Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

On this episode, Barry and I get our hairy Hobbit feet moving and head to Middle-Earth to talk about the first two episodes of the new Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Questions discussed in this episode include, is this what a billion dollars buys you? Why is the acting so bad? And, why is this adaptation of Tolkien so terrible so far?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 74: The Rings of Power

Thanks for listening!

©2022

The Rehearsal (HBO Max): TV Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Batshit, bizarre and brilliant.

“ONE TIME A THING OCCURRED TO ME, WHAT’S REAL AND WHAT’S FOR SALE?” – Vasoline by Stone Temple Pilots

It is very difficult to describe The Rehearsal, a new six-episode series written, directed and starring Nathan Fielder, now streaming on HBO Max.

At first glance, the series is a ‘reality tv’ show about Fielder helping regular people navigate their anxiety by directing elaborate rehearsals of difficult situations they will encounter in the future.

For example, in episode one Fielder assists a man who has been lying to a friend about his level of education and wants to come clean but is worried about how the friend will react. This is pretty standard reality tv stuff…nothing to see here. Except Fielder goes to extraordinary lengths to recreate the setting and the individuals involved in the encounter. He builds an exact replica of the bar where the conversation will take place, and hires actors to play everyone involved except for the man who wants to confess, and then rehearses the hell out of it trying to build a roadmap to follow for any contingency that may arise.

Episode one is amusing for how ridiculous Fielder is in his quest for “authenticity” regarding setting and cast…but it’s child’s play compared to what comes in episodes 2-6. That’s where the show turns the lunacy up to eleven and the absurdity up to infinity.

The first episode actually has almost nothing to do with the rest of the series. I won’t spoil anything vital from episodes 2-6 only because it simply has to be seen to be believed…and even seeing isn’t believing as I assume all of it is as phony as a smile on a two-dollar whore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t fascinating and insightful.

I’ve never seen any of Nathan Fielder’s earlier work, but from what I understand he’s a comedian/actor and comedic provocateur, so The Rehearsal is, I guess, best described as a docu-comedy…or maybe a mocku-comedy, or maybe an off-the-rails, reality tv social experiment.

I’m a notoriously difficult audience for comedy and am incapable of giving pity laughs. The Rehearsal made me guffaw numerous times, and not with traditional build-ups and payoffs but with subtle, understated, insanely weird moments of glorious absurdity.

Nathan Fielder is the ethically and morally corrupt ringmaster and clown of this straight-faced, three-ring circus, and he’s a passive-aggressive, raging narcissist suffering from supreme self-absorption and cluelessness…and it’s hysterical to behold, even when, or maybe especially when, he acts so superior to the rubes he’s supposedly silently judging, despite being just as ignorant, oblivious and self-delusional as they are.

I have no idea if this Fielder persona is genuine or an act, and I don’t much care. Like Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, Fielder’s persona is able to tell a complex story without ever needing to utter a word.

Fielder’s ‘act’ is, in some ways, sort of a more subdued version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat work, where he bonds with the audience because he’s in on the joke and uses ‘normal’ people as the punchline. But unlike Borat, Fielder’s insecurities and arrogance keeps slipping out from behind the mask.

The Rehearsal reminded me of a documentary/mockumentary from 1999 titled American Movie, which chronicled some passionate but unfortunate Midwestern filmmakers trying to make a movie that is destined to be terrible. American Movie was all the rage amongst a certain sect of hipster cinephiles back in the day. I even worked on a similar project as a cinematographer/actor in the same time frame. Similar to The Rehearsal, debates raged about whether American Movie was a real documentary or a mockumentary, and the answer is still elusive. I’m less in doubt about the dubious voracity of The Rehearsal.

The Rehearsal is also somewhat reminiscent of the Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche, NY, which blurs reality and manufactured reality in a post-modern cauldron of existentialism.

And the last thing that The Rehearsal reminded me of was Bo Burnham’s Netflix comedy special, Inside. Although The Rehearsal is nothing like Bo Burnham’s Inside in content and character, it’s similar in the sense that it is undoubtedly a singular work of genius.

Many moons ago while studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, my class did a sort of Meisner-esque exercise where an actor sits on a chair and looks straight ahead. The actor is supposed to be still and just listen to the words other classmates say to them from across the room and see if they generate a genuine, spontaneous emotional or physical reaction.

It's an interesting exercise in that it is meant to remove the impulse of the actor to “show” or indicate and instead just open themselves up, to be and to react organically and naturally.

I had already gone to film school prior to the Royal Academy so I realized during this exercise that it was very similar to the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s Theory of Montage. In layman’s terms Eisenstein’s theory claims that the context surrounding an image is what assists the audience in projecting onto it meaning and emotion. For example, the shot of a stoic face is given meaning if it is preceded or followed by different images. The audience projects upon the stoic face a pleasant demeanor if it is preceded by a baby laughing, and the audience projects a darker meaning if the stoic face is preceded by a shot of war or carnage.

All of this came to mind watching Nathan Fielder, as his usually expressionless face and monotonous voice is a blank canvass upon which the audience can project their own meaning, including their own bias and prejudice.

For example, for much of episodes 2-6, Christianity is often positioned to be the butt of the joke by Fielder, who is Jewish. So much so, that at one point that prejudiced sub-text bubbles to the surface as someone openly declares without any opposition, that being a Christian is itself an irredeemable act of anti-Semitism. But afterwards another discussion takes place regarding Judaism, and the previously espoused anti-Christian sentiment is then given more context and its meaning changes radically. This is an instance of Fielder finding insight because of his lack of self-awareness, not in spite of it.

In that class at the Royal Academy there was a student, I’ll call him “Tushy”, who was a recent Ivy league grad, came from a very wealthy family, and seemingly had everything going for him, and yet he still felt the need to tell everyone fantastical stories about the famous women he had dated. Everyone knew these stories were obviously untrue for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that Tushy was very gay, but he and his stories were harmless so nobody really cared.

In the Meisner-esque exercise though, Tushy’s inability to just “be”, which is a form of being honest with yourself and thus your audience, proved a liability. Tushy was incapable of just “being” and had to push and indicate all of the feelings he thought he was supposed to have during the exercise. As an audience member and participant this was uncomfortable to watch because it was so painful, obvious and painfully obvious. The teacher, who was one of the best in the world, gently tried to remind him of the purpose of the exercise and re-direct him to stillness but Tushy would have none of it. He kept pushing and urging himself to have a profound reaction (in this case crying) because he wanted everyone to think he was a profound person having a profound reaction.

There’s a pivotal sequence in The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder turns into Tushy, and is betrayed by his desperate yearning for profundity and therefore creates a manufactured profundity. Except in this case, Fielder’s forced profundity is actually profound in its own right as it exposes the deeper ‘reality’ about him, his series, and his audience, which is that our culture, marinated in malignant narcissism and saturated with social media, has devolved humanity to the point where we are no longer capable of ever feeling genuine empathy.

On its surface The Rehearsal is a simple bit of reality tv comedy, but beneath that façade is an astoundingly complex piece of work that speaks volumes about the diminished and depraved state of humanity.

The bottom line is that Nathan Fielder is a modern-American holy fool, and his series The Rehearsal is batshit, bizarre and absolutely brilliant.

©2022

House of the Dragon (HBO): Thoughts and Musings on Episode One

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

It’s surprising that Game of Thrones came to its rather ignominious end just three years ago, as those chaotic three years have felt like decades if not centuries. The way the once-glorious, must-see series badly stumbled at its conclusion seemed to make it disappear from the collective consciousness almost overnight. With stunning speed and alacrity viewers went from vociferously declaring “Winter is coming!”, to petulantly asking, “what’s next?”

Such is the nature of our current culture, where there’s a plethora of entertainment choices (notice I didn’t say “entertaining choices”) and virtually every movie or series ends up in the trash heap of forgettable fiction the moment it stops playing before our eyes.

2019 was a year of major endings, and not just for Game of Thrones. That same year Marvel’s miraculous narrative run from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019) came to a smashing conclusion. So, the biggest tv series and the biggest movie franchise, both of which dominated popular culture for a decade, came to an end in 2019 and ever since, pop culture has been struggling and staggering to find a center, be it cinematic or on television, around which to orient itself.

Marvel has tried to keep its brand at the forefront of the culture by expanding to tv as well as extending its cinematic universe, and for the most part the results have been dismal. Marvel movies and TV series are no longer cultural landmarks but instead, little but fodder for tedious culture wars.

Which brings us to House of the Dragon, the new Game of Thrones series which premiered on HBO on Sunday, August 21st. The series is a prequel set 172 years before the events of Game of Thrones that tells the story of the rule of the dragon-blooded Targaryens.

The series is undoubtedly attempting to re-create the culturally dominating experience of its predecessor. After watching the first episode of House of the Dragon, which broke viewing records at HBO and overloaded the servers at HBO Max, I’m still reticent to declare that “Westeros is back, baby!”

Game of Thrones‘ fatally flawed ending left a putrid taste in a great deal of viewer’s mouths, my own included, so it’s just about impossible that House of the Dragon will be a similar smash hit. Audiences may well be wary of giving it the time it needs to grow, and after the calamity that was Game of Thrones’ final season, with good reason.

It’s too soon to tell whether House of the Dragon will find the magic that Game of Thrones did, but it’s early yet. The first episode was fine. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t awful. It just was. Some of the CGI was terrific, some of it wasn’t. Some of the characters were compelling, some of them weren’t.

I remember watching season one of GOT and liking it but not really thinking it was anything remarkable until episode nine (out of ten) of season one.

In that episode, Ned Stark is set to be executed and I kept wondering how they were going to save him. I mean, you can’t execute Ned Stark as he’s played by Sean Bean, the biggest star on the show. But then in episode nine…they cut Ned’s goddamn head off. I remember yelling out from my couch when it happened because it was so viscerally shocking to see a tv show completely upend the conventions of its medium.

House of the Dragon will not be able to do such a thing because it’s already been done. Audiences are harder to shock a second and third time around…and considering that Game of Thrones continued to shock throughout its run (think the Red Wedding – holy shit!), House of the Dragon has an uphill climb.

I don’t know if it’s a help or hindrance that I haven’t read any of the Game of Thrones books, but I haven’t. On the plus side in terms of Game of Thrones, I had no idea what was coming, on the downside in terms of House of the Dragon, I don’t really know who anybody is or really care about them at the start.

In a real sense, I had almost no clue what was going on in Game of Thrones most of the time but enjoyed it because the acting was superb, the writing crisp, the production (sets, costumes, cinematography, sound) glorious and the world building brilliant. It also helped a great deal that there were a plethora of my three favorite things…nudity, strong sexual content and violence. You basically can never go too wrong with that combination.

With House of the Dragon, that same formula may be watered down in order to appease the social media Savanorolas who simply cannot tolerate anyone enjoying anything. Episode one of House of the Dragon had some violence and some sexual content and nudity, but not nearly enough for my voracious appetite, and certainly nothing up to the standards of Game of Thrones in its debauched heyday.

House of the Dragon does boast some fine performances thus far, most notably Matt Smith as rogue prince Daemon. Smith was last seen in The Crown playing a young Prince Philip (talk about a rogue prince – he’s the father of pedo prince Andrew…the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree), and he’s a terrific actor. As Daemon he believably transforms into a villainous and oddly charming brute.

Daemon’s brother, King Viserys, is played by the wondrous Paddy Considine, who brings to the role a palpable sense of fragility that augers trouble for the king.

Also excellent is Rhys Ifans as Ser Otto Hightower, the Hand of the King. Ifans, like so many of the actors from the original series and now its prequel, is just a damn good British actor who brings a formidable amount of craft and skill to his role and elevates the series in the process.

That said, there’s a much smaller cast in House of the Dragon as compared to Game of Thrones, there’s also fewer interesting characters. Daemon, King Viserys and Hightower are decent characters, but nothing spectacular. If they were in Game of Thrones they’d be C or D level, fringe characters, not the main attraction.

Speaking of main attractions, Viserys’ daughter Rhaenyra, played as a teen in the first episode by Milly Alcock – and played by Emma D’Arcy in later episodes as a grown woman, thus far isn’t the least bit interesting. Like Arya Stark, she shuns the lady-life and bristles at the restrictions of the patriarchy, but she is also a deluxe dullard of the highest order. Maybe that will change going forward…hopefully it will change going forward.

Equally dull is Alicent Hightower, Otto Hightower’s daughter and Rhaenyra’s best friend, played by Emily Carey as a young woman and later in the series by Olivia Cooke as an adult. Alicent is paper thin as a character in episode one, and given that she had a potentially blockbuster scene with the King at one crucial point, that is disappointing if not devastating.

Again, the series just started and has the potential to grow into greatness, but it must be said that episode one is a bit middling. Part of the reason for that is that the production lacks the crispness and visual lushness of Game of Thrones, including in the CGI department.

Not surprisingly, dragons play a big role in the story of House of the Dragon, and the dragons themselves look as good as ever, but when placed into settings the scenes look uncomfortably cheap…like a quick cut and paste job.

The sets and costumes also look to be downgraded in terms of quality on House of the Dragon, as do the costumes, both of which may be a result of some cost cutting in the wake of Game of Thrones ever expanding budget.  

Also notably sub-par was the sound design, which left much of the dialogue muddled under ambient noise or music.

House of the Dragon, which is NOT produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, is apparently the first in a collection of Game of Thrones I.P. that HBO will be sending our way. The recent financial struggles at Discovery, which took on a massive amount of debt to purchase WarnerMedia (which includes HBO) could spell trouble for such pricey projects going forward though.

If belt tightening at Discovery/Warner leads to lesser quality in the Game of Thrones spin-offs, then they’d be better off not doing them at all. Of course, I’m only saying that from an artistic/fan perspective, as quality is my number one concern.

Speaking of fan perspective, House of the Dragon is chock full of fan service and Game of Thrones Easter eggs. No doubt fans of the original series will love that, but if House of the Dragon doesn’t improve in quality and catch dramatic fire sooner rather than later, fans will turn on it and HBO will be left with a bloody mess on their hands. Only time will tell.

I’ll check back in midway through season one of House of the Dragon with another review to see if things in Westeros are headed in the right direction.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 73 - The Grey Man

On this episode, Barry and I try not to put a bullet through our gray matter as we suffer through The Grey Man, the new Russo Brothers directed Netflix action movie starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Topics discussed include awful acting, awful directing, awful writing, awful establishing shots, awful action sequences, awful Chris Evans and Netflix's awful future. On the bright side, listeners will get to hear Barry's spirit break when he learns some shocking news about the Grey Man movie universe.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 73 - The Grey Man

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Nope: A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Nothing to see here. Just more cinematic fool’s gold from Jordan Peele.

Back in 2017, writer/director Jordan Peele became an adored critical darling, and Academy Award winning screenwriter, for his box office hit, socially-aware horror film, Get Out.

What critics and many fans failed to realize at the time, and still seem completely blind to, is the fact that Peele became the new “it” director not because he’s a great talent or because Get Out was some brilliant piece of moviemaking, he isn’t and it wasn’t, but rather because liberals were in such a furious tizzy over Trump’s election victory and presidency that they were defiantly grasping for anything at all to hold on to and celebrate. As a decades-long Trump-loather myself, I understood the impulse, but refused to fall under its disorienting spell, especially when it comes to cinema.

Get Out was the perfect movie to be celebrated in this rather insane moment for two reasons. First, because it was a movie about how awful white people are and white liberals could signal their virtue and how they were “one of the good ones” by watching it and being vociferous in their praise of it.

Secondly, Get Out was directed by a black man and critics were desperate to heap praise upon anything that made them seem “not racist” aka “one of the good ones” and which inflated the “diversity and inclusion” balloon.

I said it at the time, and it only holds more-true today, that Get Out is an absurdly over-rated movie written and directed by an even more absurdly over-rated director. If Get Out had come out at any other time it would have been quickly, and rightfully, forgotten for being shallow, tinny, amateurish and vapid.  

Proof of my thesis regarding Jordan Peele and his sub-par work was evident in Peele’s follow-up film, Us (read my review of it here). Us was, like Get Out, somewhat clever in theory, but an absolute shitshow in execution. Whatever kernel of a good idea Peele had regarding Us, eventually grew to be an unwieldy and incoherent mess of a movie. But since Peele has been tapped as the new “it” director, critics, and many fans, pretended that Us was brilliant. So-it-goes in matters of cultural/political faith, I suppose.

Which brings us to Peele’s latest cinematic venture, Nope.

Nope, a sort of sci-fi/horror/western, stars Academy-Award winner Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer as siblings, the depressive O.J. and the aggressively depressing Emerald Haywood respectively, who grew up on their family’s horse farm in Southern California. The family raises and trains horses to be used in the movie business and are actually related to the first man to have ever been captured on film (a black man riding a horse).

Things start to get interesting for O.J. and Emerald when some very strange, UFO-related stuff starts happening on the ranch.

I will refrain from any further exploration of the plot to avoid spoilers but will answer these specific questions about Nope.

Is it coherent? Nope.

Is it well-written? Nope.

Is it well directed? Nope.

Is it well-acted? Nope.

Is it a good movie? Nope.

The reality is that Nope is a frustrating and irritating, middling misfire of a nonsensical sci-fi horror film that has nothing of import to say about much of anything.

Of course, other critics are slobbering all over Nope for the same exact reasons they slobbered all over Get Out and Us. But critical and fan praise of Peele is becoming more and more untenable as he continues to churn out these cinematic shit sandwiches that are critical fool’s gold.

It’s somewhat amusing to me that one of the least comprehensible parts of the movie concerns a neighbor of the Haywood siblings, the Park family, whose patriarch is a former child star named Jupe (Steven Yeun). Jupe suffered a horrible tragedy while working on a sitcom in the 90’s, and that story is infinitely more interesting than the Haywood’s UFO stuff. In fact, I’d love to see a movie about Jupe and the calamity he witnessed rather than the tedious tale of the Haywood ranch.

I mean, I get it, Jupe’s story and the Haywood’s story in Nope all deal with the horror of being moved down on the food chain as well as the exploitative nature and dangers of fame and fortune, but Peele seems allergic to profundity and brings nothing unique or mildly interesting to those topics.

As for the cast, Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor and a very pleasant screen presence, but his O.J. feels flat because there’s nothing for him to grab onto in the script.

Keke Palmer may be a good actress, I don’t know, but her Emerald is one of the most annoying characters imaginable and grates to epic proportions every moment she appears on-screen.

Other characters, like Steven Yeun’s Jupe and Brandon Perea’s Angel, are so thinly written as to be vacant caricatures. Although to be fair, Yeun at least fills his vacuously written Jupe with some semblance of inner life which is missing from the rest of the cast.

The problem is that due to the fact that there is almost no character development beyond exposition, it’s next to impossible to feel any connection to these people or to ultimately care what happens to them.

Other issues with the film abound as well. For example, the special effects are second-rate…and they include one of the more laughable on-screen monsters in recent memory as it looks like an origami jellyfish or a paper-mache octopus or a headache-inducing screen-saver or something.

Peele’s writing on Nope is scattered, his pacing lethargic, his storytelling anemic and the entire affair feels egregiously bloated with its excruciating 131-minute runtime.

Peele also loads the film with a series of empty scares that are false and cheap and ultimately undermine audience trust in the film and the director. This tactic can sometimes work in building tension, but in Nope it ends up strangling audience anticipation until in the climactic final act they are left with nothing to give and nothing to care for.

Nope will do fine at the box office because there is basically nothing else out there and the weak-kneed critics and Peele fans will relentlessly bang the drum for its brilliance, but let’s be real…Nope is not a good movie.

And finally…can we stop? Can we just fucking stop pretending that Jordan Peele is Alfred Hitchcock or Steven Spielberg? He isn’t. Hell, he isn’t even M. Night Shyamalan for god’s sake.

Look, I get it. I thought Alex Garland was the next big director after I saw Ex Machina. Unfortunately, he wasn’t (and it should be said that Ex Machina is an infinitely better film and better made film than Get Out) and has churned out two dogs in its wake.

Other people fell for Jason Reitman in the same way after his early films (Thank You for Smoking, Juno, Up in the Air), which, like Get Out, were all ridiculously and egregiously over-rated.

It happens, critics and movie fans can get carried away and envision a bright career for an “important” movie maker that requires talent you think you see but which isn’t really there. But you’ve got to snap out of your spell of infatuation when the facts are contrary to your fandom inspired delusions.  

In regards to Peele, Jason Reitman is the perfect example because, at best, Jordan Peele is maybe…maybe, a mediocre moviemaking talent who has successfully pulled the wool over critics and fan’s eyes, just like Jason Reitman did. That’s it. Jordan Peele is Jason Reitman, and now we are just waiting to see if critics will ever wake up to that moribund reality.

As for Nope, it is not a good sci-fi film, or a good horror film, or a good western, or a good social satire. I can honestly report that not only do you not need to see this movie in the theatres, you actually never need to see this movie at all. If someone wants to take you to see it, just look them in the eye and say “nope”.

©2022

Ms. Marvel (Disney +): TV Review

MS. MARVEL

Season One - 6 Episodes - Disney +

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series is embarrassingly bad and embodies everything that is wrong with the current Marvel machine. Under no circumstances should you watch it.

I just finished watching the season finale of Ms. Marvel, the latest Marvel superhero series on Disney +, and my question is this…what in the hell are we doing? Seriously, like, what the fuck are we doing as a country, as a culture, as a species?

The six-episode series, which tells the origin story of Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel – a superhero obsessed teenage Pakistani-American girl living in Jersey City who discovers she has super powers, is the most embarrassing, most egregious and most-cringe-worthy piece of garbage Marvel has released on the small screen, which considering it came out right after the steaming pile of feces that was Moon Knight, is quite an achievement.

A brief rundown of the plot is that Kamala loves Marvel superheroes (Captain Marvel most of all) and wants to be one. Then through some family history and Pakistani lore, she ends up discovering she has powers but has to hide them from her loving but conservative immigrant parents and her friends. A journey from Jersey City to Karachi and back again ensues and there are some poorly written and poorly delivered expositional monologues and some hysterically bad action sequences and then it comes to the most-inane anti-climax imaginable.  

Ms. Marvel sucks…it really, truly does suck, the reason for that is because Ms. Marvel as a character is extraordinarily dull, her origin story (at least the one presented in this series) is even duller and her superpowers are absurdly bland. The series itself looks unconscionably cheap, most notably its laughably amateurish special effects, not to mention the inept acting, insipid writing, incompetent directing and its mind-numbingly pedestrian action sequences.

The reality is that Ms. Marvel is, at best, a third-rate show for kids…and by ‘kids’ I mean really, really stupid, little kids. It’s like a superhero version of Hannah Montana or Lizzie McGuire or That’s So Raven, because it doesn’t show what life is really like for teenagers, but what adults think little kids think life is like for teenagers. The series would be better suited for Disney Kids or Disney Junior or whatever the fuck the money-hungry monsters at Mickey Mouse now call their mind-destroying, child indoctrinating channel.

Speaking of which, the star of Ms. Marvel, Iman Vellani, is, to her credit, a somewhat appealing presence – sort of like Hillary Duff as Lizzie McGuire or something like that, but she is also…just like Hillary Duff, a truly atrocious actress, and watching her try to vacuously mug, pose and preen her way through scenes is like watching a toddler repeatedly soil their Underoos.

To be clear though, Ms. Marvel’s awfulness is not Iman Vellani’s fault by any stretch, hell, you could cast Meryl Streep in this thing and still want to gouge your eyes out rather than keep watching it.

There has been a lot of hype around the series with critics fawning all over it, so much so that it is “officially the highest critically-rated Marvel series in history”, with a 98% critical score at review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Of course, this is just more proof of critic’s desperate virtue signaling and pandering than anything else. Critics are falling over themselves to adore Ms. Marvel simply because of the show’s ‘representation’ in the form of a South Asian centered storyline and diverse cast.

The critical praise of Ms. Marvel highlights the trouble with film/tv criticism in these hyper-politicized and polarized times. Namely, film/tv critics have placed representation, diversity and inclusion atop their hierarchy when evaluating a movie or show, with quality, creativity and artistry barely registering as something of value. These critics could never give an honest assessment of Ms. Marvel and excoriate it for its obvious failings because that would give comfort and aid to the bad people…or something like that. It would also open them up to attacks from the swarms of Savanarolas on Twitter who bring down the hammer on anyone who dare question the woke inquisition.

While Disney/Marvel may revel in the praise of the sycophantic simpletons who make up the Rotten Tomatoes roster of critics, they’re not faring nearly as well with audiences, as Ms. Marvel is officially the least watched of all the Marvel tv series.

Disney/Marvel and many intellectually impotent critics are blaming Ms. Marvel’s poor viewership numbers on…you guessed it, “racism!” This is par for the course and is standard operating procedure at the Disney distillery of dismal drama. The masterminds at the Mickey Mouse mansion make a shitty show or movie and then call people “racist” for pointing out how poorly conceived and executed the stupid, shitty show/movie really is. This happens all the time with the god-awful Star Wars shows and movies, and with the Marvel products as well.

Unlike most critics, but like most fans, I truly do not give a flying fuck about representation, diversity and inclusion, all I care about is quality, creativity and artistry…of which most of what Marvel and Disney vomit out onto the public nowadays, Ms. Marvel included, has none.

Am I supposed to pretend Ms. Marvel doesn’t suck just because the main character is a Pakistani-American and a Muslim? That seems absolutely absurd to me, and frankly, feels mightily paternalistic, condescending and cowardly.

The idea of a Muslim superhero is pretty intriguing, and if it that part of a character and story could be explored in a well-executed, serious and profound way, say, like the terrific Netflix series (which is now streaming on Disney +) Daredevil and how it used its main character’s Catholicism as a crucial part of his inner life and mythos, then I’d be all in. But the Muslim aspect of Ms. Marvel is the most offensively vapid and vacant bit of window dressing meant to do little more than check a box.

As for the claim that ‘racism’ is the motivating factor in audience’s dislike and distaste for Ms. Marvel, it is equally condescending and frankly, aggressively moronic.

It seems much more likely that audiences have stayed away from Ms. Marvel in droves because the character is a forgettable, fourth rate superhero that’s painfully new to the Marvel canon (she was created in 2014), so no one has ever even heard of her or cares about her.

Another factor is that Marvel fatigue post-Endgame is a real thing and is only growing stronger everyday as Marvel/Disney spew out one more piece of junk tv show or movie after another.

And on top of all that there are no “stars” in the show…I mean even the dreadful Moon Knight had Oscar Isaac in it.

Of course, if viewers did tune in to Ms. Marvel, they would’ve been met with such an incorrigibly incoherent story that they would’ve been wise to bail early…I wish I did. But lucky for you, dear reader, I watched this piece of shit so you don’t have to….and you really don’t have to.

The bottom line is that Ms. Marvel is just another buoy guiding Disney on their collision course with the deadly iceberg of wokeness, which worships representation, diversity and inclusion and ignores quality, creativity and artistry, a formula which will ultimately sink the previously-believed-to-be-unsinkable cash cow known as the good ship Marvel.

If you are one of the myopic mental defectives working at Marvel or Disney, grab a life-jacket and hop into a life-boat now, because by the looks of things your corporate caretaker is steaming full speed towards its own oblivion and is completely blind to its impending doom.

©2022

The Boys (Amazon) Season Three: TV Review

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

THE BOYS

SEASON FOUR - 8 EPISODES - AMAZON PRIME

My Rating: 4.5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A batshit and brilliant evisceration of the monolithic Marvel superhero myth and America’s corrupt culture and politics

When the alternative superhero series The Boys first premiered on Amazon Prime Video back in July of 2019, it was a sublime, and well-deserved, kick in the nuts to the mega-Marvel monolith that had grown to dominate American culture like no other corporate IP before it.

The Boys, which is based on a comic book series of the same name, tore back the curtain of the superhero craze and exposed these superbeings for what they really are…narcissistic, megalomaniacal monsters used by the ruling elite to propagandize the masses into mindlessly worshiping corporatism, militarism and fascism.

The series was jarring for its savage, realistic violence and for its daring, cutting-edge politics. For example, in season one it more than implied, but nearly shouted from the rooftops, that 9-11 really was an inside job. Pretty ballsy for a piece of pop entertainment streaming on Amazon.

Well, The Boys are now back with their third season (8 episodes), which premiered its first episode on June 3rd and its season finale on Friday July 8, and despite some minor flaws, it’s as gory, gloriously gonzo, batshit, brilliant and beautiful as ever.

I will avoid spoilers but will just say that on the menu this season is penis spelunking, a superhero orgy, octopus fucking and hospital bed handjobs and many other obscenities and absurdities, and all of which are manic, mad and magnificent.

The machinations of the plot for season three are somewhat complex but remarkably easy to follow. The Boys, which consist of Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid), M.M. (Laz Alonso), Frenchie (Tomer Capone) and Kimiko (Karen Fuluhara), are still on their seemingly Quixotic quest to destroy the “Supes” (superheroes) who have harmed them or their loved ones in one way or another.

Meanwhile, the Supes and their corporate overlords at Vought International are just as diabolical as ever and are intent on controlling the masses and expanding their power and profits by any means necessary. Sound frighteningly familiar? If you have half a brain in your head and eyes to see the world around you, it should.

Unlike the relentlessly politically-correct, anti-septic, cash-grab Marvel movies, The Boys boasts insightful and cutting social and political commentary that is more even-handed (maybe unintentionally so) in extending its middle-finger than it might appear on the surface. The series isn’t just some left-wing screed or right-wing rant as it eviscerates and devastates both sides of the universally vacuous and villainous corporatist, oligarchical, aristocratic, kleptocratc ruling party that currently enslaves America. The Boys is brilliant pop entertainment because it uses the cloak of a snarky superhero story to get out its not-so-secret, subversive sub-text about the vampiric power of American corptocracy, media mendacity and government duplicity, to a mainstream audience.

In addition to its penetrating and perceptive social and political commentary, it also features top-notch acting across the board.

Karl Urban is brutishly charismatic and charming as the foul-mouthed Butcher. Equally good is Jack Quaid as the doe-eyed Hughie, who is a complex character just beneath his goofy, scared-rabbit exterior.

Both Tomer Capone and Laz Alonso as Frenchie and M.M. respectively, have stand out seasons as their characters are given more depth and their backstories more fleshed out.

My favorite performance among ‘the boys’ is actually by the female, Karen Fukuhara as Kimiko. Kimiko is mute and Fukuhara fills her with such a visceral inner life and longing that she lights up the screen.

As for the Supes, there are a plethora of great performances to acknowledge there too.

Antony Starr’s Homelander – who is sort of a cross between Captain America and Superman, is one of the best/worst villains on television and boasts one of the most punchable faces imaginable. Starr’s performance is mesmerizing as Homelander barely conceals the hatred and insecurity boiling beneath his all-American surface.

Jessie T. Usher as the knock-off Flash, A-Train, is given more to do this season and certainly makes the most of it as the writers explore his race and his place in society.

Chace Crawford is spectacular as The Deep (basically a perverted Aquaman), and his storyline, which guts the self-help/celebrity industrial complex, is deliriously good.

Equally terrific is Jensen Ackles as Soldier Boy, a sort of Reagan-esque wet dream Captain America 1.0. Ackles gives complexity and depth to the character that in lesser hands would’ve been just an empty bad guy.

As for Nathan Mitchell who plays the masked Black Noir, his performance is difficult to judge, but the Black Noir storyline is spectacularly written and executed. I won’t give any of it away but that story brings an invigorating perspective shift and visual flair that I found greatly appealing, and ultimately extremely moving.

Other solid performances from the likes of Dominique McElligott as Queen Maeve, Erin Moriarty as Starlight, Claudia Doumit as Victoria Neuman, and most especially a brilliant Colby Minifie as whipping post, errand girl and babysitter for supes Ashley, fill out a superb cast that raises The Boys to sublime creative heights.

In a time of rampant government and corporate corruption, media mendacity and artistic/entertainment conformity, watching The Boys brash and brazen approach, which features supreme writing, acting and directing, along with its decidedly unorthodox, anti-establishment ideology, is like walking under a crisp, cool waterfall on a stifling Summer day.

If you aren’t faint of heart, don’t mind blood, guts and bizarre superhero sexual situations, and like your superhero stories with an edge, then The Boys may very well be for you. It certainly is for me, and I highly recommend it as I believe it to be one of the very best shows currently streaming.

©2022

Thor: Love and Thunder - A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

 My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manic misfire of a Marvel movie. If you are a Marvel completist then save your money and wait for it to stream on Disney +.

In order to set the context for my review of Thor: Love and Thunder, which premiered in theatres Friday July 8th and is the newest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and the Marvel behemoth’s 29th movie overall, it’s important to note that I am an enormous fan of the film’s writer/director Taika Waititi.

Waititi directed my favorite Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnarok – of which Love and Thunder is a direct sequel, and also adapted his 2014 vampire comedy movie What We Do in the Shadows into my current favorite television show of the same name, which is set to premiere its fourth season on FX this coming Tuesday.

The reality is that Waititi’s distinctive comedic style is an acquired taste, and, like the new strain of Super Gonorrhea going around, I most certainly have acquired it.

Which brings us to Thor: Love and Thunder. As exhilarating as Thor: Ragnarok was, Thor: Love and Thunder is disappointing. Yes, it has its moments, but those moments are very few and very far between.

The film’s plot is relentlessly convoluted, and revolves around Gor the God Butcher, a surprisingly subdued Christian Bale, who seeks revenge on the gods for the death of his daughter. Gor kidnaps the kids of New Asgard, who are the perfect dream children for Disney’s human resources department because of their remarkable ethnic diversity, and uses them as bait to draw in Thor and his goofy companions.

The plot twists and turns make just about no sense at all, and the tonal shifts of the film are jarring to the extreme. Make no mistake about it, the film is a comedy, but it opens with a little girl dying and then puts other little kids in frightening peril as a key plot point. The comedic tone and the kids in peril plot mix together like birthday cake at a beheading.

Needless to say, this PG-13 movie is much too scary/dark to be suitable for kids under 13…and frankly, much too shabby to be worthwhile to adults with half a brain in their head.

There are some bright spots though, among them the brief appearance of the Asgard Players acting troupe, which features Matt Damon and Melissa McCarthy dramatizing great moments in Asgardian history on stage. As well as Korg, Thor’s sidekick (voiced by Waititi himself) repeatedly mis-stating Jane Foster’s name…a gag that made me laugh every time. There’s also an absolutely absurd appearance by a hammiest of hams Russell Crowe as Zeus. Crowe’s Zeus is a gonzo piece of bloated bizarreness but I found it amusing as hell.

Another very bright spot is Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is so good as Thor it’s simply miraculous. Hemsworth is, of course, buff beyond belief and impossibly handsome, but he’s also effortlessly charming and astoundingly funny.

Unfortunately, Natalie Portman is the exact opposite. Portman returns to the Thor franchise as Dr. Jane Foster, Thor’s ex-love interest, except this time, through some not very clear plot machinations, Dr. Foster is somehow turned into a Thor…and takes the title of The Mighty Thor.

Portman as Jane Foster/Mighty Thor is more wooden than a log cabin and makes a cigar store Indian seem lively in comparison. Portman pushes so hard to be frolicky and fun but she’s so stiff and unnatural that when she attempts to smile, she seems like a cadaver getting a colonoscopy.

Portman may very well be a talented actress, or she may not be, but what she definitely isn’t is a gifted comedic actress and that is glaringly obvious in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Other issues with the film abound. For example, Gor’s villainous minions are these shadow creatures that are so generic and bland as to be ridiculous.

These shadow creatures highlight the film’s other big problems, namely its lack of visual clarity and cinematic crispness, as well as its pedestrian fight sequences…in other words the movie features third-rate action sequences and looks like shit, which is criminal for a movie with a $250 million budget.

And last but not least, the movie, like seemingly all Marvel movies and tv shows nowadays, of course, features some heavy-handed human resources inspired social engineering and woke pandering and preaching. The previously mentioned rainbow of Asgardian kids being a perfect example. As is the cringiest of cringe scenes where Gor calls Portman’s Thor, “Lady Thor”, and she angrily responds “my name is The Mighty Thor! Or you can call me…DOCTOR! JANE! FOSTER!” My only wish was The Mighty Thor aka Dr. Jane Foster had been wearing a pink pussy hat in that scene for affect. That cringilicous scene along with the “female Avengers unite” scene from Avengers: Endgame, should only be legally permitted to be played in voluminous vomitoriums because they’re such gag-worthy, girl-power garbage.

On top of all that, the final act of the film is entirely rushed and completely devoid of any dramatic impact while being detached from narrative coherence.

Due to my love of Thor: Ragnarok and my Waititi fandom, I was looking forward to Thor: Love and Thunder. I was also curious to see if, after the cinematic and creative debacles (and for the most part, box office misfires) of the recent spate of Marvel movies, from Black Widow to Shang-Chi to The Eternals (God help us!) to Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, with the brilliant Waititi at the helm and the equally brilliant Chris Hemsworth in the lead, could stop the bleeding over at the Marvel money factory that pays for Mickey Mouse’s mansions. I am here to report that it doesn’t.

Thor: Love and Thunder will do fine at the box office, but it won’t signal a return to Marvel magnificence. The reality is that Marvel is in deep shit, and if they don’t realize that then they’re delusional. Their new movies are sub-par, their tv shows are cratering in quality (I’ll have a review of Ms. Marvel out late this coming week – here’s a preview…”YIKES!”) and it is now very clear that the Marvel monstrosity has lost the plot and has their head’s so far up their asses they’re incapable of finding it.

Marvel has dominated cineplexes and our culture for nearly fifteen years, but Thor: Love and Thunder is just one more piece of proof that the bloom is off the Marvel rose and I’m here to tell you that it ain’t coming back.

The bottom line is that Thor: Love and Thunder is nothing but a major disappointment. If you are a Marvel completist, then wait for Thor: Love and Thunder to stream on Disney + in a few weeks or months, and watch it then, because it simply isn’t worth your time and hard-earned money to see in the theatres.

©2022

Stranger Things (Netflix) Season Four: A TV Review

My Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. It’s a piece of empty pop culture calories and shameless nostalgia delivery system but to its credit it is exceedingly well made.

When I sat down to watch the newly released season four of Stranger Things, Netflix’s hit sci-fi horror series, a ‘strange’ thing occurred.

Episode one began with a recap of what happened in season three as a reminder of what’s going on in the story…and I didn’t remember any of it…not a goddamn thing. I know I watched all of season three when it came out back in 2019, but for some reason I couldn’t recall a lick of it. So, I went back and actually watched all of season three again before diving into season four, and while it was vaguely familiar, it didn’t really ring any bells. I would’ve gone back and watched season one and two to jog my memory too but I just couldn’t commit that kind of time to something I’d completely forget anyway.

My Stranger Things amnesia could be a result of season three having premiered three long years ago, and goodness knows a lot has happened in those three years, in fact my failing memory could be a result of numerous head traumas inflicted over those three years as I banged my skull against the wall in a fruitless attempt to make the madness and moronity of our times disappear. Who knows?

Or maybe the reality is that I didn’t remember the details of Stranger Things because the details of Stranger Things are not worth remembering.

Which brings me to the one of the stranger things about Stranger Things, which is that while I have no idea what is going on in the convoluted plot, and while the four lead male actors, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo, Noah Schnapp and Caleb McLaughlin, are among the very worst and most annoying actors currently working in entertainment, I still find myself thoroughly enjoying the show.

The reason for that is because it’s exceedingly well made by creator/writer/directors the Duffer brothers. While “the Upside Down” and various monsters and nefarious government agencies and all of that are all a blur, what isn’t a blur is the show’s commitment to its aesthetic and how beautifully designed, structured and photographed this whole series is.

The Duffer brothers are a couple of gloriously old school storytellers paying homage to their directorial forefathers through their skilled use of shadow and light, color, sound and music to convey an entire mood, and that is what makes Stranger Things so enjoyable an experience and so seductive, if not addictive, a series.

The brilliance of the Duffer brothers is also obvious in the basic premise of the Stranger Things pitch, namely that it’s a glorious nostalgia delivery system for Gen Xers filled with a Gen Z cast in order to interest younger viewers that skillfully exploits the archetypes and storytelling tropes of both the sci-fi and horror genres in familiar but original ways.

To its credit, Stranger Things was one of the first series in the recent wave to use 80’s music as a siren song to attract Gen Xers to a show geared toward Millennial and Gen Z viewers. The success of that approach is seen in season four’s use of Kate Bush’s song “Running Up That Hill” as a plot point, which has led to a rousing resurgence of Ms. Bush back into the spotlight and her introduction to a whole new generation.

Another plus for the show is that despite the truly atrocious performances from the four lead male actors (who it seems get worse with every passing day), as well as poor Winona Ryder – who is just awful and is an astonishingly hollowed out shell of her former self, the cast are actually very good.

Millie Bobby Brown is sort of the break out star of the show because of her impeccable bone structure, and while she is certainly a beauty and is decent as Eleven, the psychic warrior/screwed up kid, it’s Sadie Sink that is the major talent on the show. Sink’s Max is a complex and conflicted character and her portrayal is never anything but utterly compelling. One can’t help but hope that Sink stays the course and we get to see what she can do as she gets older.

David Harbour is also great as the charmingly rough and tumble sheriff, as are Joe Keery, Maya Hawke and Natalia Dyer as Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley, and Nancy Wheeler respectively. Keery in particular is outstanding as a comical leading man, and his repartee with Hawke is a poor man’s version of a 1980’s Indiana-set, vacuous teenage Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn.

Season four was split into two parts, with the first seven episodes premiering on May 27th and the final two episodes premiering on July 1st. What was odd about this structure is that while the first part of season four was “normal” in that the episodes were roughly an hour long, the two episodes (episodes 8 and 9) of part two were an hour and a half and two and a half hours respectively. So, basically part two of season four is two feature films….which is kind of weird especially considering that it isn’t the series’ finale as season five is coming down the pike.

All that said, I had no problem with the length of those two episodes, and found them to be enjoyable enough that I kept watching them, so that says something. And the same is true of the entire series….it isn’t great or life changingly good, it is just an extremely well-made piece of pop entertainment.

If you like 80’s nostalgia, good music, horror and sci-fi movies and can tolerate a very uneven cast that is both brilliant and boorish, then Stranger Things is a very pleasant distraction from our often times infinitely stranger and more frightening reality.

©2022

Barry (HBO) - Season Three: A TV Review

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great acting, writing and directing make Barry one of the b est shows on TV.

I’ve been a huge fan of the black comedy series Barry ever since it premiered on HBO in March of 2018. The show, which is created by and stars Bill Hader, tells the story of Barry Berkman, a veteran of the Afghanistan war who becomes a hitman and then unsuccessfully tries to transition out of a life of violence by attempting to become an actor in Hollywood.

I loved Barry because of its gloriously dark humor, its insightful and incisive take on the inanity of acting classes and the pursuit of success in Hollywood, and its exquisite writing, directing and acting.

Season three of the series, which runs for eight episodes, finally premiered on HBO in late April and finished in mid-June, and I just completed watching it last night.

Season three gets off to a not-so-great start, in fact it was so not-so-great that I thought it had jumped the shark and lost its mojo entirely. But after a shaky first three episodes, Barry once again finds its rhythm and gets into an irresistible groove, so much so that the final three episodes are as good as it gets on television.

In order to avoid spoilers, I will only say that the mantra for season three of Barry is that ‘the bill has come due’. Barry spent the first two seasons being a reluctant but very good hitman (and very bad actor), but now the hunter has become the hunted as the families of his victims are out for revenge.

As Barry slips deeper and deeper into a tangled web of his own making, he simultaneously dives deeper and deeper into an existential ocean searching for answers, or meaning, or purpose.

Bill Hader is outstanding as he perfectly captures Barry’s increasing agitation with life in an ever-increasing pressure cooker. The fear in his eyes is palpable as he desperately tries to maintain his cool and his cover as his world crumbles around him.

Supporting characters go through their own tumultuous and tortuous journeys as well, with Barry’s girlfriend Sally (a fragile and combustible Sarah Goldberg) riding the nauseating roller coaster of the Hollywood machine for her profoundly unsatisfying 15 minutes of fame. Barry’s acting teacher, Gene Cousineau (a gloriously inimitable Henry Winkler), is stuck on the same narcissistic, self-immolating, humiliating Hollywood ride, but for the last 50 years.

Naïve dimwit Chechen gangster NoHo Hank, a truly terrific Anthony Carrigan, is navigating his own fantastically preposterous maze as well, which includes his closeted homosexuality, deadly Chechen gang politics and a love affair with Cristobal (Michael Irby), a leader in a rival Bolivian gang.

Both Carrigan and Winkler are so great in their roles that it makes me giddy. These aren’t the usual sitcom caricatures, these are well-written, multi-dimensional characters brought to life by gifted, committed actors of great skill, and the results are glorious.

The rest of the cast, from big roles to small, are top notch as well, from D’Arcy Carden as Natalie Greer, Sally’s assistant, to Elizabeth Perkins as Diane Villa the head of BanShe the network for women, to Tom Allen as Mitch the philosopher baker.  

The writing is equally as good, and in the final half of season three is just fantastic. But what is most appealing about Barry, this season in particular, is the direction. Each sequence is so well designed, both cinematically and dramatically, that it feels like a master filmmaker is behind the camera.

Bill Hader and his co-creator Alec Berg directed all the episodes in season three, and their work is jaw-droppingly impressive. From the viscerally unnerving motorcycle sequence to the podcast sound-room sequence to the FaceTime to Chechnya/police raid/Bolivian hit sequence, all of the action sequences are unique in design and execution, and it makes Barry a glory to behold. Most television directors, even the good ones, have limited visual and creative imagination, usually because their ambition is stunted by the limitations of the medium and the business of television. But Hader and Berg are not infected by any such afflictions, and their vision is so clear and their direction so crisp, that Barry feels like cinema rather than tv.

As for the comedy, season three is less aggressively funny than its predecessors, but the humor that is there works because it is so deliciously dark. For example, there’s an action sequence, the aforementioned “sound-room” scene, that is incredibly disturbing, but which made me laugh out loud at a particularly bizarre moment amongst the depravity. This is what is so great about Barry, it isn’t forcing the laughs, it just lets you marinate in the madness of its premise and then jolts you with dark absurdities that are undeniably funny even if they are barbaric, or maybe even because they are barbaric.

Due to Covid and all the rest, we had to wait three years between season two and season three of Barry. Thankfully, HBO has greenlit season four of the series, and hopefully the wait between season three and four will be considerably shorter because Barry is undeniably one of the very best things on tv, and I’d like to think we deserve good things.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

On this episode, Barry and I run for our lives from the dino-disaster that is Jurassic World: Dominion. Topics discussed include Jaws/Jurassic Park and the primordial fear of moving down the food chain, the mystery of awful writer/director Colin Trevorrow's career, and the sizzling sexual chemistry between Chris Pratt and Blue the Raptor.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 71 - Jurassic World: Dominion

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Jurassic World: Dominion - A Review

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

My Rating: 1.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This dismal dino-disaster has all the charm of a rotting Brachiosaurus carcass left out in the hot Malta sun.

Ever since Steven Spielberg busted the box office with his signature Spielbergian grandiosity and grating emotional simplicity in the original Jurassic Park back in 1993, the franchise has been an exercise in diminishing returns, with each successive movie declining precipitously in terms of cinematic quality.

Jurassic World: Dominion, which opened in theatres June 10 and stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, is the third movie in the Jurassic World trilogy and the sixth cinematic dino-venture, and allegedly the final installment, in the nearly thirty-year-old Jurassic Park franchise, and it feels distinctively like hitting bottom.

Beating the Jurassic Park dead dinosaur to dust has been a profitable exercise for Executive Producer Spielberg and his corporate cohorts at Universal over the years, but this most recent miserable meteor strike of a movie should only be warmly welcomed because it seems to signal a Jurassic franchise extinction-level event.

The good news is that Jurassic World: Dominion has a plot, the bad news is that the parts of it that aren’t completely incoherent are utterly absurd. The globe spanning story features, of course, dinosaurs on the loose, an evil bio-tech company with the rather on the nose name of Bio-Syn (subtle), as well as a beautiful teenage clone with a posh British accent.

The plot and its atmospherics are so ridiculous and stereotypically “Hollywood” they sound like something bandied about in a rejected Entourage script.

The same is true of the second-generation Hollywood royalty populating the cast, with Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Laura Dern (Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd’s daughter) and Campbell Scott (George C. Scott’s son) headlining the nepotism all-star team dreamed up in the halls of power at some nefarious Tinsel Town talent agency.

Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, the leads from the original Jurassic Park, reprise their rather forgettable roles in Dominion and mix and mingle with the equally forgettable characters from the Jurassic World trilogy.

I suppose this call back to the original is an attempt at nostalgia, but it’s a fruitless one since no one gives a flying fuck about these drab and dismal characters. The only reason to watch a Jurassic Park movie is to see dinosaurs roam the earth and wreak havoc, not to see Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum collect a paycheck.

The same is true of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. Pratt is sort of a C+ level movie star and is charming enough, and Howard is an equally pleasant on-screen presence and is easy on the eyes, but let’s not kid ourselves, no one would care if they, or Neill, Dern and Goldblum were just another high-priced dino-meal at the Jurassic Park café.

In fact, if T-Rex, or one of his even larger dinosaur co-stars, were to devour one of these mindless Hollywood meat puppets, it would make the movie delightfully worthwhile. But similar to Top Gun: Maverick, another current corporate money grab, no main character is allowed to die in this movie for some apparent reason.

This rather sterile creative decision is so egregious as to be criminal. If this is indeed the last installment of the franchise, and God knows it should be, then writer/director Colin Trevorrow should’ve used that as a blessed opportunity to shamelessly milk this bloated brontosaurus for all the drama it’s worth.

Why not have Neill’s Dr. Grant nobly sacrifice himself to save his beloved Dr. Sattler (Laura Dern) and then have Sattler eventually end up with his nemesis, Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm? Or have Dr. Ian Malcolm die in a blaze of over-acting glory to save the rest of the cast? Or have Chris Pratt get killed by his best friend/part-time lover Blue the Raptor? Hell…why not have Chris Pratt, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum all get eaten and then Bryce Dallas Howard and Laura Dern can raise the cloned teenage girl in a sort of “my two mommies/down with the patriarchy!” type of situation?

Speaking of which, the usual cultural politics of the day are on display in Dominion, with cartoon cutout minority characters, namely, Bio-Syn communications director Ramsey Cole (an appealing Mamoudou Athie) and ex-Air Force pilot and current sassy black lesbian Kayla Watts (a luminous DeWanda Wise), being the ones who save the day and everybody else’s pasty white asses. How patronizingly progressive or progressively patronizing, whichever you prefer.

Writer/director Trevorrow, who wrote all three of the Jurassic World movies and directed two of the three, has proven himself to be the poster-child for Hollywood hackery.

His movies seem like two-hour trailers for themselves, as there’s just no “there” there. As evidenced by Jurassic World: Dominion, Trevorrow’s stories are convoluted, his dialogue utterly atrocious, and his action sequences often derivative.

Another striking thing to me is that somehow the dinosaurs from the original Jurassic Park thirty years ago, look considerably better and more realistic than the ones in Jurassic World: Dominion. That is probably a function of cost-cutting and just plain old not giving a shit, but for whatever reason it occurs, it’s entirely unforgivable.

Jurassic Park movies are meant to be entertaining, mildly elevated monster movies, with a scintilla of sub-text about philosophy and science bubbling underneath the spectacle of dino-carnage. But what has ended up happening is that the films have been marketed more and more toward younger kids and also become more and more silly while also becoming more and more violent and dark. This dichotomy has made for a strange combination as the movies now seem much too scary for kids and much too stupid for grown-ups.

The bottom line is that the tortuously dopey Jurassic World: Dominion is a typical piece of mindless Hollywood franchise filmmaking that is devoid of both quality and interest. The once ferocious T-Rex from Spielberg’s startling 1993 original has been reduced to be nothing more than a creatively comatose, cold-blooded cash cow, and is definitely not worth your valuable time or hard-earned money.

©2022

Top Gun: Maverick - A Review

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Despite some compelling aerial scenes, this absurd action movie is second rate cheese and a poor imitation of the original.

This week I took the highway to the danger zone that is the number one movie on the planet, Top Gun: Maverick.

The question you need to ask yourself before deciding to see this movie is…do you feel the need? The need for cheese? If so, then Top Gun: Maverick, is the movie for you.

The iconic Tony Scott film Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a megastar back in 1986, and the long-awaited sequel, Top Gun: Maverick hit theatres on May 27 and has dominated the box office since its arrival, resulting in the biggest opening weekend of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster career. Thus far it has hauled in nearly $400 million worldwide in its first week in theatres.

The movie isn’t just making big bucks, its winning the hearts and minds of critics and audiences alike as it has Rotten Tomatoes scores of 97 critical and 99 audience.

In preparation for seeing Top Gun: Maverick, I re-watched the original movie this week. I was never a fan of Top Gun and upon re-watching that opinion didn’t change. That said, Top Gun: Maverick makes Top Gun seem like Citizen Kane.

The one redeeming quality Top Gun had was that it perfectly captured the cultural aesthetic of its time as it was an ode to the cheesy, Manichean simplicity of Reaganism and its accompanying American obliviousness and imperialism. Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell was basically a fly boy version of Reagan’s Wall Street avatar Gordon Gekko, as he swaggered his way to success replacing Gekko’s mantra of “greed is good” with “militarism is good”.

The scope and scale of Top Gun’s success back in 1986 cannot be overstated as it changed not only the film industry but the nature of propaganda and the military industrial complex. The movie was made in cooperation with the Pentagon, which used it as tool to recruit and indoctrinate millions of Americans into a militarist mindset.

Prior to Top Gun there were a plethora of great films, such as Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, that questioned America’s imperialism and militarism. But with Top Gun, the Pentagon figured out how to co-opt the Hollywood machine and not only churn out their own propaganda but silence or neuter films that questioned the American military.

Nowadays you can’t even get a serious movie that questions American militarism made because the Pentagon uses its leverage over studios to eliminate that train of thought.

Want to make another Platoon or Full Metal Jacket? You can’t because not only won’t the Pentagon let you use American military equipment, they’ll make damn sure the studio that greenlights that “anti-American” project won’t get any assistance, and will face numerous obstacles, for whatever other projects they may want to make.  

Now, if a studio wants to bend the knee and make a piece of rancid propaganda like Zero Dark Thirty or Top Gun: Maverick, the Pentagon will bend over backwards to make it happen.

Of course, the biggest problem with the success of the Pentagon’s Top Gun propaganda campaign back in 1986, is that it hasn’t just grown like a cancer in Hollywood, but in the news business as well. Watch any cable news channel today and you’ll see a cavalcade of intelligence agency veterans and assets mindlessly spewing intelligence agency approved talking points. Adversarial journalism against the military or intelligence agencies is now anathema in establishment news.

The biggest story of our time that simply cannot be told to a wide audience is the capture of all mainstream media, news media most of all, by the military and intelligence industrial complex.

Which brings us to Top Gun: Maverick.

As previously stated, I was not a fan of the original Top Gun, but to its credit it did perfectly capture the cultural aesthetic of its time, and unfortunately, Top Gun: Maverick captures the aesthetic of our time too in that it is so relentlessly generic and uninspiring.

The film is, like the recent spate of shitty Star Wars projects on the big and small screen, nothing but nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s meant to transport the viewer back to a “better” time when the moral simplicity of Reaganism ruled the world and movie stars actually existed.

Tom Cruise hasn’t been a major movie star for well over a decade as he’s churned out a cornucopia of crap since his partnership with Steven Spielberg ended after War of the Worlds (2005), and even those Spielberg films weren’t great.

Cruise can’t open a movie anymore if it isn’t a sequel, so he’s been squeezing the Mission: Impossible lemon for every last bit of juice it has, and now he’s trying to do the same with Top Gun.

The Cruise conundrum is that he has made the rather odd choice of becoming less an actor and more a famous stunt man/daredevil…and of course he does his own stunts in Top Gun: Maverick. But Cruise’s death-defying stunt fueled acting can only become more difficult as he tries to one up himself with each successive film while his body deteriorates with age (he turns 60 this year). Cruise is now essentially Evel Knievel without the drunken daredevil charm.

It's somewhat ironic that Cruise never allows himself to die in his films…but he might just end up actually dying on film. I’d say he has a death-wish but that’s impossible since he thinks he’s immortal.

Of course, Cruise could just go back to actually acting, but that was never his strong suit anyway and I guess it’s to his credit that he realizes that fact.

At this point Cruise is a parody of himself, which I guess works because this movie is a parody of the original…which was itself an unintentional parody of American militarism and machismo. Cruise gives a typically empty performance in Top Gun: Maverick…but I’m sure he’d counter that by saying “but I did all the flying!”. Congratulations?

At my screening, a bizarre filmed introduction by Cruise opened the festivities. In it Cruise looked like he reeked of formaldehyde and had just been awoken from a nap at a funeral home in what felt like a Scientology advert gone terribly wrong.

When the actual movie started, Cruise looked slightly better on screen but still looked odd. His obviously surgically altered face being both bloated in places yet contorted and taut in others. Look, the guy is in insanely great shape for 60, but his steadfast refusal to even let a little grey come in at his temples, and his strange face, feels decidedly forced and delusional.

In the movie, the plot of which is so absurd as to be ridiculous, Cruise’s Maverick is once again a rule breaker who somehow fails upwards and gets assigned a special post at Top Gun to train a group of other Top Gun pilots for a special mission.

It's not a spoiler to inform you dear reader that the mission these Top Guns are training for is identical to the mission in the first Star Wars…they’re basically being sent to destroy the Death Star. It’s good to know that the Star Wars creative bankruptcy is metastasizing to other franchises.

The original Top Gun, with its homoerotic undertones, including its manly female lead named Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and a volleyball scene populated by shirtless, oiled up pretty boys, is easily the gayest movie of the last 40 years and is considerably gayer than Brokeback Mountain, a movie which featured two cowboys aggressively butt-fucking in a tent.  

The homoeroticism of the first film is not as present in this movie…but that’s because there is no eroticism present at all. Yes, there’s a sense that all the guys from Mav’s old Top Gun class are like aged queens giving knowing glances to each that silently recount their debauched exploits on Fire Island back in ’86, but the new crew of Top Gunners, a collection of paper-thin caricatures, are remarkably asexual and unsexual. It beggars-belief that none of these studly swaggering fighter pilots is attempting to bed the lone female stick jockey, who is also neutered. These hot new Top Gunners are nothing but a collection of smooth-loined Ken and Barbie doll eunuchs that have all been unsexed Lady Macbeth style.

There is a romance in the movie featuring a stunningly gorgeous Jennifer Connelly as Cruise’s love interest Penny. The couple have history but no electricity, as no matter how much the gifted Ms. Connelly bats those beautiful blue eyes of hers, she just can’t spark the slightest bit of life to appear in Mav’s decidedly dead ones.  Maybe if Connelly’s character were named Joe and had a deeper voice it would stir Mav’s long dormant dong? Watching Connolly’s Penny flirt with Cruise’s Maverick is like watching a frantic surgeon repeatedly punch a week-old corpse’s chest in the hope of starting its heart.

Another story line in Top Gun: Maverick revolves around the son of Mav’s old “partner” Goose, who in the first movie dies due to Maverick’s reckless nature, who is one of the Top Gun pilots being trained to attack the Death Star. Goose’s son, played by Miles Teller, goes by the name Rooster. That is literally the most interesting thing about him.

A sentence you never want to hear is…”Jon Hamm is in this movie”, but unfortunately it’s true regarding Top Gun: Maverick. Hamm plays a former Top Gun pilot who is now in charge of Naval Air Forces and has a bug up his ass about Maverick. Hamm brings all of the power of his anti-charisma to bear on the role.

Without giving spoilers I will simply say this about the mission in the movie, just when you think it can’t get any sillier, it jumps a metaphorical ravine filled with sharks and becomes Rambo movie level of silly. To make matters even more buffoonish, the country the Top Gunners go to war with is never identified throughout the film. Is it the Russians? The Iranians? Nobody knows…and apparently nobody wants to know. This stuff is so silly and so cheesy that it feels like camp.

On the bright side, the aerial footage, captured by multiple cameras on the inside and outside of each fighter jet, is invigorating and pulsates with an energy that the rest of the film, which is the majority of the film, painfully lacks. If only that terrific fighter jet footage could’ve been used to tell a more meaningful and more interesting story. But alas…’twas not to be.

The original Top Gun was shlocky, but at least Tony Scott was a stylist that understood the fundamentals of moviemaking and knew how to make a coherent film. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun: Maverick, is not similarly blessed.

Just comparing and contrasting the two films reveals a great deal about Tony Scott’s skill and Kosinski’s (and screenwriters Ehren Kruger, Eric Singer and Christopher McQuarrie) cinematic incompetence.  

In Top Gun, the film opens with the top pilot on Maverick’s ship struggling with freezing up due to fear. This is an internal struggle that pilots must overcome, and eventually Maverick suffers from it too and must overcome it.

In Top Gun: Maverick the only issue pilots face is the deadly possibility that they pass out from too many G forces. The difference between that and a mental performance issue is night and day. G forces aren’t personal, they’re external and natural. Fighting G forces is like punching a rain storm. Fear on the other hand is personal…and with it comes intense personal drama.

In Top Gun even the romance is more complicated, as Maverick’s love interest is “Charlie” (read into that name all you want in terms of the homoeroticism of the film), who is actually his superior at Top Gun school. Mav is breaking the rules by bedding Charlie, and Charlie is too…which creates drama. Both Mav and Charlie acknowledge the danger of their love/work relationship and how they must keep it secret.

In Top Gun: Maverick, Mav and Penny have no stakes involved in their relationship whatsoever. She’s just a girl he used to bang and that’s as complicated as it gets. This is highlighted by the cringe worthy line by Penny’s daughter to Mav when she says “don’t break her heart.” Yikes.

In Top Gun, the story and the film, regardless of how over the top it was, is based in reality. It is grounded. Meaning that people could die if something went wrong. For instance, Goose dies because Mav fucks up and lets his ego write a check his piloting skills couldn’t cash.

In Top Gun: Maverick it’s all Hollywood fantasy world, as there is no connection to a grounded reality where people can actually die because they make a bad decision. This is accentuated by the oddity of having a no name country be the target of the Top Gun attack…which is in stark contrast to the original film which features Top Gunners facing off with the dreaded menace of Russians in Migs.

The bottom line is that Top Gun: Maverick is as generic a piece of big budget, blockbuster entertainment as you’ll find. The fact that its being widely hailed by critics and adored by fans is less a sign of the film’s worth, than of our culture’s steep and rapid decline.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 70 - Top Gun: Maverick

On this episode, Barry and I take the highway to the danger zone because we feel the need...the need for speed... as we dissect Tom Cruise’s return as Maverick in Top Gun: Maverick. Topics discussed include the mystery of Jon Hamm and the recurring theme of attacking a Death Star, the difficulty of playing volleyball covered in baby oil, and how many G forces could we handle?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 70 - Top Gun: Maverick

©2022

We Own This City (HBO): TV Review

My Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Great cast and an important story for our troubled times.

It has been my experience that most, but not all, law enforcement professionals fall into two basic categories…bullies and blowhards.

Bullies seek out the job in search of power to try and quell their sense of inferiority, and are the types who frantically call for back up and then ruthlessly beat on an outnumbered suspect once they have the advantage.

Blowhards sign up for the job in order to impress others and gain a sense of self, and they love to talk about their police exploits to anyone within earshot, but when push comes to shove, they turtle dick and run for cover.

A wonderful example of blowhard cops are the cowards in Uvalde, Texas who did nothing as a lunatic shot and killed 19 kids in a classroom literally feet from where these allegedly rough and tumble bad ass cops impotently crouched in a hallway.

As for bully cops, their behavior is fully on display in the HBO mini-series We Own This City, produced by David Simon, the creator of The Wire. The series, which runs six episodes, is based on the true story of the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Gun Trace Task Force and its malevolent and malignant rule over the streets of Baltimore in the 21st Century.

Simon’s series The Wire, also set in the morally murky world of the crime ridden streets of Baltimore, was a masterpiece. But his series since then, including the likes of Treme, The Deuce and The Plot Against America, were, frankly, pedantic and pretentious dogshit. So, I was intrigued prior to seeing We Own This City if Simon’s return to Baltimore would rejuvenate his work…and thankfully, it has.

Make no mistake, the six-episode We Own This City is nowhere near the marvel that The Wire was over five seasons, but it is chock full of fascinating performances and the occasional larger insight that is so often lacking in this age of supposedly prestige TV.

The series follows the exploits of rah-rah, go-getter Wayne Jenkins, a Sergeant leading the charge of the BPD’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) who has a twisted view of justice, very sticky fingers, and a delusional sense of self.  

The GTTF under Jenkins is essentially the most effective drug gang in the city, as it uses its legal authority to cover its ass and line its own pockets while padding its overtime.

Jon Bernthal, one of the better actors of our time, is astonishing as Jenkins. He opens the series with a mesmerizing monologue that features his mastery of the extremely difficult Baltimore accent. Bernthal never drops the accent throughout the show, just as his Jenkins never gives up the ghost of his good-guy delusion.

Bernthal’s committed, energetic and relentless performance as Jenkins is DeNiro-esque in the best sense as he is both alive in every moment on-screen yet in total control of the minute details of the character.

Jenkins’ minions in the GTTF learn to rob, cheat and steal under his totalitarian tutelage, and even when they try and move on or stay away from the depravity, the cancer of Jenkins’ still infects them.

Another terrific performance comes from Jamie Hector as Sean Suitor, a cop who left GTTF and went to homicide. Suitor’s a good cop in a bad department and watching him try to navigate his impossible situation is a viscerally unnerving experience.

The luminous Wunmi Mosaku plays Nicole Steele, an attorney from the civil rights division of the Justice Department tasked with imposing a federal consent decree on the BPD. Steele’s confidence and competence emanate from her every pour, but, in the final episode when she’s confronted by the Sysiphean nature of her job, Mosaku’s performance, and the show, take on a deep sense of profundity.

Equally profound is a monologue by Treat Williams playing Brian Grabler, a retired Baltimore cop turned Police Academy teacher. Williams is excellent in the small role and his radically enlightened speech about the drug war is as compelling as television gets.

Despite the remarkable performances, the show is not perfect. It struggles with coherency because it keeps jumping around in time, from past to present and back again. I understand that this choice was necessary to adequately recount the exploits of the GTTF, but it is at times poorly executed and leaves the viewer wondering what the hell is happening and when is it happening.

That said, We Own This City, which ended its run Monday May 30, is well worth the time to watch, especially now with the cavalcade of police misconduct cases, the rise (and fall?) of Black Lives Matter, the demands to defund the police and even the deplorable cowardice on display in Uvalde.

The reality regarding policing is that the drug war has infected government from law enforcement on the street level, all the way up to the shills and shams in Congress and the White House.

The drug war has turned cops into an occupying force and citizens into the enemy. The fact that the drugs at the center of the drug war, and the guns that often accompany them, are a main source of income for the black budgets of our intelligence agencies, reveals the drug war to be a piece of Kabuki theatre meant to do little but destabilize the working class and poor and enrich the authoritarian agencies across government (local law enforcement as well as DEA, FBI, ATF, CIA, DIA, NSA etc.).

The obvious issues with police are further complicated by the fact that violent crime, especially in black neighborhoods, is a scourge. And while authoritarianism and police brutality and misconduct needs to be addressed and eliminated, that doesn’t negate the fact that black people are being killed at an ungodly rate not by police but by other black people.

The truth is that even today’s more popular opposition to police misconduct, namely Black Lives Matter, is infuriating because it is a corrupt movement meant as a ruse to turn discussions about our totalitarian and authoritarian police state into nothing but a fruitless and emotionalist debate about a nebulous, all-encompassing “racism”, which creates needless enemies out of potential allies.

BLM not only misses the forest for the trees regarding law enforcement, it is equally blind to the plight of black people stuck in crime-ridden neighborhoods, who need protection from the rampant criminality that surrounds them. How can we take the statement “black lives matter” seriously when the people killing blacks are themselves black?

The only conclusion to draw that makes any sense is that BLM is an intentional agit prop action conjured by the ruling elite to keep us proles divided, separated and distracted from the real issue, namely how cops protect and serve the interests of the oligarchy and aristocrats, not the citizenry.

For example, race means nothing to the cops in Baltimore’s gun trace task force. If Baltimore were a city of poor, lily white people, the GTTF, which is a very diverse and inclusive bunch of bastards, would still run rampant with its thuggery.

Policing in America isn’t about black and white, it’s about us versus them. The police are the muscle for corporate interests and the elite, and they make sure to use violence to control the working man and keep us all on a tight leash.

If the school shooter in Uvalde had gone to a private school in Brentwood, California, or Arlington, Virginia, or in Manhattan, do you think cops would sit around with their thumbs up their asses while nine-year-old kids were being massacred? Of course not, because those children of the rich are whom the police are meant to protect, and their parents are whom they serve.

The bottom line is that honest, genuine discussions about policing in America need to happen and rarely do, but thankfully We Own This City isn’t just a worthy series but also a good starting point for those discussions.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 69 - Operation Mincemeat

On this episode, Barry and I don a stiff upper lip as we try to grin and bear the new Netflix WWII movie Operation Mincemeat starring Colin Firth. Topics of discussion include the banality of evil that is sub-mediocre cinema, John Madden as great NFL coach and commentator but abysmal film director, and the missed opportunity of a Weekend at Bernies World War II movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 69 - Operation Mincemeat

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: A Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A dreadfully dull stroll through the multiverse of mundanity where Marvel malaise rules the day. If you need to see it, save your money and wait until it hits Disney’s streaming service.

In the wake of having witnessed Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the 28th, and most recent film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I sat waiting for the usual end-credits scene and had a few thoughts.

The first of which was, if you’re the type of person who unironically uses the term “y’all”, I automatically think you’re a moron. I’m not saying that I’m justified in that belief, just that’s what I believe.

Another thought I had was if you pronounce words that begin with “s”, like “street” or “strange”, by adding an “h” to them and saying “shtreet” or “shtrange”, or if you’re so verbally lazy that you skip the pronunciation of “t’s” in words like “Manhattan”, and instead say “Manha’an”, or if you replace “th” at the end of a word with an “f” and instead of saying “mouth” and “breath” you say “mouf” and “breaf”, then you should drown yourself in a bathtub because you are so fucking stupid you don’t deserve to live.

The reason I was thinking about those rather random things is because a young white woman in her early 20’s sitting near me in the theatre was sharing her opinion of Dr. Strange, or as she called it, “Dr. Shtrange”, as the credits rolled and liberally used the term “y’all” and spoke about how the film was set in “Manha’an” and that it took her “breaf” away.

Unfortunately, “Dr. Shtrange” did not take my “breaf” away, although at various times throughout the movie I was wishing that I would stop breathing and be put out of my misery.

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness opened on May 6th and, not surprisingly, has won the box office battle its first two weeks, raking in nearly $700 million worldwide against a $200 million budget. Marvel dominates modern movie going and it feels like we all have to pay our Marvel tax a few times a year just to stay on top of the cultural comings and goings, and I am no exception.

My relationship to Marvel movies and tv shows is that I am routinely underwhelmed by them but feel it my duty to watch. This says more about me than anything else, and what it says isn’t particularly positive.

Marvel’s new post-Endgame game plan seems to be to inundate audiences with sub-mediocre movies and tv shows with ever more complicated multiversal mania that are required watching if you want to stay relevant with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For example, if you haven’t seen the truly dreadful Disney + Marvel wokefest of a tv show What If…? then you might be a bit lost while watching Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The same is true of Loki and even more true of the show WandaVision, which was an ambitious and mildly entertaining series starring Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, the character she plays in Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

But rest assured, being up to date on Marvel’s required watch list doesn’t make Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness coherent, it just makes it slightly less incoherent.

The plot of Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is so convoluted as to be absurd, just know that there isn’t a single universe in the multiverse that is even mildly interesting. This isn’t the multiverse of madness, it’s the multiverse of dullness.

Adding to the malaise in the multiverse is the fact that this film looks and feels cheap and rushed. For example, the visual effects are at times embarrassingly amateurish. Add in a scattershot script, generally poor performances and derelict direction, and you have a recipe for sub-mediocre Marvel movie mundanity.

What makes this movie so disappointing is that it’s directed by Sam Raimi, who you may recall, among other things, directed the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies from the early 2000s. Those films, particularly the first two, were very good and extremely well made (the third one was a hot mess…but two out of three isn’t bad!). Raimi is a quality filmmaker and yet on Dr. Strange he seems to have succumbed to the Marvel virus and made the most sterile and anti-septic piece of incoherent corporate comic book crap imaginable.

To be fair, the first Dr. Strange (2016) film was pretty forgettable too, but this sequel somehow feels even more inconsequential, which is unfortunate.

It’s unfortunate because of a few things, the first of which is that Dr. Strange is actually quite a fascinating comic book character. After seeing the first film I had a reader send me some Dr. Strange comic book titles to read and I thought they were terrific. The character, and his world, is weird, but not weird for weirdness sake. It’s a complex character and one worthy of a decent cinematic exploration.

Another thing that irritates about these Dr. Strange movies is that the films never live up to the stand out casting of Benedict Cumberbatch as the master of the magical arts and former Sorcerer Supreme himself. Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange is a deliriously intoxicating combination of insecure smugness and aggressive arrogance that is pretty great to behold…but the stories they put him in and the movies that surround him are needlessly vapid, vacuous and abysmal.

Speaking of abysmal, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness boasts what may very well be the worst performance by an actress in Marvel Cinematic history, which is quite an achievement. Xochitl Gomez plays America Chavez, a young-women who possesses the ability to traverse the multiverse. The dead-eyed, charisma-free Gomez is so awful in the role that it was physically uncomfortable to witness. It was like watching a homeless person defecate under the golden arches in front of a McDonalds and then put it on a bun and serve it to an unsuspecting public.

Gomez’s character, America Chavez, of course speaks Spanish because we have to hit all the right demographic buttons, and on top of that box-checking bit of virtue signaling she also has two mommies. In a nod to Marvel’s supreme subtlety, the name of Ms. Chavez’s universe of origin where everyone is a Spanish speaking Latina lesbian is…the Utopian Parallel. I shit you not. Here’s hoping the woke brigade and their alphabet contingent at Disney can learn Spanish and move to the Utopian Parallel and churn out their shitty movies to their heart’s content and spare the rest of us in this miserable universe their insipid cultural politics.

Speaking of mommies, Elizabeth Olsen is a good actress who was absolutely phenomenal in WandaVision playing Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch, but who is remarkably dreadful playing the same character in Dr. Strange. It’s sort of bizarre, but Olsen’s angry mommy on a multi-versal rampage just feels off here. Olsen seems completely uncomfortable on-screen as Wanda/Scarlet Witch, which manifests by her continuously being completely off-breath and off-voice throughout.

The rest of the cast, including some surprise cameos from stars playing Marvel icons - all of which will go unnamed so as to avoid spoilers, are pretty awful too. One is so horrendous that it genuinely shocked me.

As for the movie’s fate, Dr. Strange is undoubtedly going to dominate the box office for weeks on end and by year’s end will be one of the top grossing films, but that says less about the quality of the film and more about the crumbling nature of the entertainment business and the rapid decline in audience expectations. Such is life in this universe of corporate controlled, crap art/entertainment.

My advice is to avoid Dr. Strange in the theatre as it is most definitely not worth your hard-earned money. But if you’re a complete-ist and you want to stay on top of all things Marvel, just wait for it to stream on Disney + and watch it there. But even then it’ll still feel like a giant waste of time.

The bottom-line regarding Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that it made me yearn to live in a universe where Marvel movies weren’t so reliably and relentlessly sub-par.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 67 - Ozark Season 4 Part Two

On this episode, Barry and I launder our thoughts on the final seven episodes of the Netflix drug drama Ozark. Topics discussed include the harmonious sounds of Covid coughing, the foundational failings of an unsatisfying finale and the brilliance of Jason Bateman.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 67 - Ozark Season 4 Part Two

Thanks for listening!

©2022

Moon Knight (Disney+): A TV Review

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A completely forgettable and unforgivable mess of a Marvel series.

Marvel has not exactly covered itself in glory in the wake of the staggering achievement that was the narrative arc which culminated with Infinity War/Endgame.

Black Widow and Shang Chi were rather generic Disney/Marvel movie ventures and Eternals was the worst film Marvel has churned out in its history.

The Spider-Man Sony/Marvel movies have fared a bit better at the box office, but even those have been pretty lackluster films, Spider-Man: No Way Home being the exception. The other Sony/Marvel movies, Venom and Morbious, have been pretty disastrous.

In this post-Endgame era, Mickey Mouse’s minions have tried to branch out from feature films to television, giving us a plethora of Disney + content that has been more miss than hit.

WandaVision and Loki were flawed but at least ambitious. Hawkeye was a more conventional work, but entertaining nonetheless. Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a middling misfire. What If…? an animated shitshow. And now there’s Moon Knight, which is easily the worst of the bunch.

Moon Knight is, like the lead character in the recent sorry Sony/Marvel movie Morbius, a bit of an obscure superhero in the Marvel canon.

Moon Knight is one of the superhero personas of Marc Spector/Steven Grant - a guy with a split personality. Spector is a rough and tumble American mercenary and Grant is an effete Brit who works at an Egyptian museum. Moon Knight is the avatar for the moon god Khonshu when Spector’s personality is in charge, and when Grant is in charge that avatar is Mr. Knight.  

If that all sounds a bit much that’s because it is, and Moon Knight doesn’t do much to quell the confusion.

Moon Knight is, like Morbius, a pretty fascinating character once you do the comic book reading necessary, but also like Morbius, the character is poorly served by the studio’s attempt to take him mainstream because the vehicle used is so atrocious.

The series Moon Knight, like the film Morbius, is an utter abomination it is so awful.

The series runs for 6 episodes, and yet it’s pacing is so bad, its storytelling so stilted, its action sequences so dull, it felt like watching a 40 hour death march.

The series takes its sweet time actually introducing Moon Knight, a fatal error as he’s the only remotely interesting thing in it. Instead, it plays coy with Steven Grant’s perspective, and actually cuts away anytime something interesting is about to happen and Moon Knight is supposed to show up.

When Moon Knight finally does arrive on screen, he is accompanied by the most egregiously choreographed, poorly shot and dismally edited action sequences you’ll ever witness.

And it isn’t just the action sequences, as everything about Moon Knight looks and feels cheap.

A huge problem with the show is that Oscar Isaac simply can’t carry a series on his own, as he lacks the requisite charisma and star power, nevermind the acting ability.

Isaac’s appeal has long eluded me. He is routinely terrible in movies (try watching him in those Star Wars pieces of shit) and yet people fawn all over him like he’s some great actor/movie star.

That said, last year I saw him in the Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter, and I thought he was fantastic. His performance was underplayed, subtle and riddled with complexity. Finally, I began to see what other’s saw in Oscar Isaac…and then… he turns around and churns out the embarrassment that is Moon Knight.

All of Isaac’s versions of Moon Knight, be it Mark Specter or Steven Grant, are dead-eyed, dreadful and dull. By the way, Isaac’s British accent as Steven Grant is Dick Van Dyke level of hackneyed.

Speaking of dreadful, Morbious was a truly dreadful movie and, ironically, the geniuses behind Morbious and Moon Knight are on the same creative page as there’s a sequence in Morbious that is copied in Moon Knight.

In the sequence, there’s a sort of horror chase through a hallway with corporate zone lighting in it where the only lights that go on are the ones immediately above the person walking. It was enormously amusing to me that Moon Knight used the same exact lighting technique in an equally flaccid horror chase scene. Apparently unoriginal minds think alike.

Another major issue with Moon Knight is that the whole Egyptian gods thing is a tough sell, as once you start getting into supernatural instead of superhero, things become even more silly than usual pretty fast. Eternals suffered from a similar failing.

And Moon Knight doesn’t seem to be connected in any way to the rest of the Marvel Universe, so the series feels even more irrelevant. For example, why when giant Egyptian gods are fighting and civilians dying, wouldn’t the Avengers get involved?

To me, the most remarkable thing about Moon Knight is how instantly forgettable it is, and how atrociously made it is.

But rest assured, despite Moon Knight being a major mess, Marvel still managed to get its weak-kneed woke agenda into the series. There’s one sequence where a little Egyptian girl says to Scarlet Scarab (a female Moon Knight-esque character - it’s a long story), “are you an Egyptian superhero?”, and she replies with pride, “Yes I am!” That sequence made me cringe so hard I nearly defecated.

But rest assured, all that virtue signaling garbage is just icing on the cake of awfulness that is Moon Knight.

The bottom line is that if Moon Knight is what the future holds for Marvel, then the future is bleak indeed.

©2022

Winning Time (HBO): A TV Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A second rate recounting of a first rate story. Just more fool’s gold from Adam McKay.

The title of the Adam McKay produced HBO series that chronicles the critical 1980 NBA season for the Los Angeles Lakers, Winning Time, subtly says a great deal about why the series is ultimately a failure.

Winning Time is based on the Jeff Pearlman book Showtime, which was aptly titled since it documented the birth and growth of the Showtime Lakers, which, along with Larry Bird’s blue-collar Boston Celtics, revitalized the NBA and the game of basketball itself in the 1980’s.

“Showtime” in this context has multiple meanings in that it refers to the Lakers flashy, up-tempo offense, Magic Johnson’s jaw-dropping passing ability, million-dollar smile and superstar charisma, and the team’s new glitzy, Hollywood-friendly image.

But “Showtime” is also a cable channel and HBO’s main competitor, so they couldn’t name the series “Showtime” despite that being the perfect name. It would be like McDonalds naming their new burger the Burger King.

So, “Showtime” was jettisoned and the series became the banal and boring Winning Time, which sounds eerily similar to the 90’s Saturday morning show and Saved by the Bell wannabe, Hang Time, about a high school basketball team. Hang Time starred former NBA player Reggie Theus and gave the world Anthony Anderson, and also set the art of acting back to the Stone Age.

Winning Time is little more than a glossier, glitzier, adult-version of Hang Time. In case you were wondering…that’s not a compliment.

Winning Time attempts to do the near impossible, make a compelling drama/comedy that has a cultural/political agenda and is filled with famous real-life characters, while believably capturing the essence of professional basketball as played at the time.

Ultimately, the series clangs off the rim in its shot at greatness because it is so ham-fisted in nearly everything it tries to do.

As a basketball fan the thing that was most uncomfortable about watching Winning Time is that the basketball in it is just cringe-worthy. This is not surprising since basketball is a very difficult sport to fake – see White Men Can’t Jump for proof of that, and in high school the drama nerds were too busy starring in Brigadoon rather than on the basketball court.

In recreating the 1980 Lakers (and their opponents) you first have to find actors who are big enough to be believable, and who share a resemblance to their famous characters. Once you have that…which is no easy task, then those actors need to be able to play decent basketball, which is highly unlikely since if they could be as remotely good at basketball as the character’s they portray, they wouldn’t be two-bit actors.

Quincy Isaiah is a perfect example. Isaiah has a passing resemblance to Magic Johnson, and does an excellent job of capturing young Magic’s exuberant essence off the court. But on the court, Isaiah’s pudgy physique and his lack of basketball skill is, frankly, distracting and embarrassing.

Most of the rest of the players, be they Lakers or Larry Bird or Dr. J, suffer a similar fate, and no matter how much the director’s try and hide the awkward un-athelticism on display, you simply can’t tell this basketball story without showing basketball, and the basketball on display is an abomination.

The only real exceptions are Solomon Hughes as Kareem, and DeVaughn Nixon as Norm Nixon, and even they more look the part than actually play it.

Hughes is a 7-footer who played at Berkley and had a cup of coffee in the NBA. He perfectly captures the sullen brooding of Kareem off the court, and while his skyhook is definitely a bit wonky (which begs the question…why has no big man over the last 50 years tried to emulate the single most successful basketball shot in the history of the sport – Kareem’s skyhook?) he makes for a somewhat believable presence on the court.

As for Devaughn Nixon, he looks so much like Norm Nixon it freaked me out…but then I looked him up and he’s Norm Nixon’s son, so mystery solved.

Unfortunately, most of the non-basketball playing cast members throw up an airball as well.

For example, Jason Segel’s over-acting as assistant coach Paul Westhead is high school drama club reject level of awful. Segel’s Westhead is a feckless, Shakespearean fancy-pants with no lips and even less balls. Segel may be charming in various comedies, but he is an absolutely atrocious dramatic actor.

Adrien Brody, whose face looks like it was found in Picasso’s garbage bin, is, astonishingly, supposed to play super model-looking, Gucci mannequin and future Hall-of-Fame coach, Pat Riley. Brody is appallingly bad in the role. And watching Brody try to chew gum like Riley is one of the more alarming things I’ve ever witnessed, it’s like watching a brain-damaged camel chew on a truck tire.

Jason Clarke plays Laker icon Jerry West, aka The Logo, like he’s auditioning for a community theatre production of The Shining. West has made a stink about his portrayal in the series and is threatening legal action, and frankly, I don’t blame him. Clarke is a fine actor, but his choices as West are so absurd as to be insane.

One of the lone bright spots is John C Reilly as Dr. Jerry Buss. Reilly captures the degenerate clown show that is Jerry Buss. Buss, like many successful men of that generation, was a delusionally depraved douchebag and thought of himself as a cross between Hugh Hefner and James Bond.

Of course, Reilly’s Buss is funny because he’s so ridiculous in his tight jeans, unbuttoned shirt and with his scientifically impossible comb over, but he’s also pathetic, manipulative and disgusting, as he keeps pictures of all his sexual conquests and uses his wealth and the terminal illness of his mother to basically sexually assault a nurse.

Buss’s smoke and mirrors purchase of the Lakers, and his revitalization of the team, which ultimately led to the birth of the modern NBA, is an important story, but Adam McKay is incapable of properly telling it.

McKay uses his usual bag of tricks, like breaking the fourth wall and using different film stocks to give a visual flair to things, but this doesn’t elevate the material but rather feels like empty parlor tricks.

Winning Time, like all of McKay’s “serious” works, is loaded with the director’s personal politics, in this case there’s a plethora of pandering regarding misogyny and the patriarchy. These cultural political issues in Winning Time are a lot like McKay’s various filmmaking quirks in that they feel manufactured and used to cover up fundamental flaws in the storytelling.

McKay came to fame as Will Ferrell’s comedy caddy and then made the leap with the extraordinarily impressive The Big Short. The Big Short was a stunning achievement, one which I never would have thought a director like McKay could’ve made…but he did it.

But since The Big Short, McKay has tried to tackle equally complex material and has floundered. Vice, the story of Dick Cheney, was an ambitious failure. Don’t Look Up was a scattershot attempt to make a climate change satire, and it fell flat. As more time passes and more “serious” McKay projects see the light of day, it becomes more and more clear that The Big Short wasn’t the beginning of a great run, but rather an outlier from an ambitious but artistically very limited storyteller. Winning Time is just more proof of this thesis.

Ultimately, Winning Time is a loser because it’s a story of Shakespearean scope and scale about basketball made by someone who has neither any genuine insight into human nature nor a true understanding of the complexities of the game. As any big man worth his salt would say as he swatted a sorry shot into the third row, I say to Adam McKay and Winning Time, “get that weak shit outta here!”

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