”. Or that Wallace’s owlet is named after Alfred Russell Wallace who in the 1800’s used the “n-word”. Or that James Sligo Jameson (of the Jameson whiskey family) purchased a girl in Africa in 1888 and watched as she was killed by “cannibals”. Or that John James Audubon, the patron not-so-saint of conservation and bird-watching, was a slave owner in the 1800’s.

Normal people don’t care about how birds got their name as it’s completely irrelevant to enjoying bird-watching. They don’t interpret names as celebrations of awful (or good) people but simply as a way to identify different birds.

Of course, in our current racial hysteria every narrative besides race is ruthlessly pushed out of the nest and left to die of under exposure.

For instance, in the article black ornithologist Corina Newsome says that after she was hired by Georgia Audubon and wore the organization’s work shirt she felt “like I was wearing the name of an oppressor, the name of someone who enslaved my ancestors.”

Regarding Newsome the article also states that “On urban and rural trails, she quickly lifts her binoculars when she sees White people do a double-take. In a scorching Georgia marsh where she slogs through muck to study a seaside sparrow, she shifts heavy equipment to the side of her body that faces the roadway so suspicious White motorists “won’t think I’m doing something illegal and make trouble for me.”

Another “ornithologist of color” Alex Troutman says he “goes out of his way to smile and wave at every white passerby when he’s in a marsh or field “to appear as least threatening as possible”.

Look, racial prejudice exists across all racial and ethnic lines, but Newsome and Troutman’s tales are more akin to the subjective ramblings of delusional paranoiacs conjuring boogey men of racial violence and oppression where none exist rather than a serious recounting of racist incidents by thoughtful people.

The article goes on to attempt to explain the root of the racist/colonialist problem in ornithology with this fantastically flaccid paragraph.

“Europeans named birds as though they were human possessions, but American Indians regard them differently. The red-tail hawk in some languages is uwes’ la’ oski, a word that translates to “lovesick,” because one of its calls sounded like a person who lost a partner.”

How exactly naming a bird by its identifying marks…like a red-tail, is a sign of European possessiveness or racism remains a mystery, though curiously the changing of the name of the ‘McCown’s longspur’ to the ‘thick-billed longspur’ due to John Porter McCown’s confederate past is deemed a victory against racist bird names.

The most interesting pieces of information in this asinine article come after its conclusion. In his bio it states that Fears has a Pulitzer prize, which is a shock considering he writes so poorly I wouldn’t trust him to correctly and coherently write a grocery list.

Also revealed is a hysterical correction which reads “An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the location of an 1855 expedition by Alfred Russel Wallace as Africa; it was the Malay Archipelago. In addition, some historians believe that the mother and baby Wallace wrote about in demeaning human terms during his trip were orangutans.”

Confusing Africa with the Malay Archipelago and humans with orangutans seems super-racist to me. Unfortunately, Mr. Fears doesn’t have any birds named after him that we can re-name, but he has a Pulitzer and a job at the Washington Post, so maybe those can be rescinded?

Ultimately, those manufacturing tenuous claims of racism in bird names and bird-watching are as ridiculous as movie-goers who would watch Hitchcock’s The Birds and conclude it’s a civil rights movie about black crows rightfully pecking to death a bunch of privileged white people over the injustice of Jim Crow laws.

The reality regarding the buffoonery of these manufactured bird-based racism claims is that if you want to undermine the fight against legitimate racism by coming across as an absurd, insane and inane loon, then a preposterous, pretentious and beyond parodic cause like “racism in orinthology” is a truly terrific way to do it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Anne Boleyn and Color-Conscious Casting

Anne Boleyn is so dull that the lead’s race is the only worth discussing…as intended

The Channel 5 mini-series has attracted a lot of attention for its unconventional casting, but it is an underwhelming piece of television.

The first episode of the highly anticipated three-part drama, Anne Boleyn, which has generated a great deal of conversation because it cast Jodie Turner Smith, a black actress, in the titular role, premiered Tuesday night on BBC Channel 5.

The casting of a black actress to play a white historical figure has garnered much attention, which seems to be the point. I certainly wouldn’t have watched Anne Boleyn if it weren’t for the casting controversy…so mission accomplished.

This color-blind (casting without considering an actor’s race) or color-conscious (intentionally casting a minority because of their identity) casting approach has been a hot topic in recent years.

“Whitewashing”, where a white actor or actress plays a role that’s a minority in the source material, such as Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell or Tilda Swinton in Doctor Strange, or where white actors/actresses play “people of color” like Emma Stone in Aloha, Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart or Jonathon Pryce in Miss Saigon, has been labelled culturally insensitive and all but banned.

In a case of “race-washing for me but not for thee”, during this same time-period “artists of color” playing characters that are white in the source material, even when that source material is actual history, has been met with cheers for being a sign of victory for “diversity” and “inclusion”.

A Wrinkle in Time, Hamilton and Mary, Queen of Scots(2018) are just a few of the examples of the race-washing of white characters, including white historical figures, with actors of color in recent years.

As a traditionalist who believes in respecting source material, particularly when the source is history itself, I always find it ironic that the woke are so enthralled with color-blind or color-conscious casting when it comes to white historical figures or originally white characters yet are so addicted to classifying people by their racial identity in real life.

Of course, the argument from the pro-color-blind/color-conscious side is rather disingenuous and unserious. Author Miranda Kaufman’s recent article on the subject in the Telegraph is a perfect representation of the vacuousness and vapidity of that position.

Kaufman opens her piece by declaring she is “always exasperated by the uproar when a new historical drama comes out with a cast that isn’t solely white” and then goes on to reveal her ignorance and stunningly obtuse perspective on the issue.

According to Kaufman, since there were blacks in England during the Tudor era that means it’s no big deal if a black actress plays Anne Boleyn.

There were white people in the civil rights movement, so should Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day Lewis and Meryl Streep play Malcolm X, MLK and Rosa Parks? There were white abolitionists so should Sean Penn and Jennifer Lawrence play Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman? This is obviously absurd.

Equally absurd is Kaufman’s reasoning that because there were 200 free blacks out of a total of between 2 and 4 million people living in Tudor England, then a black Anne Boleyn is perfectly reasonable even though, as Kaufman admits, “of course” Boleyn wasn’t black.

Kaufman’s article is titled, “Yes, there were black Tudors – and they lived fascinating lives”, so why not make a tv show about one of them and cast black artists in the roles instead of turning history into fantasy by casting Jodie Tuner Smith as Boleyn?

My opposition to color-blind and color-conscious casting is purely a function of wanting to see the very best film and television possible. Film and tv is all about ‘make believe’, as the actors are playing ‘make believe’ in order to make the audience believe what they are witnessing is genuine.

This is why movie and tv studios pay millions of dollars for top-notch CGI to make it look like superheroes are really flying and dragons actually exist, and why taller actors play Abe Lincoln and pretty actresses play Marylin Monroe.

By casting a black woman as Anne Boleyn, or any other white figure, the critically important suspension of disbelief needed to lose oneself in entertainment has one more obstacle to overcome in our jaded age, and the ‘make believe’ is made markedly less believable.

Which brings us to Anne Boleyn.

I wanted Anne Boleyn to be good because I want every-thing I see to be good, but unfortunately it isn’t just Anne’s head that will roll in relation to this show, but viewer’s eyes as well.

This drama is a rather flimsy and flaccid retelling of the Boleyn tale that brings nothing new to the table except for the race of its leading lady.

The show is not underwhelming because of Jodie Turner Smith, it would probably be anemic regardless of who played the titular role, but it isn’t helped by her presence either.

Smith is an undeniable beauty but she’s not particularly charismatic, and she certainly lacks the magnetism and skill to elevate this rather shallow and stilted drama.

The rest of the cast, be they white, black or other, don’t fare any better, as the production feels decidedly cheap and devoid of drama.  

Episode two and three of Anne Boleyn air over the next two nights and maybe it will find its dramatic rhythm and improve significantly, but I doubt it as the first episode was so dull it left me wanting to chop my own head off.

The bottom-line reality regarding Anne Boleyn is that the virtue signaling of color-blind or color-conscious casting may make pandering studio executives and the woke feel good, but it often doesn’t make for good art and entertainment.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

A Quiet Place II: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT: Not worth risking a trip to the theatre to see it, but if you stumble upon it on a streaming service than you might as well watch.

A Quiet Place II falls dramatically, culturally and politically flat as it fails to live up to the suspenseful original

The original was an ingenious commentary on cancel culture, but the sequel feels more like a lifeless corporate money grab than meaningful metaphor.

In 2018, the monster movie/horror film A Quiet Place snuck up on movie audiences and frightened and thrilled the hell out of them to the tune of $340 million in worldwide box office on a $21 million budget.

That movie, written, directed and starring John Krasinski, was a taut and tense, edge-of-your-seat original about an isolated family with a deaf daughter trying to survive after an invasion by sound sensitive aliens that kill anything they hear.

Besides being an unexpected success, the film and its ingenious major plot point of the need to keep quiet or be killed was also surprisingly a cultural and political lightning rod as it was a potent metaphor for political correctness, cancel culture and the silencing of alternative views – things which have only increased since 2018.

Considering corporate Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for reusable intellectual property it can exploit for profit, it isn’t surprising that Paramount Pictures has gone back to the well to try and recapture the magic, and more importantly the box-office success, of the first film.

A Quiet Place II was ready to go back in the Spring of 2020 but Covid delayed the release for over a year. But now it’s in theatres and Paramount is so desperate for a hit they are actually running a short introduction to the film from Krasinski where he thanks audiences for coming out and seeing his movie.

That bizarre intro seemed exceedingly polite (if not a bit desperate), but is understandable coming out of Covid and considering that after a shortened 45-day release window A Quiet Place II will be available on the Paramount + streaming service.

As for the original A Quiet Place…I absolutely loved it. I had zero expectations going into it and when it ended, I let out a deep breath that I realized I’d been holding nearly the entirety of the movie. I love when that happens, when a film comes out of nowhere and just pulls you in and takes you on a gripping and suspenseful journey.

I was equally shocked and thrilled that John Krasinski of all people, who was best known as Jim from the U.S. tv show The Office, was capable of being such a skilled director and interesting storyteller.

A Quiet Place II, which is also written and directed by Krasinski, and once again stars his real-life wife Emily Blunt, is not flying under the radar and won’t sneak up on anybody. Expectations are very high for the film, and unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to them.

A Quiet Place II isn’t a terrible movie, by any stretch. In fact, there are some fantastic moments, like the first five minutes of the movie. But beyond that it is too often a forgettable, generic, repetitive and predictable horror film/monster movie, which is a terrible letdown.

The film is chock full of sequences meant to be suspenseful, but they all feel so calculated and contrived as to be just another piece of movie-making manipulation manufactured by Hollywood conventionalities.

The drama and the narrative too seemed forced, flat and rushed. Missing is the claustrophobic dramatic sense of imposed silence, small spaces and familial relationships that fueled the drama, suspense and tension of the original.

Due to the events in A Quiet Place, the sequel lacks the combustible father-daughter drama to the extant it was featured in the original. The introduction of new characters, like the forlorn Emmett (Cillian Murphy), further dissipates the confined family drama aspect of the story that was so effective in the first film.

Also gone is the suspense from the all-encompassing dread and need for silence, as the aliens are exposed for having a weakness in the original so silence becomes more a tactic than an existential demand in the sequel. And finally, in the sequel the family ventures out into the world, thus diminishing the tension born of that sense of being trapped in the same space.

As for the cultural and political relevance of the film…well…cancel culture and political correctness have only gotten more powerful in the three years since A Quiet Place premiered, but somehow A Quiet Place II actually feels less metaphorically relevant.

If you strain hard enough there is certainly some cultural and political sub-text you can deconstruct. For instance, the notion of needing to find courage, stay calm and work together to overcome the woke beasts of cancel culture is there if you look hard enough. So is the idea of needing to find a big enough and effective enough communication device to expose the weakness of the p.c. police and defeat them. But none of that metaphorical analysis is fueled by remotely as much energy as that found in the first film.

Maybe it’s just a function of A Quiet Place II not being as effective as the original or maybe it’s because the original already rang the cancel culture alarm so there’s nothing new to posit on the subject in the sequel. Regardless, A Quiet Place II doesn’t feel like a cultural lightning rod so much as a corporate cash grab. Such is life in Hollywood.

Ultimately, A Quiet Place was an ingenious piece of storytelling that was unique and original. But while familiarity doesn’t breed contempt for A Quiet Place II, it certainly does breed predictability and boredom.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Cruella: Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Really not much of interest in this big budget misfire.

Cruella is the perfect kid’s movie for a culture that celebrates cruelty and malignant megalomania

Disney has discarded the old princess narrative and under the guise of self-empowerment are now teaching generations of young girls to embrace self-serving toxicity.

In the new Disney movie Cruella the Rolling Stones classic Sympathy for the Devil plays over the film’s final scene, which felt a bit too on the nose for the origin story of a notorious character that will go on to attempt to skin puppies for the sake of fashion.

Cruella, of course, is Cruella de Vil, the infamous arch villain of the iconic animated film One Hundred and One Dalmatians. With this new, live-action, reimagined reboot starring Emma Stone we discover why Cruella hates dalmatians so much and how she rose to power.

What we really learn though is that the suits at Disney will go to any lengths to plumb the depths of their intellectual property vault to make money and corrode the culture.

Cruella, whose real name is Estella, is at first set in a sort of Dickensian London, where we learn of her troubled childhood. The film then magically shifts into the stylishly swinging London of the 60’s and 70’s where Estella graduates from good girl gone bad to bad girl grown up.

The soundtrack, which is easily the best part of the movie, reflects that time period as it features an abundance of classics from The Doors, Queen, Nina Simone, ELO, Tina Turner, The Clash and the aforementioned Stones.

Unfortunately, like seemingly all Disney films, Cruella is a shameless money grab in the form of a two hour and fourteen-minute advertisement for Disney’s vast catalogue of past movie hits and its newfound woke politics.

Director Craig Gillespie has experience making movies about cartoonishly villainous women, as evidenced by his terrific film I, Tonya, about disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, but on Cruella he seems desperately out of place.

The film’s star, Emma Stone, doesn’t fare much better. Stone is a likeable screen presence, but she is all bark and no bite as Cruella, as the thread bare script makes little human sense and reduces her acting to histrionics.

The lone bright spot in the cast though is Paul Walter Hauser who is glorious as always as the bumbling buffoon Horace Badun. The rotund Hauser is quickly becoming one of the best scene stealers and actors in the business.

The film’s massive $200 million budget doesn’t translate into stunning visuals either, as the film looks just ok and lacks any remarkable cinematic moments. It’s also painfully derivative, generously borrowing from other, much better films like The Devil Wears Prada, Joker, The Thomas Crown Affair and V for Vendetta.

The biggest problem with Cruella though is that it can’t quite figure out what exactly it wants to be. It’s too dark to be for kids and too silly to be for adults. Yet despite the movie’s PG13 rating, it would appear from the movie’s rather ludicrous plot and minimal character development that the target audience is impressionable pre-teen girls, which is unfortunate since the film’s moral perspective is less than idyllic.

Even though there are shades of Cinderella in Cruella, there are certainly no princesses to be found. The old days of the Disney princess are long gone and some may say good riddance, but now the corporate behemoth Mickey Mouse built is pivoting to not just churning out generic girl power movies, but with Cruella, bad-girl girl power movies.

This is a bad girl versus bad girl movie, a battle of the bitches if you will, where Cruella (Emma Stone) faces off against her fashion designer nemesis Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson – doing a second-rate Meryl Streep imitation), with the most-cruel and conniving female fashionista winning the stylish bad girl championship crown with belt to match.

I’m old enough to remember when Joker came out in 2019 and hysterical establishment critics shrieked in horror, declaring it dangerous because Joker was the “patron saint of incels” who’d inspire white men to violence. Joker was rated R and obviously geared towards adults, but Cruella? It’s for 10 year-old girls is designed under the guise of self-empowerment to encourage the selfish, bitchy and viciously toxic behavior of brats of all ages.

And don’t be fooled, Disney knows exactly what it’s doing as it clearly understands full well the power of pop culture to persuade, which is why it wouldn’t allow Stone to smoke as Cruella despite that being a signature trait of the character.

God only knows what deleterious effect Cruella will have on generations of girls in a nation already filled with a plethora of narcissistic Karen De Vils.

Of course, Cruella is inoculated against that sort of moral and/or cultural criticism from mainstream critics because it has the “proper” woke perspective and a “diverse” and “inclusive” cast where most of the “heroes” are women, minorities or both.

Among these heroes are Cruella, a genius taking on the small-minded patriarchy, Anita, the black female gossip columnist defiantly helping Cruella’s cause, Artie, the gay fashionista who fights for all things fabulous, and Jasper, Cruella’s right-hand person of color.

Ultimately, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story about an anti-hero or villain. These stories can have great value in that they help a culture assimilate its shadow and ultimately find catharsis. Joker is a perfect example of this, and so could be Cruella if it were made for adults.

Cruella though is a sign of a culture intent on destroying itself as it’s a kid’s movie that teaches young girls to identify with and have sympathy for this undeniably immoral and malignant megalomaniacal she-devil, all while it celebrates cruelty.

I guess a corrosive kid’s movie like Cruella was inevitable since we live in a popular, political and social culture populated with so many cruel, immoral, malignantly megalomaniacal adults. As the saying goes “you get what you pay for”…which is why I definitely wouldn’t recommend paying for Cruella.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Friends: The Reunion

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 49 secodns

The one they shouldn’t have made: Friends’ pointless, self-aggrandizing reunion delivers neither nostalgia nor laughs

The long-waited reunion of one of TV’s most successful shows is a missed opportunity. The aging cast should have been brave enough to reprise their beloved roles instead of just reminiscing about their glory days.

The often-delayed and much-hyped ‘Friends: The Reunion’ finally premiered on HBO Max on Thursday. The end result of this rather slick, self-aggrandizing, hour and 43-minute long commercial for itself was a bevy of ambivalent shrugs and a collective “who cares?”.

‘Friends’ burst on the scene on September 22, 1994 and with its beautiful and talented cast of Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Matthew Perry, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRXVQ77ehRQ

Like some sort of sitcom Beatlemania, ‘Friends’ became part of the cultural zeitgeist, with its catchphrases (how YOU doin’?), storylines (Ross and Rachel) and style (the ever-present Rachel hairdo) dominating mainstream entertainment discourse for a decade until its finale on May 6, 2004.

The show was enormously successful as the top-rated television comedy for six of its 10 years, averaging a whopping 25 million viewers an episode in America.

Even after it rode off into the sunset and was relegated to reruns, the show still garnered much attention, as it was consistently among the most streamed programs on Netflix, and has been watched over 100 billion times over all platforms over its lifetime.

The staying power of ‘Friends’ is why WarnerMedia were so keen to get their hands on the show in order for it to be the cornerstone of their new streaming service HBO Max, and shelled out $425 million for the privilege.

The ‘Friends’ reunion, only the second time in 17 years the cast has been in the same room together, was meant to be the big draw to HBO Max when it opened for business in May of 2020, but due to Covid, the filming of the reunion was pushed back not once but twice. And now it is now finally here.

The idea of a ‘Friends’ reunion where the characters Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey returned had the potential to be pretty great.

The opportunities were endless for the show’s creators. They could have opted to have Ross and Rachel bitterly divorced, Monica addicted to meth, Chandler embracing his true trans nature, Phoebe homeless playing guitar on the subway, and Joey facing homicide charges, and it would’ve been interesting if not entertaining. ‘Friends’ could have been daring and deconstructed, if not self-destructed, its rather monotonous middlebrow milieu.

Instead, the new episode is like a reunion at a high school you didn’t attend, where you’re left out of the conversation and have to watch the cool kids reminisce about their awesome lives.

The problem with the reunion is that fans only care about Aniston, Schwimmer, Cox, Perry, Kudrow and LeBlanc because they were Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey. But Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe and Joey aren’t in the reunion, only Aniston, Schwimmer, Cox, Perry, Kudrow and LeBlanc are. A ‘Friends’ reunion only has power if it’s bringing those characters back together, not just bringing the cast back together.

Watching them sit around and recount funny stories and do some minimal table reads isn’t the slightest bit interesting or entertaining. It’s sort of like reassembling a famous band and having them talk about when they used to play music together, as opposed to actually having them play some music together.

To make things worse, the show is sometimes hosted by James Corden, and the only good thing about James Corden is when Ricky Gervais makes fun of him. For instance, at the 2020 Golden Globes Gervais gloriously quipped, “this year the world got to see James Corden as a fat pussy…and he was also in ‘Cats’!”  Sadly, the ‘Friends’ reunion has no Ricky Gervais, only James Corden.

Also unfortunate is having to watch David Beckham, Kit Harrington, Malala Yousafzai and Mindy Kaling tell us their favorite episodes, or Lady Gaga sing ‘Smelly Cat’, or Justin Bieber, Cara Delevingne and Cindy Crawford model silly ‘Friends’ costumes, or a relentlessly ‘diverse’ and ‘inclusive’ bunch of ‘Friends’ fans share how much the show means to them. All of which is just as awful and self-congratulatory as it sounds.

Ultimately, the ‘Friends’ reunion isn’t so much a testament to its greatness as it is a monument to the ravages of age. Father Time is still undefeated and proof of that is on the bloated, surgically supplemented faces of the cast. Lisa Kudrow aside, the entire cast has aged dramatically and dreadfully.

Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston were two of the most luminous beauties on television during the show’s heyday, but now if you saw them and their contorted faces in your bathroom at four in the morning, you’d think your house was haunted.

Both women constantly dabbed the corners of their eyes with tissues throughout the reunion, but it seemed less like they were crying and more like they were leaking from a deficient surgical seam.

In addition, Matt LeBlanc looks like he’s eaten a whole Joey and Matthew Perry looks like something is very wrong with him. I don’t mean that as a joke, Perry looks genuinely ill to the point of it being very disconcerting.

Regardless of the ravages of age on the cast, people have always watched ‘Friends’ for the escapist dopamine hit of some soft sitcom humor, but ‘Friends: The Reunion’ doesn’t have that, and is also shockingly devoid of even the dopamine hit of nostalgia.

In conclusion, ‘Friends’ hasn’t done anything interesting or worthwhile since the show ended in 2004, and some would argue the same was true during the show’s run. Rest assured, the unimaginative ‘Friends: The Reunion’ keeps that streak resolutely intact.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Final Account: Documentary Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 58 seconds 

New Nazi documentary ‘Final Account’ is a powerful and prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age

Luke Holland’s film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary German’s in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that it’s easy to label our enemies as Nazis…but the true search for evil should begin with a look in the mirror.

The new documentary Final Account is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.

The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi, “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Director Luke Holland, whose mother lost her family in the Holocaust and who himself died of cancer in 2020 after the film’s completion but before its premiere, goes on to prove Levi’s thesis.

Holland began production in 2008 and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project, and his bare-bones, oral history approach, works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.

Holland’s subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one becoming a member of Hitler’s elite body guards, the Leibstandarte.

Their recollections regarding the holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admitted the egregiousness of the crime but doubt its scale. And one, a former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.

This former bodyguard of Hitler says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should’ve been deported and not exterminated. He’s so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because “then I would dirty myself”. His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasn’t a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.

Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.

Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.

None of these revelations are met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter of fact-ness.

The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.

The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the sight of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.

After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems they’re resistant because they think he’s lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear they’re actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German and having fought for Germany.

This scene is electrifying because it’s the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to “don’t let yourself be blinded”.

Werk’s warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it – the “not-see” disease, is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. “Not seeing” the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.

The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York attacking Jews, blacks viciously attacking Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighers being held in Chinese concentration camps.

This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate American.

This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of “functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” which populate the Nazi nightmare of Final Account.

Final Account is not a great film, it is somewhat derivative in style as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps, but it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.

It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in Final Account will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT. 

©2021