The Irishman: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

The Irishman, written by Steve Zaillian (based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt) and directed by Martin Scorsese, is the alleged true story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a truck driver out of Philadelphia who becomes a trusted member of the Italian mafia. The film stars Robert DeNiro as Sheeran, with supporting turns from Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.

Martin Scorsese is one of the true masters of American cinema, and so when he releases a new film cinephiles take notice. Scorsese’s newest project, The Irishman, is a Netflix film, which means it will have a very limited release in theatres in November before it settles in for the long haul on the streaming service at the end of the month.

Being the obnoxious purist that I am, I wanted to catch The Irishman in theatres so I decided to see the first show at 10:45 on Tuesday morning. I assumed the theatre would be just how I like it…sparsely populated. I mean who, besides a loser like me, goes to a movie on a Tuesday morning? Well…apparently there are a lot of losers in Los Angeles. I was stunned to see that my screening of The Irishman was jam-packed and nearly sold out, with only the first two rows of the theatre with empty seats. The film is supposedly only playing in two theatres here in Los Angeles, and luckily for me one of the two is my regular hang out. My screening was bursting with an interesting cross-section of people, from hipsters to the elderly to elderly hipsters.

What surprised me the most about such a large crowd was that the film runs three hours and thirty minutes, which makes it a prime candidate to watch in the comfort of your home where you can hit the pause button to take bathroom breaks and not miss any of the action. Such is the draw of Scorsese that audiences would put their bladders to the test and shell out money to see a film they could essentially see for free with unlimited bathroom breaks just a few weeks from now.

The Irishman is not so much a genre defining film as it is a genre closing film. Like Clint Eastwood’s eloquent tombstone on the grave of the western, Unforgiven, Scorsese gives us the mob movie that makes mob movies dramatically obsolete with The Irishman. Both Unforgiven and The Irishman burst the archetype and myth that animate them and replace it with the awkward, unwieldy and soul-crushing reality of the consequences of that myth.

Unlike its energetic and exuberant predecessor Goodfellas,The Irishman is a melancholy meditation, a profound existential prayer whispered into the abyss. Scorsese’s makeshift mob trilogy, which began with Goodfellas and continued with Casino, finds its weighty final chapter with the contemplative epic The Irishman, and reveals an introspective auteur coming to grips with mortality. The Irishman is a film obsessed with mortality, as death looms over every scene like an ominous storm cloud containing the relentlessly inevitable deluge of both physical and spiritual destruction and disintegration.

In Goodfellas and Casino, Scorsese sees the mob world as morally corrupt, but does so through a nostalgic lens…these guys may be bad but they are “good guys”, good-fellas. In The Irishman, as physical action turns to spiritual consequences, nostalgia is replaced with a plaintive reflection, so profound as to be akin to a sacramental confession.

The performances in The Irishman magnificently give life to Scorsese’s artistic contemplation, with Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci doing some of their very best work, and easily the best work of the last three decades of their careers.

DeNiro, with the assistance of a “de-aging” special effects technology, plays Frank Sheeran from his young adulthood into old age. DeNiro has not been this engaged, this sharp or this magnetic for a quarter of a century. DeNiro and Scorsese give Frank time and space, with which he is able to be still and contemplate his choices both in the moment and in hindsight. DeNiro sublimely fills these moments with a consequential aching, and his character with an acutely unconscious wound that gives Sheeran a complexity and profundity he is unable to grasp. DeNiro is now 76 and this performance may very well be his last hurrah as an actor, and it is a fitting monument to his colossal talent and extraordinary career.

Al Pacino has a supporting role and is absolutely fantastic. Caustically funny and desperately combustible, Pacino’s character (I won’t tell you his name so as not to spoil it) is a force of nature. Pacino imbues his character with a compulsion for control and a pulsating pride that make a toxic combination and undeniably dynamic viewing.

Joe Pesci is sublimely superb as the restrained and deliberate mob boss, Russ Buffalino. Pesci made his name playing frantically unhinged characters, but in The Irishman he shows off his mastery of craft. Pesci’s Buffalino is quiet and still, and yet because he fills his stillness and silence with an undeniable intentionality, he radiates an unnerving power. Pesci rightfully won the Best Supporting Actor for his work in Goodfellas, but his performance in The Irishman, while not as showy, is even better, as it is as layered and complex a piece of acting as you’ll find.

The de-aging technology used on DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci can be a little disorienting at first, and it takes some getting used to, but after the first few minutes you never even think of it. The one thing that is sort of odd about it is that the technology only de-ages their faces and not their bodies. So when a young and fresh faced DeNiro is beating the crap out of a guy on a sidewalk, he moves like a 76 year old man…like he is underwater…which is very strange to see.

The Irishman is epic is scope and scale, and it covers some 40 or 50 years of time. As previously stated, the film has a run time of three hours and thirty minutes, and I can tell you that the film is so engrossing and captivating, that not once during that three hours and thirty minutes did I mentally or physically check out. The same was true of the other people in my screening as bathroom breaks were minimal and phone checking was non-existent…which is extremely rare nowadays.

The long running time is a good sign because it means that this is Scorsese’s film, untouched by the filthy hands of studio execs or money people. Piece of Shit Hall of Famer Harvey Weinstein once famously demanded that Scorsese cut 45 minutes off of Gangs of New York and the film was immensely harmed by those cuts. The same is true of Silence, which Paramount demanded be cut for time, and also seriously suffered because of it. When studios meddle they always and every time fuck it up, this is why Netflix matters, because unlike other studios they don’t meddle and they don’t chase the short-end money of box office bravado, they let artists be artists.

Netflix is important too because without them The Irishman never gets made. The other studios passed on the film and its hefty price tag of $160 million, and so Netflix was the studio of last resort. Scorsese would no doubt prefer to have a long theatrical run with his film, but I bet he is quite pleased he made the trade-off of reduced theatrical run in exchange for Netflix letting him make the movie he wanted to make. Just more proof that the studios and theatres are fucked…they have no vision and no balls…and they will deservedly go down in flames.

The real question regarding The Irishman is not whether you should see it, you obviously should as it is one of the very best films of the year, but where you should see it. For cinephiles, I do recommend you make the effort to see it in the theatre, as it is beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer on The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, with a subdued color palette, exquisite framing and deliriously gorgeous but subtle cameras movement. The film is also expertly edited by Thelma Schoonmakert who seamlessly keeps the film’s dramatic pacing on target while also allowing it to breathe. But for regular folks who are not as concerned about those things as I am…I think they can avoid the theatrical gauntlet and wait until The Irishman hits Netflix at the end of November and watch the movie at their leisure with the pause button at the ready when nature calls.

The Irishman is a powerful film that is the very best work of the second half of Scorsese’s career. While it is difficult to predict what the always erratic Academy Awards will do, I think it is a safe bet to say that The Irishman will at least garner a plethora of nominations. I think it will be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (both Pesci and Pacino), Best Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), and Best Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker). In my opinion the film is certainly worthy of all of those awards…but there are other worthy films this year too, so we will see.

In conclusion, I have not revealed much about The Irishman’s plot or characters because I knew little about them when I saw the film and thought that enhanced my viewing experience. I have a lot of thoughts on the movie, its politics (oh boy do I have thoughts!!), its sub-text and its symbolism, but I will hold off on sharing those thoughts for now because they are potential spoilers. Once I have seen the film again and it is running on Netflix, I’ll write more in depth about it.

The bottom line regarding The Irishman is this…it is a phenomenal film well worth the time commitment to see. If you have the time and the bladder control, see it in a theatre, if not wait until you can watch it at home come November 27. Regardless of when or where you see it, see it, and enjoy one of the greatest film makers of all time as he wrestles with his legacy and his mortality.

©2019

Martin Scorsese - Top Five Films

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 57 seconds

Despite an abysmal winter, spring and most of the summer, 2019 is actually shaping up to be a good year for cinema. The first ray of sunshine came in the form of Quentin Tarantino’s wish fulfillment ode to Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Then the cultural hurricane known as Joker came along and sent the woke brigade and the impotent cuckolds in the establishment media into a full blown panic before most ever even saw it. When the Joker finally made landfall it was an insightful and electrifying artistic nuclear explosion at the center of the comic book genre that has dominated the box office and the culture wars.

Now that Halloween has come and gone, cinematic master Martin Scorsese has a new film, The Irishman, hitting theatres, and shortly thereafter hitting Netflix, that is generating massive Oscar buzz. This will be followed by another enigmatic auteur, Terrence Malick, who has a new film, A Hidden Life, coming out this December.

With Tarantino, Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick in the mix, it is a good time time be a cinephile…and since Scorsese’s new film came out last Friday and I haven’t seen it yet, it is also a good time for me to rank his top five films.

Scorsese is the most important film maker of his generation and maybe the most important American film maker of all time. Unlike Spielberg and his popcorn movies, Scorsese hasn’t padded his wallet with his work but instead advanced the art of cinema. Nearly every single film and filmmaker of note over the last 40 years has used Scorsese’s artistic palette to paint their own works. His use of dynamic camera movement, popular music and unorthodox storytelling structures and styles have become requisite and foundational film making skills. Scorsese didn’t invent cinema, but he did invent a new style of it that did not exist prior to his rise to prominence in the 1970’s, and that is why he is the most unique of auteurs.

Scorsese’s filmography can be split in two, with 1997’s Kundun being the end of the first half of his film making career, and 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead being the beginning of the latter part of his career. The first half of his career is staggeringly impressive, as he jumped genres with ease. Films as diverse as the gritty Taxi Driver, the musical New York, New York, the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, the remake of Cape Fear, the enigmatic sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money, and his biography of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, showcase Scorsese’s cinematic versatility.

The second half of his career has shown Scorsese to have lost a few miles per hour off his fastball and to have been brow beaten by the studios into making more mainstream fare. 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead was awful, most notably because Scorsese fell under the then popular spell of acting charlatan Nicholas Cage. Gangs of New York had similarly bad casting decisions, such as Cameron Diaz, no doubt encouraged by meddling money people…like Harvey Weinstein, who also took a gigantic shit on Scorsese’s vision of the film by demanding he cut 45 minutes off the running time. Other notable films from this period are The Aviator, Shutter Island and Hugo, all of which are less Scorsese films than they are studio films made by Scorsese.

Scorsese’s lone Academy Award win for Best Director came during this period with the film The Departed. The Departed is an ok movie, but it definitely feels more like a knock-off of a Scorsese film than an actual Scorsese film. It also feels like it could have been directed by anybody, which is more an indictment of the movie than and endorsement of the movie making.

The first half of Scorsese’s career is highlighted by his frequent collaborations with Robert DeNiro, and the second half by his frequent collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio. If you’re looking for any greater piece of evidence that Scorsese is no longer at his peak, look no further than that fact. DiCaprio is a fine actor, but he is no Robert DeNiro, as DeNiro in his heyday was as good an actor as we have ever seen.

That said, Scorsese has made some great films in the second half of his career…as my list will attest…and who knows, maybe The Irishman will be worthy of inclusion. I am definitely looking forward to seeing it.

Now without further delay…onto the the list of Martin Scorsese’s “five” best films!

5C - Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Wolf of Wall Street sneaks onto the list because it is uproariously funny while also being socially and politically insightful. In the face of the grotesque corruption so evident on Wall Street and in Washington, it was nice to see Scorsese focus his talents on the decadence and depravity that are the soul of American capitalism. It also helps that this is the only time the DiCaprio collaboration works, as Leo does the best work of his career as Jordan Belfort.

5B - Casino (1995) - Casino is an often often overlooked gem in Scorsese’s filmography. The film may have suffered from “Scorsese fatigue” as it appeared to tread on the same “mob” ground his recent masterpiece Goodfellas (1991). Casino is an indulgent masterwork in its own right, as Scorsese tells the story of how the west was won, and lost, by the Italian mafia, who were replaced by the corporate mafia. The film showcases some stellar performances from DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.

5A - Silence (2016) - Silence is the very best film of the second half of his career…so far. Scorsese has always carried a Catholic cross bearing a tortured Christ on it throughout most of his films, and Silence is a tantalizing glimpse at the muse that has haunted Scorsese his entire artistic life. Silence is an ambitious film, and it doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions, but it still is great. One thing that I felt hampered the film was that it also was the victim of cuts for time, which is frustrating as Silence is a rare film in that it runs 160 minutes but deserved, and needed, to run at least another 45 minutes. Secondly, Scorsese once again falls for artistic fool’s gold by casting this generations Nicholas Cage, the mystifyinly popular Adam Driver.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)- Speaking of Scorsese’s Catholicism…The Last Temptation of Christ hit theatres while I was attending Catholic high school, and you would’ve thought that Satan himself had put the movie out. Students were read a statement by the diocese imploring us not to see the movie because it was blasphemous and viewing it would guarantee a one-way trip to eternal damnation. Obviously, I responded to this warning by rushing out and seeing the film as quickly as I could…and I am glad I did (and I’m still Catholic!). The Catholic Church’s fear over this film was so absurd as to be laughable, and this is only heightened by the fact that the film is the most spiritually vibrant and resonant depiction of Christ ever captured on film.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993) - The Age of Innocence is the most un-Scorsese of Scorsese films, as it tackles romantic intrigue among the austere world of Edith Wharton’s 1870’s New York. In many ways The Age of Innocence is a massive cinematic flex by Scorsese as he shows off his directorial versatility and exquisite film making skill. While the casting of Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer were hurdles to overcome, Scorsese does so and in magnificent fashion as The Age of Innocence is an exercise in dramatic and cinematic precision.

2. The King of Comedy (1982)- The King of Comedy is a piece of cinematic gold that accurately and insightfully diagnoses America’s star-fueled, delusional culture. The film is highlighted by Robert DeNiro, who gives an unnervingly committed and forceful performance as Rupert Pupkin, the celebrity obsessed comic wannabe who tries to get his big break by any means necessary.

The King of Comedy crackles because Scorsese creates a palpable sense of claustrophobic desperation that permeates every scene in the movie. The film is genuinely funny but uncomfortably unsettling and undeniably brilliant.

1C - Raging Bull (1980) - The top three films here could be in any order as all of them are undeniable masterpieces and the height of cinematic achievement. Raging Bull, the black and white look at former Middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, is a tour-de-force from not only the film’s star Robert DeNiro, who won a Best Actor Oscar, but from Martin Scorsese, who brings all of his cinematic skills to bear on the most cinematic of sports, boxing.

Scorsese uses LaMotta’s story to explore the meaning of masculinity, its incessant fragility and its inherent volatility. While Scorsese does masterful work bringing LaMotta’s battles inside the ring to exquisite life, his most brilliant film making achievement is in illuminating LaMotta’s most imposing fight, the one raging inside of himself.

1B - Taxi Driver - Taxi Driver once again shows both Scorsese and DeNiro at the very top of their game. The film perfectly captures the madness of New York City in the 1970’s, and the spiraling madness of a delusional loner who is the modern day everyman.

Scorsese’s camera rides along a taxi cab as it ventures through the gritty streets and bares witness to the sick and venal society that produces pimps, whores and politicians, and we get to know Travis Bickle, who is the rain that will wash these filthy streets clean.

A simply astonishing film in every respect. Not just one of Scorsese’s greatest films, but one of the greatest films of all-time.

1A - Goodfellas - Goodfellas is a not only a monumental cinematic achievement, it is also a fantastically entertaining and eminently rewatchable masterpiece. Over the last thirty years, whenever I have stumbled across Goodfellas playing on cable, I will always and everytime stop and watch whatever scene is on, and 9 times out of 10, will end up watching the rest of the movie.

A terrific cast that boasts superb performances from Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, turns this film about New York gangsters, into a familiar and familial tale that everyone can relate to in one way or another. The New York of Goodfellas, is the New York of my youth, and those populating that world are my Irish family…all of them. In my family there’s a Paulie, a Henry, a Jimmy and everyone knows a Tommy. These guys are my uncles and their friends and cousins, and their wives are my aunts. Watching Goodfellas is like watching a home movie for me.

The film teems with iconic scenes and sequences, from entering the Copa to the “Layla” dead bodies sequence to “hoof” to “go get your shine box” to “what do you want fucko?” to “funny how? I mean, funny like a clown? I amuse you?” I can’t get enough of Goodfellas, as I’ve probably seen the movie at least 100 times, and I’ve discovered something new every time I’ve seen it.

Scorsese has made many masterpieces, but Goodfellas is his most entertaining masterpiece, and is a testament and monument to his greatness.

More proof of Scorsese’s genius is that I had many, many films that I love sit just on the outside of my top “five”…such as Mean Streets, The Color of Money, Cape Fear and Kundun, and they stand up to most other makers very best work.

And thus concludes my Scorsese top “five”…which is really a top nine, because Scorsese, the consummate rule breaking director, deserves a list that breaks the rules. So go forth and watch as much Scorsese as you can, and let’s hope that The Irishmen lives up to the hype!

©2019

Jojo Rabbit: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This film is funny at times and definitely worth seeing, but only at matinee prices, or until you can see it for free on Netflix.

JoJo Rabbit, written and directed by Taika Waititi, is based upon the Christine Leunens novel Caging Skies and tells the story of Jojo, a ten year old Hitler youth in Nazi Germany whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. The film stars Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo, with supporting turns from Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson, Thomasin McKenzie, Sam Rockwell and Stephen Merchant.

Jojo Rabbit is an ambitious cinematic undertaking that describes itself as an “anti-hate satire”. As someone who hates the vacuous woke rhetoric of “anti-hate” and believes that hate is not only normal but a vital part of the human condition, that tag line is a turn-off. But then I discovered that the film was a dark Nazi comedy, and since I have long whined about the fact that World War II movies, be they drama or documentary, always and every time make Hitler out to be the bad guy*, the film then became more intriguing to me. After being lured in by the prospect of Nazi-induced laughs, I pulled the trigger and went to see Jojo Rabbit. Thankfully, the film lives up to its premise and remedies the past anti-Hitler cinematic injustices and gives audiences the wacky and zany Hitler we’ve always wanted. (*This is a joke!)

In all seriousness, making a Nazi comedy, especially in these hyper-sensitive, hot-take abundant times, is an act of artistic derring-do. Jojo Rabbit for the most part succeeds in pulling off this most difficult of feats. If I am judging the movie on pass/fail, it passes. That said, it is a good film, not a great one.

The credit and the blame for the film’s better than average and less than terrific outcome, is writer/director/supporting actor Taika Waititi. The first and only other time I’ve seen a Waititi film was when I watched Thor: Ragnorak while bleary-eyed on a cross country flight. I hadn’t ventured out to the theatre to see Ragnorak out of sheer Marvel fatigue, and so, due to boredom, checked it out on my flight. To say I was blown away is an understatement. I was totally mesmerized as I watched this Marvel masterpiece that was funny, smart and insightful, play out on the tiny screen mere inches from my face on the cramped plane. Waititi brings the same level of inventiveness and ingenuity to Jojo Rabbit that animatedThor: Ragnorak.

Waititi not only wrote and directed the film but co-stars as Jojo’s imaginary friend Adolf Hitler. The film is at its best when Waititi, a charismatic performer, is on-screen. Waititi’s masterful Hitler bits crackle and had the audience at my screening, myself included, laughing out loud. The problem though is that they are too few and far between. After the first fifteen minutes or so, Waititi’s Hitler vanishes from the film for long stretches, and those stretches scuttle all of the film’s giddy and insane momentum.

In my opinion I think the film should have been more of a Harvey-esque story, with Hitler being a constant companion to Jojo rather than the star of brief interludes. I think this approach would have not only made the film more consistently funny and bizarre, but also more dramatically potent and poignant. Again, I understand that the film must’ve been limited by the source material, but source material needs to be adapted to the screen, and my suggestion should have been part of that adaptation.

As for the cast, it is as wildly uneven as the film. Roman Griffin Davis is very good as the Jojo, the committed Nazi boy with the active imagination. Davis plays everything straight and it is his commitment to truth that makes his Hitler sidekick so funny.

Sam Rockwell does his usual stellar work as Captain Klenzendorf, a down on his luck German soldier. Rockwell elevates what could have been a Sgt. Schultz level caricature into a brilliantly comedic yet painfully human portrayal. Rockwell fills each moment and movement with a dynamic intentionality that is simply brilliant.

Stephen Merchant has a small role as a member of the Gestapo and he is both funny and exceedingly unnerving. Merchant’s usual banal goofiness takes on a menacing tone as he is imbued with the dark power of Nazism.

Thomasin Mckenzie is an actress I really like, her Mickey Award®© (Breakout Performance of the Year) winning work in Leave No Trace was fantastic, but here she does the best she can with a rather pedestrian role. McKenzie’s Elsa is the dramatic counter-weight to the film’s comedy, but the character is so one-dimensional as to be cliched, and thus the film never sustains the dramatic heft it desires. The narrative shift to Elsa is ill-conceived and feels like an albotross around the film’s neck.

Scarlett Johansson does not fare so well either, as she is handed a paper thin character and does little to put any meat on the bones. Johansson’s Rosie is like a #Resistance manic pixie dream girl for the World War II set. I found her performance to be grating, aggravatingly shallow and irritatingly frivolous.

Rebel Wilson has a small role as a Nazi Fraulein that goes over like a lead(Pb) zeppelin. I have often wondered aloud “what in the world is the appeal of Rebel Wilson?” I don’t get it…I don’t get it at all..NOT…AT…ALL. Wilson is not funny…not even a little bit. Her bits in Jojo Rabbit are painfully unfunny and fall thunderously flat. Rebel Wilson is one of the great mysteries of our time and I am hoping she goes away before I have to exert any mental energy trying to figure out her appeal.

The bottom line is this regarding Jojo Rabbit…it is most definitely a flawed film, but it does pull off an amazing feat by being a crowd-pleasing Nazi comedy. Waititi’s Hitler humor and Rockwell and Merchant’s Nazi comedy are uproariously satisfying. While the film can be at times cinematically uneven and dramatically trite, at other times it is tantalizingly original and combustibly hysterical.

Jojo Rabbit is the type of film, both politically simplistic and emotionally manipulative, that may catch fire and garner Oscar buzz. I do not think it is an Oscar level film, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an enjoyable cinematic experience. I thoroughly enjoyed Jojo Rabbit despite its faults, and I think people should see it, they just shouldn’t pay $14 to see it. My recommendation is to either pay matinee prices or wait until it hits Netflix before seeing Jojo Rabbit. It isn’t a perfect film, or even a great one, but it is an interesting one, and in these artistically cowardly times, that ain’t nothing.

©2019

The Waterboys - Belasco Theater: A Review

The Waterboys - Belasco Theater - October 15, 2019

My year of living musically most likely came to a close last Tuesday, October 15th, when I ventured to downtown Los Angeles to catch my final scheduled concert of 2019, The Waterboys at the Belasco Theater.

The Waterboys are a Scottish-Irish band fronted by singer-songwriter Mike Scott, who hit the height of their success back in the 1980’s, and at that time were poised to become the next big thing. As is often the case, due to a variety of reasons, the band never became the next big thing, but they have been churning out quality music for decades.

I had never really thought much about The Waterboys in my life and considered them a one hit wonder, with Whole of the Moon being the hit, until an Irishman enlightened me as to the band’s and Mike Scott’s virtues. Four years ago I was invited by my Irish immigrant friends Cuchuliam and his bride, the Rose of Dun Laoghaire, to see The Waterboys at the Fonda Theater. I was duly impressed by the band’s musicianship and the potency of their songs. Cuchuliam then loaned me his Waterboys catalogue of music and I was off to the races in becoming a Waterboys fan.

In the four years since our last jaunt to a Waterboys show, much water has passed under the bridge, but once again Cuchuliam and the Rose of Dun Laoghaire generously, and shockingly considering they both suffer from Short Arms-Deep Pockets Syndrome, gifted my companion, the irrepressible Lady Pumpernickle Dusseldorf, and I some tickets to catch the band live…this time in support of their new album Where the Action Is at the Belasco Theater.

Any time that I spend with Cuchuliam and The Rose is often trying. As longtime readers know, I loathe the Irish with the fury of a thousand suns and do not even consider them to be legally human. What makes Cuchuliam and The Rose all the more difficult for me to tolerate is the fact that they are immigrants and since coming to America have built a vast fortune by stealing jobs from Americans and exploiting our generous welfare state. You may be wondering why on earth I would be friends with such lowly creatures, and that is a valid question. The answer is that they are literally the only friends I have left. Everyone else I know hates me with even more passion than I hate the Irish, and thinks even less of me than I think of those Emerald Isle animals. Just as politics makes strange bedfellows, so to does being reviled and rejected by the world make strange friendships…hence my twenty year relationship with Cuchuliam and the Rose of Dun Laoghaire.

My evening with the Irish got off to a typically Irish start when Cuhculiam and The Rose arrived fashionably, but predictably, late to dinner at a swank downtown restaurant. The Irish are always at least a half hour late for anything and everything, which is why they are virtually unemployable…Cuchuliam and his addiction to the dole being living proof of that.

Also in keeping with Irish tradition, they arrived absolutely stinking drunk. They had no doubt been drinking all day, which should not be surprising since it was a Tuesday after all, but that didn’t stop them from consuming heroic amounts of alcohol while ordering and eating every type of potato the restaurant had on it’s menu.

The drink led these Irish hounds to be predictably talkative. I was then lucky enough to witness a debate between these two rosy cheeked leprechauns over which “ethnic” group was the worst. Mexicans fared the best in this debate because they '“invented Tequila”, which apparently goes a long way with the Irish. The other minorities did not fare as well, and were cursed up and down in between verses of “Danny Boy” and choruses of “Jesus, Mary and Joseph” and “Jesus weeps!”

After being asked to leave the restaurant, we navigated our way to the Belasco. The theater was about two blocks from the restaurant, which was good because I don’t think I could have carried my drunken Irish luggage any farther.

I had never been to The Belasco and was duly impressed by it. It is a gorgeous space with a high domed ceiling and exquisite crafted and ornamented walls. The space is not very big, but a perfect size for a show such as The Waterboys.

As we awaited the show, to no one’s surprise the Irish hit the bar. When they returned a stranger, who looked suspiciously Irish, approached and then hugged both Cuchuliam and The Rose. This stranger, Potato Man, was a long lost Irish friend who just like Cuchuliam and The Rose, had been sucking at the American teet for the last twenty years. They must have been passing out Waterboys tickets at the welfare office because besides Potato Man, Cuchuliam and The Rose, The Belasco was filled to the brim with Irish and Irish-wannabes.

The show started a little after 8 pm and the crowd greeted the band graciously. The Waterboys have had a variety of lineups over the years but their current members are Mike Scott (lead guitar and lead vocals), Steve Wickham (fiddle), Brother Paul (keyboards), Aongos Ralston (bass), Ralph Salmins (drums).

The show opened a little bumpy with Where the Action Is. The song was fine and the band sounded great, but the sound for Mike Scott’s vocals was off. There was a bit of an echo and it was terribly tinny. The vocal sound was sub-par for the first few songs but thankfully was subtly corrected and the rest of the show went without an audio hitch.

The band played two 10 song sets with a twenty five minute intermission in between them. The songs were solid and the band played with aplomb, but the show was a bit of a let down. There are some reasons that the show did not connect as much as my previous Waterboys outing four years ago did. The first is that Mike Scott was admittedly suffering from a cold, and thus his energy was a bit down.

Secondly, I think the tone of the show, which was fun and gregarious, does not fit the band’s catalogue. Scott is a deep and philosophical song writer who lyrically bares his soul and cuts himself and humanity to the bone. Fun is not his strong suit, whereas honesty, earnestness and genuineness are his strong suit.

The pacing of the show and the set list added to the feeling of disconnect. A sign of the show’s oddity was that for the last quarter of it a large and loud crowd gather on the other side of the bar, outside of the music space, and had a very raucous discussion, nearly drowning out the band and certainly distracting the audience. It was odd…but just another odd thing in a show that never totally came together.

The highlights for me, and there certainly were highlights despite the unevenness of it all, were Fisherman’s Blues, which is just a great song off a great album, as well as Medicine Bow, Whole of the Moon (the encore) and Salmins drum tribute to Ginger Baker, which was extremely well-done. All of the musicians throughout the show were impressive, most notably Brother Paul’s frenetic organ and Wickham’s volcanic fiddle.

The show ended around 10:30 or so and my date and I headed for the exits. When we last saw Cuchulain and The Rose of Dun Laoghaire, they were making out with a leather-clad, goth woman who may or may not have been Morrissey in drag. When they took a break from their make out session they spotted us across the room and gave us a big smile and wave. We waved back and headed to the car wishing we had more and better friends. But as my father used to say…wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which hand fills up faster.

As we hastily drove home through L.A. traffic, we reminisced about what a strange Irish night it had been…and how we wished we could see these wonderful, glorious, generous, vivacious and loving Gaelic vermin more often. If only.

SET LIST

Where the Action is

When Ye Go Away

Dunford’s Fancy

Fisherman’s Blues

London Mick

A Girl Called Johnny

Still A Freak

Nashville, Tennessee

Medicine Bow

Ladbroke Grove Symphony

INTERMISSION

Man, What a Woman

Rosalind (You Married the Wrong Guy)

Blues for Baker

We Will Not be Lovers

If the Answer is Yeah

Nearest Thing to Hip

November Tale

Morning Came Too Soon

In My Time On Earth

ENCORE

The Whole of the Moon

©2019

The Lighthouse: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Not worth seeing in the theatre…you can wait til it hits Netflix or cable to check it out.

The Lighthouse, written and directed by Robert Eggers, is the story of two lighthouse keepers, Thomas Wake and Ephraim Howard, who struggle with the isolation and solitude of their job. The film stars Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake and Robert Pattinson as Ephraim.

Director Robert Eggers burst upon the scene in 2015 with his ingenious horror film, The Witch, which was set on a remote farm in 1630’s New England. The Witch was a piece of devilishly terrific film making that used craft and artistry to breath life into an ancient tale. The Witch was not perfect, but it was well-crafted and highlighted the great potential of Eggers as auteur.

The Lighthouse has been much anticipated, by me and other cinephiles, because of the great promise shown in The Witch and because of the intriguing casting of Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, two committed actors. I was very excited to see The Lighthouse, so much so that I went on opening day to see it as soon as I could.

Sadly, my excitement for The Lighthouse diminished with every passing flash of its monotonous warning beam of light. The Lighthouse tries to be so many things and yet ends up being nothing at all. The film is a very ambitious project, but the bottom line is that it simply fails as a cinematic endeavor.

The biggest issue with The Lighthouse is that it is neither entertaining nor artistically enlightening. The film certainly boasts all the atmospherics that would enable it to be a quality film…great setting, terrific acting and solid black and white cinematography…but the narrative is so thin, rushed and indulgently incoherent that when it is all over the film simply wisps away like dust blown off an old photograph, never to be thought of again.

I’ve heard The Lighthouse described as a horror comedy, which strikes me as painfully inaccurate and woefully inadequate. People describing the film as a comedy are only doing so because they are so befuddled by it they think it must be a joke. The Lighthouse is not a comedy as there is nothing funny about it, and if it is meant to be a comedy it is even worse than I think it is.

I would describe the film as a mythological horror thriller, which in theory should be right up my alley, but even with that awkwardly specific yet expansive moniker the film fails to deliver the goods. It certainly touches upon some things, particularly the mythology aspect, that could be very interesting, but it doesn’t do so in any sort of interesting way and ultimately falls decidedly flat.

Eggers’ direction on The Witch was stellar, but with The Lighthouse he flounders trying to set narrative focus. The film meanders and never gains any dramatic or horror momentum and then hits an unearned hyper-drive that leaves coherence lost out at sea. The unwieldy ambition of the film ends up sinking the movie and leaving it a rotting hull on the ocean floor, which you’d think would be an indication of a fascinating story to tell, but here we are stuck with a pretty mundane sea shanty that gets sunk by its own inadequate telling.

Dafoe and Pattinson actually do some pretty solid work on The Lighthouse, but the narrative is so diluted their efforts are all for naught. Pattinson, in particular, has really grown into a quality actor, as evidenced by his work in this year’s High Life, and he gives his all as the junior lighthouse keeper. It will be interesting to see what he is able to do with the much trod ground of Batman when Matt Reeves takes the helm for the next installment of that cash cow franchise.

Dafoe is always a committed actor, and he does his most Dafoe-eqsue work in The Lighthouse as the ornery, pseudo-Ahab, Thomas Wake. In last year’s At Eternity’s Gate, Dafoe literally gobbled up dirt as Vincent van Gogh, and in the Lighthouse he once again indulges in the same mineral rich diet, devouring soil like he does the scenery.

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shoots a nice black and white in a claustrophobic aspect ratio, and the film does look gorgeous, but his framing fails to accentuate the narrative or psychological sub-text, and the visuals end up feeling muddled and muted. In this way Blaschke’s beautiful black and white is equally as empty as the story and film it is wrapped around.

In conclusion, I really wanted to love The Lighthouse…but I didn’t. For all it has going for it the film simply doesn’t work. If you are really interested in seeing it, my recommendation is to save your money and wait for it to hit a streaming service or cable. If you really want to have a hauntingly good movie-watching Halloween, skip The Lighthouse altogether and watch the super-creepy and effective, The Witch.

©2019

Game of Thrones Predicted the Zealotry of Extinction Rebellion Eco-Fanatics

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 38 seconds

 The similarities between the eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion and the Sparrows cult from Game of Thrones are uncanny.

I have a long held a theory that film and television can be tools of prophecy used to glimpse the future. Here are a few examples that support my unconventional thesis.

In the 1990’s, numerous films, such as Armageddon, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Godzilla and The Siege, showcased the New York City skyline being decimated by one calamity or another. In addition, on March 4, 2001, the X-Files spin-off series, The Lone Gunman, aired an episode where hijacked airliners were being flown into the World Trade Center. Then six months later 9-11 happened and the devastation to the New York City skyline by hijacked planes was all too real. 

Another example was in 2016, when the films Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman reigned supreme at the box office. These films highlighted internecine warfare between superheroes, even pitting the colors red (Iron Man/Superman) versus blue (Captain America/Batman). These movies were released in the spring of 2016 and predicted the contentiousness of the coming November election and the raging of a vicious culture war in its aftermath.

The Handmaid’s Tale was in production when Trump won the 2016 election, and when it first aired in the Spring of 2017 gave voice to liberal women’s fears of patriarchal misogyny under a Trump administration. The show was also a precursor and predictor of the #MeToo movement in the fall of 2017.

Game of Thrones in particular is a bellwether when it comes to entertainment as prophecy. The show’s first episode, “Winter is Coming”, aired in 2011 and that phrase quickly became the series tag line. Billboards warning, “Winter is Coming”, portending an invasion by undead White Walkers and their zombie minions, soon loomed ominously over cities and towns across America. In the ensuing years a metaphorical winter did indeed descend upon the U.S., as the cold wind of political correctness swept across the land while an army of mindless ‘woke’ scolds waged war on free expression and diversity of thought.

Game of Thrones ended this past May, but with every passing day its creator George R.R. Martin looks more and more like Nostradamus. For example, when I saw the recent Extinction Rebellion climate crisis protests, I immediately thought of Game of Thrones.

Why would eco-activists who snarled New York City traffic by supergluing themselves to a boat in Times Square, took a hammer to a government building in London, grounded a flight from Dublin to London, and plotted to use drones to shut down Heathrow, remind me of Game of Thrones? Well, because these fanatics are eerily reminiscent of a group of religious zealots from Game of Thrones called the Sparrows.

If you’ll remember, the Sparrows and their leader, the High Sparrow, came to prominence in King’s Landing after the death of Tywin Lannister. The cult attracted great numbers of followers to their devout way of life, including some royals like Ser Lancel Lannister, who was former incestuous lover to his cousin, Cersie Lannister.

The similarities between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion are numerous. For instance, both groups were born out of noble intentions, as the Sparrows set out to alleviate the suffering of the down trodden, and Extinction Rebellion were concerned about the environment.

Both groups are also religious in nature. The Sparrows ardently worship the Faith of the Seven and brutally torture sinners and violently coerce them to confess, such as Cersei who was forced to do a public naked walk of shame to atone for her sins.

The eco-moralists of Extinction Rebellion are a religious cult too, as their members blindly worship at the altar of “scientism”, claim to have a monopoly on truth, demand purity and punish heretics. Extinction Rebellion has also gotten celebrities such as Radiohead’s lead mope Thom Yorke, among many others, to do their own walk of shame and sign a confession admitting to their past climate crisis sins.

Extinction Rebellion even has its own Joan of Arc character in Greta Thurnberg. Thurnberg, a heart felt 16 year-old who suffers from mental and emotional issues, has been held up as an eco-saint and had her passion, youth and innocence exploited as both weapon and shield by cynically manipulative activists.

It should be noted that there are some differences between the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion. For instance, the Sparrows are religious ascetics who live a life of monk-like devotion and simplicity in order to save their souls, whereas Extinction Rebellion are not ascetics themselves, but instead insist that everyone else live ascetic lives by giving up their worldly goods such as cars or traveling by plane.

{The Sparrows also work to feed the poor, while in contrast Extinction Rebellion demand that people grow their own food, which would starve the poor since they have no land upon which to grow sustenance. }

Another difference is that the leader of the Sparrows, the High Sparrow, gave up a vast fortune in order to become a member of the religious order, while the co-leader of Extinction Rebellion, Dr. Gail Bradbrook, is a professional malcontent who makes her living through various protest movements with Extinction Rebellion just being the most recent.

While the Sparrows and Extinction Rebellion do have differences, the bottom line about both groups is that their true purpose is to usurp power in order to implement their radical agenda.

On Game of Thrones the High Sparrow played a masterful game of political chess setting the Lannisters and Tyrells against one another in order to wrest control of the Iron Throne for himself. The High Sparrow exploited the political ambitions of the Tyrells and the weakness of Cersei Lannister’s impressionable young son, King Tommen, in an attempt to gain power and turn his religious beliefs into royal decree.

Extinction Rebellion’s strategy is equally Machiavellian. Their abrasive tactics of creating traffic jams and airport delays are only going to irritate and aggravate working people, thus creating enemies instead of allies. But Extinction Rebellion doesn’t care about gaining popular support. The movement believes in Gene Sharp’s theory of non-violent action that claims that protest movements only need the support of 3.5% of the population to trigger mass changes. So Extinction Rebellion is using peer pressure and social fear among the elite in the establishment media and the entertainment industry in order to acquire endorsements and donations they believe will assist the movement in reaching cultural critical mass while bypassing populist sentiments.

Extinction Rebellion are just as devious and duplicitous as the High Sparrow, as evidenced by founding member Stuart Basden revealing the movement’s real agenda is not combating climate change but destroying “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “Euro-centrism” and “hetero-sexism/heteronormativity”. In other words, Extinction Rebellion is nothing more than a Trojan horse to normalize and codify into law ‘woke’ hatred of straight, white males in the name of environmentalism.

What is even more alarming about Extinction Rebellion is that investment banks like HSBC, JP Morgan Chase and Citi all share their radical environmental agenda because they see the “climate crisis” as an “opportunity”. These banks also saw an “opportunity” in mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations during the housing bubble. That turned out to be a catastrophe for working class people and so will the Wall Street backed Extinction Rebellion agenda, which will be just another replay of the tried and true formula of stealing from the poor to feed the rich.

I am a committed environmentalist and am not skeptical of climate change science, but I am deeply skeptical of Extinction Rebellion, their intentions and their tactics…and you should be too.

On Game of Thrones Cersei eliminated the plague of the Sparrows in the most explosively spectacular of ways, but paid a steep price by losing her son, King Tommen. Hopefully Extinction Rebellion will go much more quietly into their good night. But if they don’t, and these eco-moralist clowns do impose their delusional environmental agenda, it will be Joker, with its depiction of an angry populist uprising that becomes cinematic prophecy.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.com.

©2019

The Who - Hollywood Bowl: A Review

THE WHO - THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL - OCTOBER 13, 2019

I am currently in the midst of the home stretch of my year of living musically, as I am seeing my final three shows of the year in a ten day span. Last Sunday night I saw nouveau classic rockers Greta Van Fleet try and resuscitate the moribund rock genre, and this past Sunday night I trekked out to the Hollywood Bowl to catch the legendary rock act, The Who. My year long music odyssey will, barring any last minute concert opportunities, come to a close on Tuesday night with a walk down memory lane with The Waterboys.

The Who have been around for longer than I’ve been alive, and for the majority of my life I was indifferent to them. I never considered myself a fan and saw the band as sort of on the second level of elite classic rock bands….somewhere behind The Beatles and Stones but ahead of Queen.

When I came of age and became aware of their music, The Who were still major players but Keith Moon was dead, and they were turning out radio friendly, but seemingly vapid albums, especially compared to their earlier ground-breaking work (Tommy, Quadrophenia, Who’s Next). To be clear, I didn’t hate the band or its music, it is just when I started paying attention to them their music really wasn’t worth paying much attention to.

Then was around the time in 1979 when The Who made news due to a stampede at one of their concerts in Cincinnati that resulted in 11 people being killed. I was just a kid but this story was huge news and I think unconsciously created a negative association with the band. One thing I do remember clearly about the whole thing was a gloriously absurd “serious” episode of the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati that dealt with The Who tragedy in a painfully 1970’s sort of way.

With this sort of ambivalent attitude toward The Who from an early age it should come as no surprise that I have never seen them live. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I really got into the band and started listening to their earlier, more seminal works. I had heard about the rock opera Tommy for decades but had never actually sat down and listened to the whole thing…and when I finally did I got what all the hype was about. The same was true of Quadrophenia, their much maligned other rock opera, which I absolutely love. And of course, I always thought Who’s Next was a great album, and upon reexamining it concluded it was even greater than I remembered.

It was in this frame of mind that I bought Who tickets for their Sunday night show at The Hollywood Bowl, a venue I had never been to before. The Sunday show is the middle of three shows the band is playing at the Bowl in October, and I got pretty decent tickets for a reasonable price…reasonable for big market concert tickets that is.

Half of the original The Who members are dead, with iconic crazy man drummer Keith Moon dying in 1978 and genius bass player John Entwhistle passing away in 2002. The remaining original members are lead singer Roger Daltry and lead guitarist and all-around creative master force and maestro Pete Townshend.

Having never been to the Hollywood Bowl, I asked around about advice on getting there and parking and all that and the resounding response I got was to not drive there. So my date, Lady Pumpernickle Dusseldorf and I bought park and ride tickets and took a special bus to the venue. I don’t know how much time the bus saved on the trip to the Bowl, but it certainly reduced the hassle and stress of the commute and I highly recommend it.

On the bus trip and on our entering the venue, one thing became very clear regarding Who fans…they are overwhelmingly geriatric. The masses of decrepit elderly, limping and foot dragging Who fans struggling to make their way into the show looked like an invasion of the walking dead.

The Hollywood Bowl is a gorgeous venue and the sight lines and acoustics are fantastic. Our seats were in Section K, which is a little less than mid way from the stage to the back of the seating. The one issue with the Hollywood Bowl is that the seating is comprised of long benches, so that means some disruptions whenever someone not near the end of the bench has to go to the bathroom…and with a large collection of geriatric rock fans with leaky bladders, that means a lot of bathroom breaks.

The opening act was Liam Gallagher, formerly of the 1990’s Britpop band Oasis. The show was scheduled to start at 7 pm and, like old people at a buffet, Gallagher hit the stage promptly at 6:59 and was greeted with a smattering of acknowledgment.

Gallagher played a series of new material, or material new to me, with a bad attitude and even worse pitch, to a decidedly disinterested crowd. The more irritated Gallagher became the more disinterested the masses got, with each feeding off the other.

Liam Gallagher was the picture of petulance and entitlement on Sunday night as he bitched and moaned that no one was getting aroused about his flaccid performance. The reality is that the audience of fossils Gallagher was trying to excite had no clue who he was since they were in their 40’s and 50’s when his band was moderately successful in the mid-90’s. These dinosaurs would rather have been watching the watermelon smashing comedian Gallagher, rather than the off-pitch former Oasis front man Gallagher.

And speaking of Oasis, they are a band that are a total mystery to me. When their big album What’s the Story (Morning Glory) hit the states, my reaction to the hype around it was…what the fuck? I felt like a rock and roll Rip Van Winkle that woke up after a twenty year nap to discover this milquetoast Britpop band was, out of nowhere, all the rage. Their previous album, Definitely Maybe, which had the allure of being “mysterious and cool” because it was British, was actually monotonous and shitty. Their mega-hit follow up was supposed to be a cornerstone of the Britpop movement, but it was more a vanguard of a shit-pop movement, as it was a bland stew of arena anthem rock wrapped in the pose of independent, edgy coolness. It struck me that Oasis, and the entire Britpop phenomenon, were a manufactured reaction to the organic explosion of American grunge rock. Oasis and their Britpop contemporaries were trying to cash in on the desire to be a part of a “new wave”, similar to grunge but a poor, disingenuous and entirely manufactured facsimile. The problem with Britpop being the next-big-thing or alternative/replacement to grunge though is that Britpop was generic crap, and was only appealing to those who were either late to the grunge bandwagon and/or were desperate to stay on the cutting edge of cool and alternative pop culture.

At the end of the day, Oasis’ real skill was not music, God knows, but rather in drawing attention to themselves through self-serving boasts about non-existent talent and staging headline feuds between Liam and his band mate brother Noel, the founding members of the oft-bickering band.

In this way Oasis and the Gallagher brothers are really performance artists and not rock musicians. Liam kept the performance up on Sunday night by being a middle-aged enfant-terrible thoughout his lackluster performance. He chastised the crowd when he introduced one song by saying, “here’s another one you don’t know”. And when he played the one hit from Oasis the audience by chance might know, Wonderwall, but they didn’t sing along, he chastised them further by spewing out “I guess you don’t know the words”. No Liam, people don’t know the words to your derivative Britpop drivel, and they don’t give a shit about you being a bad boy or whatever you think you are. You are a poseur and a clown who deserves a swift boot to the teeth. Now go fuck off, ya feckin twat.

Gallagher played a crisp 25 minute set that felt like 225 minutes. But then he left and we waited for The Who to arrive. The crowd swelled but we were blessed with two empty seats next to us so we never felt pinched in and we were right next to the aisle so we didn’t have to worry about being trapped by the masses.

The Who hit the stage at 8:04 pm, and were greeted with robust cheers. The band, which consisted of old staples Daltry and Townshend, also included Townshend’s younger brother Simon (guitar, vocals), Zak Starkey - Ringo’s son, on drums, Loren Gold (keyboards, vocals) and Jon Button (bass, vocals). The Who were also accompanied by an orchestra which was highlighted by sexy first violinist Katy Jacoby.

The band started the show with an abridged version of Tommy, their iconic rock opera. The show began with a rich orchestrated version of the opera’s Overture, then blasted off with 1921, Amazing Journey, Sparks, Pinball Wizard and finally We’re Not Gonna Take It all in quick succession without the band or the audience stopping to catch their breath.

At this juncture the band shifted gears from Tommy material and belted out Who Are You, a song which I never liked as a kid and which has further been eroded by becoming the theme to the CSI franchise. I actively dislike this song, but to give you an indication of how good The Who are live, I thought it was spectacular on Sunday night.

Who Are You was followed by an exquisitely cool version of the much under rated 80’s song Eminence Front and then Imagine a Man off of The Who by Numbers. To end this first section of the show the band played a song off of their new album which is due out in December. The song, titled Hero Ground Zero, was not very good, and the audience used it as an opportunity to relieve their aching bladders en masse.

The Who are a fascinating band as they have virtually been a greatest hits band for the last 35 years, as they’ve only put out one new album, 2006’s Endless Wire, since 1982. The new album, of which I will be receiving two “free” copies on account of having bought concert tickets, will be interesting to assess. As evidenced by the band’s stellar musicianship and performance on Sunday night, The Who can still play…the question remains though as to whether they can still create at an elite level. Hero Ground Zero was not a promising sign, but the second song off the new record that they played later in the evening, Ball and Chain, showed much more promise.

The band broke the show into thirds, with the first section accompanied by the orchestra and dominated by Tommy material. The second section was sans orchestra and showcased the songs Substitute, I Can See For Miles, a surprisingly scorching You Better You Bet and a powerful Won’t Get Fooled Again that featured just Daltry and Townshend on acoustic guitar. Won’t Get Fooled Again was utterly spectacular and was a testament to Townshend’s thriving guitar prowess.

The third section, which once again featured orchestral accompaniment, brought the night to a close with such gargantuan rock songs as 5:15, The Rock, Love Reign O’er Me and finished with the classic rock anthem Baba O-Reilly. The show was a brisk 2 hours and 10 minutes, all under a glorious full moon.

My impressions of The Who are that they have rightfully earned their spot on the Mount Rushmore of rock. Townshend and Daltry still put on a tremendous and energetic show for the ages. These guys are absolute masters of their craft and proved it on Sunday night.

Daltry has always been a power singer, belting out songs with a rarely matched dynamic vocal muscularity. Daltry is not the most nuanced singer in the world and has a limited vocal range, which is why Townshend is often recruited to handle the more delicate vocals, but to Daltry’s great credit he has always known who he is and never strayed too far from his strong points. At 75, it is truly remarkable that Daltry still sings with such a volcanic vocal vigor. Yes, his voice is weakened a bit from his 1960’s and 1970’s heyday, but not nearly enough for the songs or his performance to suffer. Daltry may not move like he used to, but he certainly commands the microphone and The Who catalogue with powerful aplomb.

Pete Townshend was, at one point in the late 60’s and early 70’s, the most ambitious guitarist and songwriter in rock music. His rock operas Tommy, Quadrophenia and Lifehouse - which morphed into the album Who’s Next when the Lifehouse idea fell through, were some of the most original and ambitious albums of that era. Interestingly enough, I think that Townshend’s ambition and arm wheeling showmanship often overshadowed his pure guitar virtuosity. Townshend is a supreme guitar player, and if Sunday night is any indication, he is still near the top of his game. Townshend still cranks his arm with magnetic abandon and occasionally musters some fancy footwork, but his showmanship has now taken a backseat to his virtuoso musicianship, and it is impressive to behold.

The backing band, particularly Zak Starkey on drums, are phenomenal. According to Townshend, Starkey was the only student Keith Moon ever had, no doubt having a dad who was the Beatles drummer helped convince Moon to take on this endeavor. Starkey’s Moon apprenticeship shows as he plays the drums with a controlled abandon and volatility very similar to his esteemed drumming mentor.

In conclusion, The Who put on a spectacular show on Sunday night filled with an energy that belied their advanced age. I am thrilled I finally got to catch them live and witness them play such a stellar set at such an historical venue as The Hollywood Bowl. The Who are immortal, and Pete Townshend and Roger Daltry are rock behemoths who still walk the earth. If you get a chance to see them perform live, I highly recommend you take it while you still can…you won’t be disappointed.

SETLIST

Overture

1921

Amazing Journey

Sparks

Pinball Wizard

We’re Not Gonna Take it

Who Are You

Eminence Front

Imagine a Man

Hero Ground Zero

Substitute

I Can See For Miles

You Better You Bet

Won’t Get Fooled Again

Behind Blue Eyes

Ball and Chain

The Real Me

I’m One

5:15

The Rock

Love, Reign O’er Me

Baba O’Riley

©2019

Parasite: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A fantastically original film, gloriously directed and acted, that is both dramatically potent and politically insighftul.

Language: Korean with English subtitles

Parasite, directed and co-written by Bong Joon-Ho, is the story of the Kim family, who live at the bottom rung of Korean society and try to connive their way out of poverty. The film stars Song Kang-ho as father Ki-taek, Jang Hye-jin as mother Chung-sook, Choi Woo-shik as son Ki-woo and Park So-dam as daugher Ki-jong.

Parasite is an exquisitely crafted film that, although it is in Korean with English subtitles, speaks as eloquently and insighftully about the perils of American capitalism and the growing resentment and rage born out of astronomical wealth disparity, as any film in recent memory. In this way Parasite is reminiscent of last year’s Shoplifters and this year’s big movie Joker. All three of these movies tap into the pulsating dissatisfaction of the working poor who are being left further and further behind, and growing angrier and angrier about it, with every passing day.

Whenever certain themes recur in films that capture either the critical or commercial imagination (or both), my antenna stand on end because as my studies have shown, cinema can be prophecy, and these films are red flags as to what is percolating just beneath the surface in the collective sub-conscious. One look around America, and the world, gives credance to the theory that these films, all of which give voice to the emotional pull of populist uprisings, are trying to warn us of what lies ahead.

Parasite is a brilliant examination of the frustration and fury that accompanies being at the bottom of the social rung in a corrupt and rigged capitalist system. The only way to get ahead and get out of the prison of debt, and it is a prison, is to lie, scheme and cheat. If that means throwing other poor people under the bus, then so be it.

Director Bong Joon-ho has tapped into these ideas of class struggle before, most notably in his film Snowpiercer (which starred Chris Evans aka Captain America), which was a remarkably innovative and original film. Bong’s class consciousness in both Parasite and Snowpiercer is fueled by anger and fear… namely, fear for what will result when the anger from below is righteously unleashed upon those at the top when the house of cards crumbles. Bong, either consciously or unconsciously, understands that the current world order sits atop a super volcano that is growing more and more unstable and combustible, and his film’s reflect the emotional and political fragility of our time.

In Parasite, the poor are vermin, roaches, who are either being pissed on or drowned, as poverty is a deluge that imposes upon them indignity after indignity until it suffocates them. The poor are forced to stay in their place and warned not to “cross the line” into familiarity with the rich. The prison of poverty has walls, both real and imagined, that are impenetrable…even when you repeatedly bang your head against them…like Arthur Fleck does in Joker (wink).

The rich family in Parasite, the Parks, are the picture of decadence, detached from the ability to see the poor as even human. The Parks are repulsed by the poor, who they see as more akin to animals than people, as evidenced by their disgust at the literal smell of poverty. The Park’s revulsion at the poor does not stop them from fetishizing poverty, much like Americans fetishize Native Americans but make sure they stay on the reservation (wink)…just one more way for the rich to exploit the poor for their personal gain.

Parasite’s politics and psychology are as insightful as its drama is enrapturing. The film never shies from the difficult or the desperate, nor does it wallow in it. Instead Bong Joon-ho has made a socially relevant, dramatically explosive film that is deliriously entertaining in every single way.

Bong’s direction of Paradise is fantastic, as the film’s dramatic and physical geometry is spectacular. His use of straight lines, differing levels (symbolic of class status) and long journeys upward and downward (very similar to Joker, where Arthur Fleck makes those trudging journeys up the long flight of stairs, and the victorious dance down it) is proof of a master craftsman and artist at work.

Bong’s ability to meld together comedy, suspense, elements of thriller, as well as social commentary is extraordinary. I never knew what was coming next in Paradise and was always surprised, sometimes shocked and never disappointed.

The cast of Paradise are outstanding. Song Kang-ho in particular gives a dynamic performance that is consistently rich and layered. And both Choi Woo-shik and Park So-dam do stellar work that is both magnetic and subtle. Park in particular has a charm and presence about her that is intriguing and compelling.

Parasite is one of the very best film’s of the year and most certainly will garner an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Picture, if not a win, and may even sneak in a Best Picture nod. The film is expertly made, wonderfully acted, politically prescient and dramatically potent, for these reasons, Parasite is required viewing for cinephiles and regular folk alike. My recommendation is to go as quickly as you can to the art house and see Parasite…it is that good. And after that, head to the cineplex to see Joker…again, and then when you get home watch Shoplifters (I see it is now available on the streaming service HULU)…because they are that good too. If you want to know what is coming for America and the world, and why, go watch those three movies. But make sure you go see Parasite as quickly as you can…it is truly a fantastic film and well worth you time and money.

©2019

Greta Van Fleet - Hollywood Palladium: A Review

GRETA VAN FLEET - HOLLYWOOD PALLADIUM - OCTOBER 6, 2019

Greta Van Fleet are a hard rock band from Michigan currently on tour in support of their album Anthem of the Peaceful Army. I ventured out solo on Sunday night to catch their second of two sold-out shows at the Hollywood Palladium.

Greta Van Fleet are comprised of the three Kiszka brothers, Josh (vocals), Jake (guitar) and Sam (bass/keyboards) along with Danny Wagner on drums. The band came to prominence by making some waves in the stagnant rock genre with the release of two popular EP’s in 2017, Black Smoke Rising and the double EP, From the Fires.

Greta Van Fleet has been both praised and maligned as being a Led Zeppelin clone. The main reason for the Led Zeppelin comparisons are that singer Josh Kiszka has a Robert Plant-esque, high pitched singing voice that often emulates Plant’s signature wail. That said, the comparisons to Zeppelin are entirely unfair to Greta Van Fleet because Zeppelin is one of the handful of all-time great rock bands ever to strut the earth. Greta Van Fleet are not Led Zeppelin and never will be, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be good in their own way. Of course, when expectations are set so high by Zeppelin comparisons, let downs or resentments are sure to follow, and sure enough Greta Van Fleet has, I think unfairly, been ridiculed by many.

I was alerted to Greta Van Fleet back in ‘17 by my friend Red Dragon, who is a music afficionado exrtraordinaire. I thought the band’s songs Black Smoke Rising and Highway Tune, which are featured on both of their EPs, stood out as quality songs and much-needed solid rock hits.

The band’s debut LP, Anthem of the Peaceful Army, came out in October of 2018, and was a top-selling album upon its release. I checked out Anthem and while I liked some of it, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did their EPs. I got my first glance at Greta Van Fleet live when they played Saturday Night Live in January of 2019. I was excited to see them on tv, but their performance was…underwhelming…to say the least. I found singer Josh Kiszka’s vocals to be pretty grating live and his overall rock star presentation to be at best sorely lacking, and at worst embarrassing.

Despite my lukewarm feelings about the band’s SNL gig, when I saw they were playing the Hollywood Palladium I quickly snatched up a general admission ticket. The ticket was moderately priced, after all the fees and such I think I paid 60 something bucks for it, and in my opinion it is always best to err on the side of going to concerts than skipping them.

Since I was flying solo, I did not , much to my chagrin, have a pre-show Shake Shack meal. Instead I waited until pretty late before heading out to the venue. When I got to the Palladium at 7:15 for the 7:00 show, the line to get in was around the block. The line went quickly though and the general vibe from fans was one of good will. In fact, a young couple waiting in line in front of me didn’t even have tickets and were trying to buy them online when an older couple walked past asking if “anyone needed free tickets”. The young couple said yes and this older couple took a few minutes and actually texted them two free tickets. Apparently the older couple’s two kids didn’t want to go to the show so they just gave the tickets away. It was an incredibly kind act and the couple in front of me were giddy with karmic bliss for the rest of our wait together.

I had never been to the Palladium before and was interested to see the space. The first thing that stood out to me was that the Palladium staff were exceedingly polite and good-natured. Both the security staff who worked the metal detectors, and the guy checking tickets, were very pleasant and warmly told me to “enjoy the show”. This may not seem like much, but considering the treatment you usually get from staff at concerts, this was extraordinary.

It was a general admission show so I scanned the area inside the Palladium and then made my way to about the 12th row of bodies from stage left. People were pretty tightly packed in and it was very warm, but the atmosphere was easy going.

The opening act, Shannon and the Clams, went on at 8:05 and the crowd received them with a subdued applause. I had never heard of Shannon and the Clams and was curious as to what they were all about. The band is made up of Shannon Shaw (vocals/bass), Cody Blanchard (vocals/guitar), Will Sprott (keyboards) and Nate Mahan (drums). The band looked coolly disheveled, as the three men wear slightly mismatched, vintage suits, with Blanchard sporting a bow tie and Mahan sporting a cowboy hat and bolo tie. Shannon, a buxom, Rubenesque blond, wore a classic mini-skirt.

Shannon and the Clams played a crisp set for about 35 minutes. The set was a driving mix of original Buddy Holly-esque retro rock, rhythm and blues and garage punk all with beautiful and precise doo-wop backing vocals. Their songs were strong and the musicianship impressive, especially that of drummer Mahan who never let the band’s momentum lag.

Shannon may be the named headliner in the band, but the straw that stirs the drink is Cody Blanchard. Blanchard’s guitar playing is a mix between Buddy Holly and Dick Dale. His singing voice is higher than Shannon’s, who possesses a gritty, lower register growl, but it is superb. Blanchard also possesses an ease and welcoming confidence on stage that is very appealing. That said, he does boast what may be the worst haircut of recent memory, a sort of thinning bowl cut/mullet combo that could stop traffic with its hideousness.

Shannon Shaw is a solid bassist and has an earthy power and undeniable charm about her. Sadly, the sound mix at the Palladium was not quite as crisp as it should have been and so her lower pitched vocals often got lost. That said, the band ended their set with a truly fantastic cover of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit with Shannon on lead vocals, and she just crushed it.

Shannon and the Clams made a new fan on Sunday night, and I look forward to getting to see them again.

After Shannon and the Clams left the stage, the road crew went to work and the crowd started to swell. As the crowd swelled, some tempers flared and a near scuffle broke out near me but quickly subsided with some drunken bro-hugs and high fives.

The crowd was a very eclectic mix in terms of age. There were a lot of middle aged and old people, but a substantial number of millennials. My rough estimate would be that the crowd broke down as 40% middle-age/old and 60% teens and twenties. I did see a few moms and dads with their pre-teen kids as well.

Greta Van Fleet hit the stage at about 9 with When the Curtain Falls and were greeted with raucous cheers. What is immediately apparent upon seeing Greta Van Fleet live is that the musicianship of Jake (guitar) and Sam(bass) Kiszka and Danny Wagner, is really impressive. They are a tight trio and Jake is an absolutely filthy guitar player who plays with a demonic intensity.

The second song of the night was Edge of Darkness, and this is where things started to get interesting. The song is a rather mundane bit of rock and roll, but the rendition of it on Sunday night turned into an absolute bombshell. Seemingly out of nowhere Jake just erupted with a dynamic guitar solo that went on a combustible and entertaining odyssey. The band barely stayed with him as he just torched the Palladium and left it in a smouldering pile. He then followed it up with even more explosive playing on their hit Black Smoke Rising. These two songs combined confirmed that Jake Kiszka is the sun around which the rest of the band orbit.

Equally impressive were the rhythm section of Sam Kiszka and Danny Wagner. These guys grabbed a hold of the tiger that is Jake’s guitar playing and held on for dear life as it rampaged across Los Angeles. The chemistry between the two Kiszkas and Wagner is terrific and they are musicians to take very seriously.

The stage set up for Greta Van Fleet was pretty basic and relied a great deal on an overused smoke machine and very poor light design. The band played an, at times, uneven 11 song set, ending on a high note with a quality rendition of Highway Song. They then took an extended break and returned with a two song encore.

If you’ll notice, I have not mentioned singer Josh Kiszka yet, which is a bit unusual in a concert review. The reason for my apprehension regarding Josh is that I really, really wanted Greta Van Fleet to be great. I really want a rock band to come along that will drag the genre kicking and screaming back into relevance. Sadly…Greta Van Fleet is not that band, and the reason for it is Josh Kiszka.

Josh does hit some very high notes with authority, but he is no Robert Plant. Hell, he isn’t even David Coverdale. The reason Josh fails as a singer, and he does fail, is that his voice is totally lacking in any texture and nuance. Josh sings at a very high pitch, but that is all he is able to do. He doesn’t so much sing songs as yelp them out. He is unable to tell a story, connect emotionally or just break up the monotony with his voice. It is all one thing all the time. This was never so apparent as when the band, in tribute to the late Ginger Baker, did a cover of White Room by Cream. Josh’s vocals on that song were actually painful to listen to they were so bad.

The other issue with Josh, and I wish it wasn’t an issue worth mentioning, but it is, is that he is painfully uncool. Josh’s style is atrociously awful and only accentuates his uncoolness. Josh is a diminutive guy who looks like a Hobbit wearing a Leo Sayer wig who raided his hippy grandmother’s closet and stole the clothes she meant to burn rather than donate to Goodwill.

Josh also lacks any and all stage presence. Every single time he came on stage, which was numerous as he often disappeared off-stage for some reason, he would return by walking out and waving both hands over his head. He looked like a second grader getting off a school bus desperate to be welcomed warmly by his parents at the bus stop.

Josh has no rock star energy about him at all. He is not physically connected and can’t move well, and therefore he wanders the stage like a kid lost at the mall. When brother Jake is off on one of his meteoric guitar solos, Josh grabs a tambourine and flamboyantly plays it totally out of rhythm and looking ridiculous as he awkwardly and aimlessly, but energetically, gallivants around.

Some people, like Jim Morrison for instance, are born with “it”, while others, like Mick Jagger, have to manufacture “it”. Whether you are born with “it” or manufacture “it” doesn’t matter, all that matters is that you possess “it”. Josh Kiszka does not possess “it”. What he possesses is an “anti-it”, which is a shame because his brothers Jake and Sam definitely have “it”. These two aren’t just great musicians, unlike their singing brother, they are great showmen.

Maybe the stars will align and with experience Josh will grow and gain some stage presence, a stronger persona and identity, get a better stylist and then learn the finer nuances of singing and the vocal instrument. I certainly hope that happens and that the band become a huge success and revitalize the moribund world of rock and roll….but I’m not optimistic.

Sadly, it feels right now like Greta Van Fleet will have minimal staying power with Josh Kiszka as their front man. They can certainly grow as a band, and no doubt will over the next two or three albums…but with Josh as their singer they have a very clear and limited ceiling. Of course, since the band are three brothers and another guy, and the problem with the band isn’t the other guy, they aren’t going to replace their brother. So it seems that the Greta Van Fleet problems of today could be set in stone sans major development by Josh.

In conclusion, Greta Van Fleet are not Led Zeppelin, and hopefully they aren’t even Greta Van Fleet yet. Despite the band’s sterling musicianship, the vocals and presentation of lead singer Josh Kiszka are an albatross around its neck. The bottom line is this, the lead singer of Greta Van Fleet needs to be cooler than Greta Van Susteren, and he isn’t. Maybe in another year or two Josh Kiszka and his voice will have matured and will blossom into the rock star we truly need right now. I was rooting for him to succeed on Sunday night, and I’ll be rooting for him to succeed going forward.

SET LIST

When the Curtain Falls

Edge of Darkness

Black Smoke Rising

The Music is You (John Denver cover)

You’re the One

Age of Man

Black Flag Exposition

White Room (Cream cover)

The Cold Wind

Mountain of the Sun

Highway Tune

ENCORE

Flower Power

Safari Song

©2019

Joker: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.75 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW.

Joker, directed by Todd Phillips and written by Phillips and Scott Silver, is the story of Arthur Fleck, a mentally-ill, down on his luck clown-for-hire and stand up comedian, who transforms into Batman’s arch-nemesis, the super-villain Joker. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix as Fleck, with supporting turns from Robert DeNiro, Frances Conroy and Zazie Beetz.

Early Thursday night I put my life in my hands and made the dangerous trek to the local art house to see Joker in 70mm. Thankfully, no angry white incels were laying in wait for me, so I lived to tell the tale of my Joker cinematic experience…here it is.

I went to Joker with very high hopes, but paradoxically, because I had such high hopes, I assumed I’d be disappointed by the film. My bottom line regarding Joker is this…it is a brilliant film of remarkable depth and insight, a gritty masterpiece that is a total game-changer for the comic book genre, and a staggering cinematic achievement for director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix.

Joker is the cinematic bastard son of Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece of 1970’s New Hollywood, Taxi Driver. Beyond being an homage, it is more an updated bookend to that classic, engineered for the corporatized Hollywood of the 21st century.

The film’s Taxi Driver lineage is hiding in plain sight, as it has similar music, shots, camera angles and even re-purposes the famed finger gun to the head move. Joker’s Gotham, is eerily reminiscent of Taxi Driver’s New York City of the 1970’s, which Travis Bickle aptly describes as “sick and venal”. I couldn’t help but think of my Los Angeles neighborhood when seeing Joker’s dilapidated Gotham, with its garbage piled high on every sidewalk and a layer of filth covering the city. In “sick and venal” Los Angeles, we are much too evolved to have garbage piled high on our sidewalks, no, out here in La La Land, even in million dollar neighborhoods, people are disposable and so we we have them piled high on the sidewalks instead, as homelessness is epidemic. Joker’s Gotham, Bickle’s New York and my Los Angeles also share a deep coating of grime as well as a thriving rat population that is disease-ridden and increasingly bold, both in and out of public office.

Joker’s depiction of Gotham as a Bickle-esque New York is fascinating bit of sub-text, as it is a throwback to a time before Manhattan was Disney-fied and Times Square turned from degenerate porn hub to hub of capitalism porn. Joker is also a throwback to a time before cinema was corporatized/Disney-fied, a pre-Heaven’s Gate age, when filmmakers like Scorsese could flourish and make movies like Taxi Driver, unhindered by suits blind to everything but the bottom line.

Joker ‘s genius is also because it is a “real movie”, a Taxi Driver/The King of Comedy covertly wrapped in the corporate cloak of superhero intellectual property. Unlike the sterile Marvel movie behemoths, which Scorsese himself recently described as “not cinema" and which are more akin to amusement park rides than movies, Joker is, at its heart, a down and dirty 1970’s dramatic character study, for this reason alone the film is brilliantly subversive and a stake into the heart of the Disney Goliath.

It is astonishing that Todd Phillips, whose previous films are the comedies Old School and The Hangover trilogies, was able to conceive of, and execute, Joker with such artistic precision and commitment. Phillip’s success with Joker is reminiscent of Adam McKay’s astounding direction of The Big Short (2015). Previous to The Big Short, McKay had basically been Will Ferrell’s caddie, making silly movies well, but they were still silly movies. McKay’s long term film making prowess is still in question, as is Phillip’s, but that does not diminish their mastery on The Big Short and Joker.

Phillip’s direction really is fantastic, but he is also greatly benefited by having the greatest actor working in cinema as his leading man. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Arthur Fleck/Joker is an astonishing feat. Phoenix famously (or infamously depending on your perspective) lost a great deal of weight to play the role, and his wiry, sinewy frame at times seems like a marionette possessed by a demon outcast from American bandstand or Soul Train. Fleck/Joker’s madness is seemingly chaotic, but Phoenix gives it an internal logic and order, that makes it emotionally coherent.

Phoenix is a master at connecting to a volatile emotionality within his characters, and of giving his character’s a distinct and very specific physicality. What is often overlooked with Phoenix is his level of meticulousness and superior craftsmanship in his work. Joker is no exception as his exquisite skill is on full display right alongside his compellingly volcanic unpredictability. Phoenix’s subtle use of breath, his hands, as well as his attention and focus are miraculous.

Phoenix is a revolutionary actor. He is so good, so skilled, so talented, that he is reinventing the art form. His work as Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012) was a landmark in the art form, and his performance in Joker is equally earth shattering. If he does not win an Best Actor Oscar for Joker, whoever does win the award should be ashamed of themselves for stealing the statuette from its rightful recipient.

Contrary to establishment media critical opinion, Phoenix does not make Arthur a sympathetic character, but he does make him an empathetic one, and one with which we empathize. We don’t feel sorry for Arthur, we feel kinship with him as he struggles to maintain some semblance of dignity in a society allergic to compassion.

Joker was described by its detractors as being “dangerous”, and I can attest that the film is indeed dangerous, but not for the reasons laid out by its critics. Joker is dangerous because it dares to do something that corporate controlled art has long since deemed anathema…it tells the very ugly truth.

Joker has the artistic audacity to peel back the scab of modern America and reveal the maggot infested, infected wound pulsating in agony just beneath our civilized veneer. Joker’s chaotic madness is a perfect reflection of the sickness of our time. Think Joker is too “nihilistic” or “negative”? Turn on a television, read a newspaper or take a cross-country flight, and you’ll see that the nihilism and negativity of Joker are nothing compared to the madhouse in which we currently live.

Arthur Fleck is America, as the country, populated by narcissists, neanderthals and ne’er do wells, has devolved and self-destructed, rotting from the inside out after decades of decadence, delusion and depravity. America is rapidly degrading and devolving, and that devolution is mirrored by Arthur Fleck has he transforms into Joker.

Joker is unnerving to mainstream media critics because it shines the spotlight on the disaffected and dissatisfied in America, who are legion, growing in numbers and getting angrier by the hour. As I have witnessed in my own life, the rage, resentment and violent mental instability among the populace in America is like a hurricane out in the Atlantic, gaining more power and force as every day passes, and inevitably heading right toward landfall and a collision with highly populated urban centers that will inevitably result in a conflagration of epic proportions.

Joker, the consummate trickster, is devoid of politics and ideology and exists only to feed and satiate his own voracious madness. Fleck is an empty vessel and the Joker archetype co-opts and animates him. Fleck, born again as Joker, is adopted as a symbol for the struggles of the angry and the desperate, in other words, Joker is the archetype of our times, a Trumpian figure, who unintentionally inspires others, friend and foe alike, to release their inhibitions and unleash their inner demons. Joker is dangerous because he is an avatar for the rage, resentment and desperation of millions upon millions of Americans who have been forgotten and left behind and are utterly despised by the elite. Joker is both apolitical and all political. The populist Joker is both Antifa and the Alt-Right. Joker is everything and nothing to everyone and nobody all at once. The media in the movie, and in real life, make Joker into a monster, an icon and an iconic monster for the dispossessed, elevating him in the eyes of those desperately seeking a savior.

In a perverted and brilliant way, Phillips and Phoenix make Fleck into a Jesus figure, who as he transforms into Joker, becomes an unwitting Christ/anti-Christ. The line between messiah and madman is a thin one, and depends almost entirely on projection and perspective.

Arthur Fleck, like Jesus, is literally someone who is repeatedly kicked when he is down. Like Jesus, society ignores and despises him. Like Jesus he is berated, belittled and beaten…and yet all he wants to do is make people smile. Like Jesus, Fleck’s birth story is convoluted and lacks coherence.

What makes Phoenix’s portrayal so chilling is that his Fleck earnestly desires to bring joy to the world just like Jesus…and just as Jesus is actually a good magician/miracle worker, Fleck is actually a good clown, filled with energy and purpose. But Arthur soon realizes that there are two jokes at play in the universe…the one where he is the punchline, and the one in his head, of which he is self-aware enough to realize regular people “won’t get it”. Jesus makes the same sort of discovery during his temptations, he hears a “joke” in his head too, but it is the voice of God, and he comes to realize no one else will “get it” either. Fleck and Jesus are presented the same two paths, Jesus takes the one of self-sacrifice and becomes the Christ, and Fleck takes the road of human sacrifice, and becomes The Joker/Satan.

At its core Joker is a character study, and so there is not a lot of heavy lifting among the cast besides Joaquin Phoenix. That said, Frances Conroy, Robert DeNiro and Zazie Beets all do solid work with the material they have.

The film is shot with an exquisite grittiness by Lawrence Sher. Sher pays adoring homage to Taxi Driver by using certain specific camera shots and angles throughout the film. Sher also uses shadow and light really well to convey Fleck’s/Joker’s perspective and his tenuous grasp on reality. Sher, like Phillips, does not have a resume that would make you think he was capable of doing such substantial work, but in the case of these two men past was not prologue.

Joker is one of those movies that reminds you why cinema matters, as it uses the tired and worn comic book genre to draw viewers in, and then sticks the knife of brutal cultural commentary deep into their chests.

Joker has been at the center of of a cultural storm ever since it premiered to a raucous ovation at the Venice Film Festival in September. The film won the Golden Lion (Best Picture) at Venice and was quickly catapulted into the Oscar discussion, which created a fierce backlash against the film from certain American critics and woke twitter. The common refrain from those critics who saw it at Venice, and those who hadn’t, was that the film was “dangerous” because it would incite disaffected white men to become violent. In researching an article I recently wrote about the controversy, I came across a stunning number of articles with the imploring and weak-kneed headline, “Joker is Not the Movie We Need Right Now”. Of course, the converse is true because Joker is exactly the movie we need right now.

The critical opinion of Joker, especially among the critics at influential media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, The New Yorker and Time, is aggressively negative and dismissive, riddled with a belittling and condescending commentary. The criticisms leveled at the film from these effete establishment critics are obviously contrived, petty, personal, political and entirely predetermined. The amount of intentional obtuseness on display about Joker, its cinematic sophistication and its artistic merits, by these supposed important critics is stunning and revealing.

The critical malevolence toward Joker is undoubtedly fueled by a need to virtue signal and pander to woke culture, and is born out of personal contempt for the filmmaker (who dared defend himself against “woke culture”) and manufactured anger at the subject matter. The poor reviews of Joker by these American critics says considerably more about those critics, their dishonesty and lack of integrity, than it does about Joker. Make no mistake, Joker is a masterpiece in its own depraved way, and the critics who succumb to the myopic social pressure and cultural politics of the moment by reflexively trashing the movie as immoral and artistically and cinematically unworthy, will be judged extremely harshly by history.

In looking at the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Joker currently has a critical score of 69 and an audience score of 91. The disconnect between critics and audience on Joker is similar to the disconnect on display regarding Dave Chappelle’s recent Netflix stand up special Sticks and Stones. Chappelle’s show was pilloried by critics who were horrified by the comedian’s “unwoke” and decidedly politically incorrect take on the world, as the critical score is currently at 35, while the audience score is a resounding 99. It would seem that in our current age, bubble-dwelling, group-thinking critics in the mainstream media, are no longer interested in artistic merit, cinematic worthiness, skill, craftsmanship or talent, but rather in personal politics, woke ideology, political correctness and conformity, and are dishonest brokers when it comes to judging art and entertainment.

Joker is a watershed for the comic book genre. In the future film historians will look back on this time and say that there comic book films pre-Joker and comic book films post-Joker. There is no going back for the genre. That does not mean that Marvel will immediately crumble and fall into the sea, but it does mean that the genie is out of the bottle, and there is no getting it back in. Jason Concepcion and Sean Fennessy at The Ringer recently pondered if Joker is to the superhero genre what The Wild Bunch was to westerns back in 1969. They are not so sure, but I certainly think is as genre redefining or killing as The Wild Bunch. The Disney/Marvel model, post-Endgame and post-Joker, will only see diminishing cultural resonance and relevance, as well as financial returns, from this point forward. The superhero genre will not disappear overnight, but it has begun its long retreat from its apex, and God only knows what will eventually replace it.

In conclusion, Joker is a mirror, and it reflects the degeneracy, depravity and sheer madness that is engulfing America. Joker is an extremely dark film, but that is because America is an extremely dark place at the moment. Joker is unquestionably one of the very best films of the year and should be, but probably won’t be, an Oscar front-runner for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. I highly recommend you go see Joker in theatres as soon as you possibly can, as it is must-see viewing for anyone interested in cinema, art or in understanding what is rapidly coming for America.

©2019

'Patron Saint of Incels'? Woke Outrage over Joker is a Bad Joke

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Critics and woke people are up in arms over Joker because they think “evil” white men will like it and be inspired to kill.

It used to be that it was right-wingers who would get outraged over movies they deemed “dangerous” because they offended their delicate sensibilities, Last Temptation of Christ and Brokeback Mountain being prime examples. Now it is left-wing scolds who reflexively denounce movies they find “problematic”, with the highly anticipated Joker having raised their self-righteous ire.

Joker opens on October 4th and is directed by Todd Phillips and stars Joaquin Phoenix. The highly anticipated movie is inspired by Martin Scorsese’s films Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy and is thought to be a breath of fresh air in the comic book genre and the antithesis of the corporate Marvel movies. Joker tells the story of Arthur Fleck, a disaffected white man who eventually becomes Batman’s nemesis, the super villain Joker.

Fleck being white has ignited a moral panic over Joker, because according to woke twitter, white men are inherently violent, and so Joker is dangerous as it will act as a pied piper leading lonely white men to commit Joker-esque mass shootings.

The criticisms of Joker on twitter are stunning for the shameless level of scorn and hatred brazenly heaped upon white men.

Tweets saying “I don’t want to be around any of the lonely white boys who relate to it”, and “Joker movie is starting to look like a sympathetic tale of a ‘wronged by society’ white dude and their entitlement to violence” and “in a time of increasing violence perpetrated by disaffected white men, is it really the best thing to keep making movies that portray disaffected white men doing violence as sympathetic?”, highlight the racial animus animating the Joker moral panic. It is inconceivable that such venom would be acceptable against any other racial group, such as African-Americans or Muslims.

The Joker panic has spread like a contagion from twitter to the real world, where police have vowed to increase their presence at theatres, and some cinemas are banning ticket holders who wear costumes.

The US Army and the FBI have issued a warning that some “incels” or involuntary celibates, may violently target screenings of Joker.

Family members of victims of the 2012 Aurora, Colorado movie theatre shooting, have even written a letter to Warner Brothers, conveying their concerns over Joker and imploring the studio to support anti-gun causes. This is puzzling as the Aurora tragedy was during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, which didn’t feature the Joker, and while some early reports claimed the shooter dressed like the Joker and declared,  “I am the Joker”, those reports have been thoroughly debunked. This conflating of Joker with Aurora reveals the vacuity of the frenzy.

The hysteria around Joker has infected American film critics as well. When Joker premiered at the prestigious Venice Film Festival it received a twenty-minute ovation and won the coveted Golden Lion for best picture. The last two Golden Lion winners, Roma and The Shape of Water, went on to be nominated for twenty-three Oscars combined, winning seven. Joker’s reception at Venice would seem to be indicative of the film’s artistic bona fides, but American critics, who are more interested in pretentious pandering and virtue signaling, strongly disagree.

Stephanie Zacharek of Time, said of Joker, “the aggressive and possibly irresponsible idiocy of Joker is his (director Phillips) alone to answer for”.

Zacharek goes on to state that Arthur Fleck, “could easily be adopted as the patron saint of incels.”

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker opined, “I happen to dislike the film as heartily as anything I’ve seen in the past decade…”

David Edelstein of Vulture, described the film as “morally blech”, then went full on Godwin’s law in his review when he declared, “As Hannah Arendt saw banality in the supposed evil of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, I see in Joker an attempt to elevate nerdy revenge to the plane of myth.”

Film critics getting the vapors over a movie is nothing new, as cinema history is riddled with fraught hyperbole over “dangerous” movies.

In 1955 New York Times critic Bosley Crowther bemoaned Rebel Without a Cause because “it is a violent, brutal and disturbing picture.”

In 1971 esteemed critic Pauline Kael decried A Clockwork Orange, denouncing the film as “corrupt” and describing director Stanley Kubrick as “a pornographer”.

In 1989, Joe Klein, a critic for New York wrote an infamous piece on Spike Lee’s iconic film Do the Right Thing. Klein wrote, “If Lee does hook large black audiences, there’s a good chance the message they take from the film will increase racial tensions…if they react violently – which can’t be ruled out…”

Klein went on to write that the sole message black teens would take from the film was “The police are your enemy” and “White people are your enemy”.

In a great example of the intoxicating power of the Joker moral panic, Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr wrote an article about Joker where he references Klein’s historically embarrassing take on Do the Right Thing, but instead of using Klein’s egregiously myopic article as a cautionary tale, Burr instead embraces the reflexive emotionalism of the Joker moral panic.

Burr declares of Joker, ““Is it “reckless”? Honestly, in my opinion, yeah, and if that makes me this year’s Joe Klein, so be it. To release into this America at this time a power fantasy that celebrates — that’s right, Warner Bros., celebrates — a mocked loner turned locked-and-loaded avenging angel is an act of willful corporate naivete at best, complicity at worst, and blindness in the middle”

As Burr concedes in his article, there is no causal link between violent movies or video games and mass shootings, and yet because Burr “feels” uneasy, he deems Joker guilty of being “dangerous”.

The bottom line is this, there have been shootings before Joker, and unfortunately, there will certainly be shootings after Joker, but Joker will not “cause” anyone to kill people. Human beings will be violent not because of movies but because they are human beings. As Kubrick so eloquently showed us in 2001: A Space Odyssey, evolution has not removed our violent impulse, only given us better weapons.

The purpose of art is to, sometimes uncomfortably, examine humanity and reflect the world in which it exists, and by examining and reflecting, hopefully give the audience a deeper insight and understanding of themselves, their fellow humans and the world in which they inhabit. I have not seen Joker, so I don’t know if it does those things well, but from the plethora of negative reviews I’ve read from American critics, their problem with Joker is that it does those things all too well.

These critics, both professional and amateur, prefer not to examine the origins of the isolation, alienation and rage felt by disaffected white working class males who are inundated with messages from the media and the education system that stigmatize and/or criminalize whiteness and traditional masculinity.

They want to ignore or malign these men, particularly those in middle age, even though they are dying from deaths of despair (suicide, drug overdose or alcoholism) at alarming rates that have more than doubled over the last twenty years.

Joker is not a clarion call to white male violence, it is a desperate attempt at a diagnosis of the pandemic that is killing white men and will eventually kill America.

Joker’s effete and effeminate critics, the eunuchs sprawled on fainting couches at the thought of having to bear a cinematic meditation on the heart of darkness at the center of an iconic super villain, are a bad joke. Their insidiously overwrought outrage and moral panic over Joker exposes their egregious unworthiness as thinkers and critics, and frankly, the vapid unseriousness of our culture.

 A VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCTOBER 1, 2019 AT RT.

© 2019

Ad Astra: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE. IT. NOW. A profound meditation on masculinity that boasts an Oscar worthy Brad Pitt performance in one of the very best films of the year. But be forewarned…this film is more art house than blockbuster.

Ad Astra, directed by James Gray and written by Gray and Ethan Gross, is the story of Roy McBride, an astronaut who goes to space in search of his father. The film stars Brad Pitt as Roy, with supporting turns from Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland and Liv Tyler.

I have not been to the movies in quite a while, the reason being that there has been nothing playing that I considered worthy of paying $15 to see. Ad Astra was one film that I was aware of and which intrigued me so I thought I’d take the plunge. I did not have particularly high hopes for the movie because the director, James Gray, has consistently turned out beautiful misfires of movies. I have seen all of Gray’s movies, which include The Lost City of Z, The Immigrant, The Yards, Little Odessa, We Own the Night and Two Lovers, and he is certainly gifted at making moody, cinematically gorgeous films with solid performances that should be good but just never are. Gray’s films have consistently failed to resonate with me because the narratives are always so unfocused and his film’s structures so fundamentally unsound.

Ad Astra, which for some reason I keep inadvertently calling Ed Asner, actually means “through hardships to the stars” in Latin, and that is an apt description not only of the film’s story, but of Gray’s cinematic ambition and Pitt’s performance. The bottom line is this, Ad Astra is an intimately profound and profoundly intimate film that is absolutely stunning.

While Ad Astra is, like all of Gray’s films, deliberately paced, it is very well put together and flows seamlessly and effortlessly along its journey. The film never lags and has a forceful emotional and narrative momentum to it that makes it thoroughly compelling.

The film is set in the near future and the plot is about an astronaut going into space to track down his highly revered space exploring father. Ad Astra is similar to two other recent “space” films, First Man and High Life, that use space as a narrative device for the compartmentalization, isolation and emotional frigidity of manhood. I loved both First Man and High Life, and Ad Astra is a quality finale to this makeshift thematic trilogy.

At its core Ad Astra is a mediation on masculinity, its accompanying rage and the afflictions passed down from fathers to sons. I was deeply moved by this film because these themes have been the existential epicenter of my entire life. As a father, I am trying not to pass on the afflictions that were passed onto me by my father, down to my son. The tragedy of the masculine life though, and of my own life, is that men are often consumed by the flames of their afflictions, and no matter how hard they try, they fail in stopping the transmission of their wounds onto their male offspring. As Ad Astra tells us, “the son suffers the sins of the father”, and I know in my case I fail in the endeavor of sparing my son from my own affliction the overwhelming majority of the time. My only feint hope in redemption would seem to be my son being strong enough and resilient enough to eventually forgive me for my failings. I only hope I live long enough to see that happen…but there are no guarantees.

As I watched Ad Astra I couldn’t help but think of the 1997 Paul Schrader film Affliction, as that movie, which was set in the forbidding cold of New Hampshire which seems as isolating as the cold of space, was also about the madness of wounded masculinity being passed down from father to son like a genetic disease. Seeing Affliction for the first time rattled me to my bones, whereas Ad Astra moved me to my soul.

Ad Astra is also reminiscent of both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Apocalypse Now (there are a bunch of small clues paying homage to Apocalypse Now in this film…from Brad Pitt’s voice over to his answering a question by saying “that’s classified”, to a detour with a brief but distinctly surreal musical number…among many others), as the demanding evolutionary journey of the main character is not only outward but inward. McBride’s journey deeper into space is like Willard’s journey down the river in Apocalypse Now. The compulsion, bordering on madness, to make that journey, is akin to Hamlet’s musings on the “undiscovered country, from whose bourn, no traveller returns”. Put another way, you never go back up the river (if indeed you are even able to go back up the river), the same man you went down, and the same is true of space.

2019 is turning into the year of Brad Pitt. This past July, Pitt garnered raves and Oscar buzz for star turn in Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. That movie, and Pitt’s charismatic performance in it, put Brad Pitt squarely back in the center of the cultural zeitgeist, with women swooning over his shirtless antenna repairs (a weird connection between Ad Astra and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Brad Pitt repairing antennas! What does it mean?!?!?!) and men wanting to be cool like him.

Pitt has always been more a pretty face than an actor of any heft, but as he enters his late middle-age, he seems to have settled into himself and found a more grounded place from which to build his characters and to be genuine on screen, and that has never been more evident than in his powerful performance in Ad Astra.

Pitt’s work in Ad Astra is a thing of subtle beauty and genius, and is easily the greatest work of his long career. Pitt’s Roy McBride is a layered creature, wrapped tight enough to control the volcanic, primal rage that courses through his veins, and to regulate his own heart beat, but that control is a tenuous thing when McBride’s inner wound pulsates. Pitt’s once flawless face is now weathered, and his every wrinkle and every slight movement of his facial muscles in Ad Astra, tell epic stories of the emotional pain suffered and psychological crosses borne deep within McBride.

Pitt, the charismatic, eye-candy movie star, was on full display in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and his star power carries Ad Astra from start to finish too, the difference here though is that Pitt also gives an exquisitely precise and detailed acting performance that gives his character, and the movie, depth and profound meaning.

The rest of Ad Astra’s cast all do splendid work, with Ruth Negga, Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland making the utmost of the rather small roles they inhabit.

The cinematography of Hoyte van Hoytema is simply gorgeous. Hoytema’s use of shadow and light is stunning as he creates a precise, austere yet visually vibrant background upon which the emotional journey of the film takes place. Hoytema, who won the prestigious Mickey©® award for his spectacular work in Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk, is among the best cinematographers working today, and Ad Astra is among his greatest work.

The entire aesthetic of the film is superb as the visual effects of the film look fantastic, as the near futuristic world in which the story takes place is entirely believable, and the script also enhances the authenticity of the film, as the minute details of the future world seem mundanely accurate, as does the science. The soundtrack, made by Max Richter, is brilliant as well, and helps to create an unnerving and ominous mood that flows through the film like a river, inevitable and occasionally swelling.

In conclusion, Ad Astra is the film where James Gray’s peculiar talents, aesthetic and style finally come together in a supernova of cinematic brilliance, and the result is a psychologically insightful and poignant film that speaks profound truths about the affliction and isolation of masculinity as it struggles to find its place in our cold, forbidding modern world.

As to whether I can recommend this film to people or not, I find myself in a conundrum. Ad Astra, which is definitely more art house than blockbuster, resonated so deeply and personally with me that I do not know if it will do the same with other people. I think women in particular might have a hard time connecting with the film, which has a paucity of female roles and minimal female dialogue, only because it is exclusively focused on masculinity. That said…maybe women, who often bear the burden of the wounded masculinity of the men in their lives, will find solace and understanding in the film. I honestly do not know…all I know is that Ad Astra was one of the very best films I have seen this year, and spoke eloquently and astutely to the seemingly endless war that forever rages within me. If a war rages within you or within someone you love, maybe you should go see this movie, it might be a salve for wounds unseen, or better yet, an impetus for a much needed cease fire.

©2019

Anecdotal Observations on Elizabeth Warren

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 4 minutes 28 seconds

This past weekend a poll of Iowa voters came out and showed that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren was leading the pack in Iowa, having jumped ahead of front runner Joe Biden. The poll has Warren at 22%, Biden at 20% and Bernie Sanders at 11%.

Warren has been climbing in nationwide polls as well and is currently perceived as having a great deal of momentum while Biden seems to be floundering and Bernie seems to be dropping.

I wrote a few weeks ago that I thought that Biden looked painfully doddering and dead eyed, and it seems that sentiment, while vociferously pilloried by the media, is gaining traction with some Democratic voters. In the last Democratic debate, Julian Castro got into a heated exchange with Biden and accused the former Vice President of not remembering what he had said just moments ago. In response, the media went apoplectic on Castro, calling the remark a cheap shot and ageist while they circled the establishment wagons around poor hapless Uncle Joe.

I did not watch the debate but saw the exchange later and I noticed something that I think other “regular” people saw that is at odds with the media reaction. What I saw is that Castro challenged Biden’s mental capacity, no doubt due to age, and then a dead-eyed Biden proved Castro’s point for him by turning to Bernie Sanders, who is actually two years older than the decrepit Biden, and asking “what did he say?” Biden looked like Grandpa Simpson in his underwear looking for his false teeth, which made Castro’s attack all the more effective, at least in wounding Biden. For this reason and others, Biden’s drop in the polls is no surprise.

As for Warren’s jump in the polls, I have no insightful explanation except to say that while she too is no spring chicken, she certainly has considerably more vim and vigor than “Retirement Home” Joe....or is it “Funeral Parlor” Joe?

The only insights I have regarding Elizabeth Warren are entirely anecdotal, and should be taken with the grain of salt that type of information deserves. Here they are…

While the last Democratic presidential debate raged, my 4 year old son and I entertained ourselves by watching Be Be Bears, a Russian produced cartoon about the misadventures of two bears, Bjorn and Bucky, on Netflix. Bjorn is a polar bear who has left his frozen home in the Arctic to venture a bit further south where he has befriended Bucky, a brown bear who is extremely confident in all things, most notably his inventing ability.

In the episode we watched, Bucky had invented a bunch of robots to clean his house, but the robots, like all robots, turned on him and imprisoned Bjorn and Bucky. Bjorn and Bucky’s female friend, Little Fox, came to their rescue and distracted the robots and assisted Bucky in unplugging them. It was a quality episode of Russian bear wholesomeness.

When Be Be Bears ended I turned off Netflix as it was bed time for my little bear. When Netflix went off, the regular tv came on and just so happened to be on the channel showing the debate, which at that moment featured Elizabeth Warren giving an impassioned speech about…something. My son never watches regular tv, and when I watch regular tv around him, it is always just some ballgame…so his seeing a political debate was a bit shocking to him. As I searched for the remote to turn off the tv, my son got up, walked over to the tv and pointed right at Elizabeth Warren and proclaimed, “I DON’T LIKE THAT LADY!” My wife and I looked at each other puzzled. He then said, “she looks like Granmo.” (Granmo is what he calls his grandmother).

This seemed contradictory as my son loves his Grandmother so I asked him, “Do you not like Granmo?”

He replied, “I love Granmo…but I don’t like that lady”, pointing at Elizabeth Warren’s enlarged face on the television screen.

I asked him why he didn’t like her and he said, “I just don’t like her at all”.

After my son went to bed I started thinking about this incident and wondering why my son had such a visceral negative reaction to Elizabeth Warren. I wondered, had the notoriously nefarious Russians been up to no good? Had they hacked my son using subliminal messages in their supposedly family friendly show about a white bear and brown bear living in harmony with each other and the environment in order to turn him against Senator Warren? I didn’t know the answer…but I was intrigued.

After mulling this over for a few days I decided to call a bunch of my friends and family to get their thoughts and feelings on Senator Warren. I narrowed my calls to my plethora of family and friends who either reside in Massachusetts or at one time resided in Massachusetts and still have deep roots there. These people, the majority of which are women, are across the political spectrum, with a few arch-conservatives, a few strident leftists, and a large number of middle of the road independents. Of all of these people in allegedly liberal Massachusetts, which number into the multiple dozens…not a single one told me they like their senator, Elizabeth Warren.

Anecdotal observations are not very noteworthy, as you can find anecdotes to support whatever thesis you so desire, but the reason I am sharing this anecdotal information is that it is striking due to the anti-Warren sentiment being completely unanimous across the political spectrum. Every single person I spoke with felt negatively about Senator Warren, with some of them vociferously despising her while the rest of them unabashedly disliking her.

The women I spoke with range in age from middle-age up to retirement age, are mostly highly educated, single and successful in their careers. The men I spoke with are middle-aged to retirement age, college educated and mostly married.

Much to my shock, to a person, the female loathing of Warren had little or nothing to do with her policies and everything to do with her personality and presentation. The words I kept hearing, over and over again from women about Warren was that she was “annoying” and “unlikable”, with many of the respondents openly saying they “knew they weren’t supposed to say” that she was “unlikable”, but that was how they felt anyway. A few of the women even went so far as to say that they “hated” Warren, and these women are not raging Republicans either.

Among the men, all of them disliked Warren’s presentation and personality as well, but with the men their dislike of her was also heavily laced with misgivings about her policies. The word I also heard most often from men in describing Warren was “annoying”.

I recently saw some talking head on the television pontificating that Warren will be a shoe-in in the New Hampshire primary, which comes right on the heels of the Iowa caucus, because New Hampshire is neighbors with Massachusetts. Well…what I gleaned in my conversations with Massachusetts people is that in regards to Elizabeth Warren, familiarity breeds contempt, and so NH might not be the slam dunk some think it will be.

If Warren loses NH, it may come as a shock to the media and thus alter the narrative of her inevitability, which will no doubt be climaxing post her presumed Iowa win and heading into an expected coronation on her supposed home turf of NH. If the apple cart of this media narrative gets overturned then lots of interesting things could happen in the Democratic nominating process…from a resurrection of the not-so-good-ship Biden, to Bernie seeing a surge and scaring the shit out of the political and media establishment, to another lower tier candidate gaining some unexpected momentum which could catapult them to the nomination.

With all of that said, it is also worth noting that just because the Massachusetts people I spoke with did not like Warren, that didn’t mean they liked Trump. Across the board people disliked Trump, although a few people, very few, did support him and his policies, with one man saying he likes Trump because he “gets things done”.

It is also worth noting that the same people I spoke with in regards to Warren this year, also felt similarly about Hillary in 2016.

So this means that if 2020 is Trump v Warren, it will be a pseudo-retread of 2016 in that it will be a showdown between two candidates that people find unlikable…and we know how that ends. Although in Warren’s favor, she is less of a known commodity/liability than Hillary, who had built up 30 years of animus by the time she was the Democratic nominee for president, and thus may not be quite as hamstrung by negative sentiment by the time election day rolls around as Hillary certainly was in 2016…but that is no guarantee.

If Warren gets the nomination Americans will have spent a full year inundated by her presence. Voters may have the same immediate visceral, negative gut reaction to Warren that my son had when first exposed to Warren, or those that don’t immediately feel that way may grow to dislike her more and more the more they see of her, as with the Massachusetts people with which I spoke.

The bottom line is this, the 2020 election looks to be another year long shit show. The kabuki theatre of American democracy in 2020 will once again feature a dog and pony show starring a dog we hate and pony we loathe…with the end result being, no matter who wins, the status quo remains unchanged and awful, or gets even worse than it is now.

In conclusion, after careful thought and consideration, I have finally chosen who I will be supporting in the next election. They are kind, loyal and resilient. Yes, they are Russian, but that is a fact I am willing to overlook due to their inherent decency and unwavering thoughtfulness. It is for these reasons and more that I am proud to announce that I fully endorse…BJORN AND BUCKY IN 2020!!

©2019

2019 TV Round Up

ESTIMATED READING TIME: 5 minutes 14 seconds

Once again the Emmy Awards are upon us, and once again no one cares. But since this Sunday night is supposed to be a celebration of the best of the best in tv, I thought I would briefly share my thoughts on the 2019 television fare I was able to catch.

I rarely write about television only because there is so much of it and I am so behind in watching everything that comes out. An example of which is that I literally just started watching 30 Rock for the first time a few months ago and that show went off the air in 2013.

The advent of binge watching, thank you Netflix, has changed the tv viewing experience so that audiences no longer simultaneously digest new material, but rather do it on their own time. I prefer this method of tv viewing, but it makes writing on the topic difficult and rather useless.

So, since I rarely if ever review television, I have decided to just throw together a cheat sheet of mini-reviews for the relevant shows I have watched this year. I have no idea if any of these shows are nominated for Emmy Awards because I, like every other normal human being on the planet, do not care about the Emmys, in fact my indifference is so great I refuse to even do a google search to see the list of nominees.

So with my laziness established, let’s begin our review of 2019 television!

GAME OF THRONES - HBO: 4 Stars

I watched Game of Thrones from the beginning and as a testament to my limited intellectual abilities I readily admit I didn’t what the hell was going on 90% of the time and had no clue who half the characters were, but the show had an above average amount of nudity and violence, my two favorite things, so I was on board.

Game of Thrones was one of the very few, in fact I think only, tv show I wrote about this year. As previously stated the show’s final season was a definite mixed bag and was not nearly as good as the seasons that preceded it. That said, watching King’s Landing get obliterated was as exhilarating a visual sequence as we have seen in the history of the medium.

The cast of Game of Thrones have always done solid, if not spectacular work. I think Emilia Clarke, Kit Harrington, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Peter Dinklage were among those who were the most spectacular.

THE BOYS - AMAZON: 4.5 stars

The Boys is an absolute gem of a show that is the best kept secret on tv. I seem to be the only person who has ever watched the program and have become a sort of evangelist in favor of it. I have told countless friends that they have to check this thing out.

The Boys beautifully deconstructs the corporate superhero mythology that is the dominant myth of our time. If you are sick of Marvel and Disney’s dominance of the superhero space…then watch The Boys. The show is an insightful and piercing commentary on the American corporatocracy, and it pulls no punches. It eviscerates the empty headed corporate flag waving of the media, Disney in particular, and tells more truth in its fiction than the establishment news has ever done in its reporting.

There is a sequence in the show, and I won’t give it away, but it deals with the Hegelian dialectic (problem - reaction - solution) and it is the absolute truth of our time and is brilliant.

The show stars Jack Quaid, who is the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quad. This is obvious but still kind of weird to see, but Jack is the perfect amalgam of his two famous parents. At times he looks exactly like his dad, and other times just like his mom…it is like he has his own weird famous parent morphing super power.

The rest of the cast, which includes Karl Urban, Antony Starr, Elisabeth Shue and Erin Moriarty, is top-notch and play their roles with aplomb.

The Boys is not perfect but it really is a fantastic show and a bolt of anarchist rebellious energy into the very stagnant super hero genre. This show actually made me yell in joy at one point at how subversive it is…I kid you not. Anyway, if you love super hero stuff, or are sick of superhero stuff…this is definitely the show for you.

MINDHUNTER - NETFLIX: 4.25 stars

Mindhunter is produced, and sometimes directed, by filmmaker David Fincher. One of my favorite Fincher films, and one of my favorite films period, is Zodiac. Zodiac is a rare Fincher film in that it sort of flew under the radar, in fact I didn’t even see it in the theatre. But after discovering the film a bunch of years ago, I cannot get enough of it…and even use scenes from it when I work with clients. I watch Zodiac so often it has become a running joke in my house…and probably with the FBI agents who are surveilling me.

Mindhunter is like an extended and expanded version of Zodiac, as it is set in relatively the same time frame, and shares the same visual and artistic aesthetic. Mindhunter is, not surprisingly since it is a Fincher project, beautifully shot and lit and looks great.

The acting in the show is solid and subtle, as the main cast maintain a tight lid on things. The guest stars, who play a panoply of serial killers, are creepily fantastic in bringing their famous killers to life.

Mindhunter is, at its core, an extremely well made “cop” show that is decidedly smart and mature. This show is Fincher at his best….moody, unnerving, menacing, unsafe. The show is so well- made I think it would be impossible to watch it and not end up double checking the locks own your windows and doors before going to bed at night and also not looking at the nearly invisible normal people who populate our surroundings and thinking, at least for a moment, that they might be, or are at least capable of being, super predators.

FLEABAG - Amazon: 4.5 stars

Fleabag is what feminist tv/film should be. It is not whiney and self serving with an axe to grind but aggressively funny and deeply reflective. Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and stars in the show and her performance is remarkable and her writing, scintillating.

The rest of the cast, which include Sian Clifford, Andrew Scott and the glorious Olivia Colman, give superb performances across the board.

What makes this show such an intrepid piece of feminist comedy is that the female lead has absolute agency, she is not a victim but an active participant in the mess that is her life. The plot of Fleabag is fueled by Waller-Bridge’s character’s actions, not by her responding to other people’s actions. If she is a victim it is of her own bad decisions, not of other people’s.

BLACK MIRROR - NETFLIX: 4 stars

Black Mirror really is a Twilight Zone for the 21st century. The show never fails to be unique, original, challenging and insightful and also never fails to surprise. Black Mirror boasts terrific writing, top notch direction and stellar casts.

What is great about Black Mirror is that all of the episodes are stand alone so you can watch them at your leisure. This season there are, at least so far, only three episodes and they are fantastic. The best of the bunch is “Striking Vipers” which is both shocking and funny.

I can’t remember being underwhelmed by any episodes of Black Mirror, but I can recall being completely freaked out by more than a few of them. (The one with the dog like hunting drones is stellar!)

THE HANDMAID’S TALE - HULU: 1.5 stars

The Handmaid’s Tale’s first season was an electric piece of television. The fact that the show was in production prior to Trump’s election but spoke so eloquently about women’s anxiety after he won, is a testament to the artistry and craftsmanship that went into making it. The problem though is that the show, which was so compelling in season 1, quickly jumped the shark in season 2, and in season 3 has gone full Evel Knevel on a tricycle over Jaws in a kiddie pool.

It is difficult to overstate what a heinous piece of crap this show has become. The only equivalent I can think of is the precipitous fall of House of Cards which was like a speeding train falling off a cliff after its first few seasons.

Just like House of Cards downfall, what saps The Handmaid’s Tale of drama is that there is no longer any genuine threat to the main character June. June has become an avatar for the girl power people in her audience and thus is given no genuine obstacles to overcome, just manufactured ones, by the fan servicing producers.

At one point while watching one of the episodes in season 3 I said out loud to no one in particular…”I hate this show”…and I really have grown to hate it, which is frustrating because the show in the first season, and Elizabeth Moss’ acting in that season, were just mesmerizing. But now the show really has devolved into a pointless, rambling, dramatically incoherent, self-reverential mess and Moss’ acting little more than her not blinking in order to cry and acting faux tough. The bottom line is this, if Gilead were as awful and authoritarian as it is supposed to be, then June would have been swinging from the wall a long time ago. At this point I watch the show praying she gets hung and puts us all out of our misery.

The show is just so…stupid and frustrating…and the characters equally stupid and frustrating. In season’s 2 and 3 The Handmaid’s Tale has abandoned any semblance of a coherent internal logic and now just seems to be winging it. It is safe to say I will not be returning to Gilead for season 4.

WHEN THEY SEE US - NETFLIX: 1 Star

This show, which is about the very relevant and important story of the Central Park Five, is produced by Oprah and directed by Ava DuVernay….and it shows. That is not a compliment. This mini-series is just God awful. It is embarrassingly maudlin, shmaltzy and unconscionably ham handed.

This show will no doubt win a bunch of Emmys, but that is only because it is the sort of anti-Trump, anti-racist screed that Hollywood dipshits gobble up like Xanax. But do not be deceived, this show is atrociously poorly made. The cast, most notably Jharrel Jerome, are abysmal. Jerome sets the craft of acting back decades, if not millennia, with his corny performance as Korey Wise, one of the Central Park Five.

What frustrated me so much about this mini-series was that it is based on what should be a dramatically potent true story, and a story that is so vital and relevant to our times. But in the hands of DuVernay, this story is sapped of any meaning, and instead turns out to be an emotionally manipulative piece of garbage better suited to the Lifetime channel than Netflix.

Sadly, this story of the Central Park Five is as true to life as the Central Perk Five of Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe. Yikes.

CHERNOBYL- HBO: 4 stars

This mini-series which recounts the 1989 nuclear disaster, starts out great but loses some dramatic momentum late as it staggers to the finish line. Chernobyl looks great from start to finish and is elevated by some great acting, most notably from Jared Harris.

The weak link with the show is the script, as it falls into the tired Boris and Natasha evil Soviet caricature too often. The historical accuracy of the show has been called into question as well, but that is somewhat excusable, but the tired cliches of Soviet inhumanity are not.

The first few episodes of the mini-series were as good as anything on television this year, but the finale was decidedly disappointing and underwhelming. That said, I enjoyed it for the great cast and for how well it was shot.

ESCAPE AT DONNEMARA - SHOWTIME: 2.5 stars

Escape At Donnemara, which was directed by Ben Stiller, is a wholly uneven enterprise. Just like Chernobyl it starts off strong, then there’s a lull and then a significant dramatic and artistic spike in the second to last episode…but then it finishes with a whimper.

Stiller certainly puts some artistic bows on the show, using music and sound and fading to black to nice effect, but ultimately the show only stays on the surface of things and there is never a sense that we are getting at any semblance of the truth.

One of the odd things about the show is that it can feel incredible slow, bordering on dull, and yet that leisurely pace pays no dramatic benefits because the narrative ultimately seems so rushed at the end of the day.

That said, I thought Paul Dano’s performance as Sweat was really phenomenal. Dano makes Sweat a real person, not some caricature. Dano’s Sweat is conflicted, with a vivid and pulsating inner life that is compelling to watch. The show would have been better served with more Paul Dano and not less.

Patricia Arquette’s performance is all show. Arquette’s Tilly is nothing more than a monotonous and endless droning on, and the acting never once reveals anything of use or honesty about Tilly.

Benicia del Toro gives what I would deem a rather lazy del Toro performance…we’ve seen this act before and it has grown tired.

Ultimately, this mini-series has its moments but ended up being unsatisfying.

VEEP - HBO: 4 Stars

Veep was good this season but not great. Of course, Veep had set the bar ridiculously high with its first six seasons, so topping it in the finale was always going to be a tough job.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is one of the wonders of the world, and her performance as Selena Meyer was so great as to be iconic. The rest of the cast were their usual stellar selves as well.

That said, season 7 felt like the show had definitely run its course and in the age of Trump, where reality is much stranger than fiction, seemed a bit, dare I say it…tame.

I liked season 7, but I think it was the weakest of all the Veep seasons.

BARRY - HBO: 4.5 Stars

Barry is awesome. This show perfectly captures the absurdity of the Hollywood experience for any actor trying to scratch out an existence and chase a dream. The acting class scenes are spot on and poignantly painful for their depiction of the shit show that is acting class in Hollywood.

What is so great about Barry is that it wonderfully mixes shocking violence with exquisitely subtle comedy. Few shows are ever able to do one or the other, but Barry is able to do both and do them extraordinarily well.

The straw that stirs the drink of Barry, is Bill Hader, who is a god send as assassin turned wannabe actor, Barry. Hader’s comedic timing and energy are exquisite, but it is his transformation into the ruthless assassin that makes the show real enough to be worthwhile. Hader is not just a funny man, he is a genuinely gifted dramatic actor, and his versatility is a rare trait indeed.

The rest of the cast, particularly Henry Winkler, are gloriously good. Winkler’s scene stealing work as Gene Cousineau is a stake through the heart of the ghost of Fonzie (hey, second Fonzie reference of this article!). Winkler perfectly captures the insincerity, dishonesty and desperation of those unfortunate souls who become acting teachers…I would know.

Barry is appointment viewing in my household.

Thus concludes my brief foray into television criticism, I hope you found it useful. My top picks this year are The Boys, Mindhunter, Fleabag, Black Mirror and Barry. None of those shows are for the feint of heart, so know that going in. I have no idea if any of these shows are nominated or will win at The Emmys on Sunday night…and more importantly, I don’t care…and neither should you.

©2019

Thoughts and Musings: Featuring Fredo, Bed Bug, Lady Kicker and More!

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 12 seconds

FREDO AND THE BED BUG

A story came out a few weeks ago that was my favorite story of the year, the millenium and maybe of all time. The story was really nothing more than a video…but my Lord that video was absolutely magnificent. The video is of CNN host Chris Cuomo, son of former NY Governor Mario Cuomo and brother to current NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, getting all chesty with some guy at a summer party because the guy called him “Fredo”. Sadly, the video, which is in my humble estimation the very best movie of 2019 so far, has been scrubbed from youtube….but here is a news report on it.

Cuomo was incensed at being labeled with the disparaging name Fredo, which refers to Fredo Corleone of the Godfather movies, who is the incompetent and weak Corleone son especially when compared to his brothers, Michael, Sonny, and Tom Hagan. Cuomo went so far as to say that Fredo is the equivalent of the “n-word” for Italians. Brilliant.

A couple things here…first…Cuomo is a silver-spooned, spoiled brat and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement in Nepotism award who may be the dumbest person to ever speak on television. Anytime I’ve ever seen Fredo Cuomo on television I am constantly distracted by the overwhelming sound of wind whistling through his empty fucking head. If Fredo Cuomo weren’t part of New York political royalty, my guess is he would have been diagnosed as being officially mentally retarded and sent to an institution where he could eat paste all day and play with his, and others, poop, rather than have gotten a job on television. Although to be fair, tv is a great place to put a mental defective and intellectual midget like Fredo Cuomo as he fits right in with the rest of the vacuous dipshits in that business.

In the video in question, Fredo Cuomo acts tough by telling the guy who called him “Fredo” to be a man and own up to what he said and also threatening to throw the guy down a flight of stairs. The guy in the confrontation is little more than an irritant and Fredo gets to do and say what he wants with impunity and only really tries to escalate things when he is being held back by his sycophantic posse.

Here is the thing…Chris “Fredo” Cuomo has lived the entirety of his life much like Donald Trump, in a protective bubble where he is immune from consequences. Well, if I ever have the pleasure of being in Chris Cuomo’s presence I vow I will call him Fredo over and over and over and over and over again, and I hope he tries to do something about it because I won’t put my tail between my legs…I will do the world a favor and smash his stupid, entitled fucking face in. There is a legitimate reason for people to call Chris Cuomo, “Fredo”, it is because he is, just like Fredo, stupid, worthless and weak. In fact, Chris Cuomo is way worse than Fredo…Fredo at least was banging cocktails waitresses two at a time out in Vegas, a bit of multi-tasking of which Chris “Fredo” Cuomo is no doubt incapable. Calling Chris Cuomo “Fredo” is not an insult to Cuomo…but an insult to Fredo.

My greatest hope going forward is that all Americans can put aside petty political and cultural squabbles and come together around this singular issue and make the unified commitment to always and every time call Chris Cuomo, “Fredo”, whenever within earshot of this vacant-eyed douchebag. Now, If you are so lucky as to be in Fredo’s presence but you think it is an inappropriate time to call him Fredo, if, say, he is visiting sick kids in a hospital or something…don’t let that bother you…it is always the PERFECT time to call him Fredo…BECAUSE THAT IS HIS FUCKING NAME FROM NOW ON!

To mimic our wondrous jackass of a president…I hereby declare that forthwith, Chris Cuomo is officially to be known as “Fredo”. Go forth Americans and make me proud and torture this needle-dicked clown by calling him Fredo to his face in perpetuity! And for extra credit call his brother Andrew...The Gimp.

There was another instance of supposed rude behavior in the public sphere this week when Dave Karpf, a professor at George Washington University, sent out a tweet that called NY Times columnist Bret Stephens a “bed bug”. Literally seven people read the tweet, but somehow word got to Stephens and he sent off an email to Karpf inviting him to his house to see if he would dare call him a bed bug after meeting his wife and family. The email is mildly threatening in a “say that to my face” kind of way, but nothing egregious. No, what makes Stephens actions in this case egregious are that he sent the email not only to the “offender” Karpf, but to Karpf's boss, the provost of GWU. Obviously Stephens was trying to get this guy fired for his snarky tweet.

What makes all of this even more repulsive is that Stephens is constantly calling out people to be more thick skinned and for snowflakes to grow a spine and all that jazz. Well…what is good for the goose apparently is not so good for the gander. Stephens is a repugnant little neo-con, chickenhawk character who is always willing to send other people to fight, especially for his beloved Israel, for whom he is a shameless shill. Stephens’ writing is nothing if not derivative, vapid and banal, and as recently as this past June I wrote about how he lied about the attacks on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in order to drum up war against Iran for Israel.

In keeping with his character, Stephens went on MSNBC in the wake of Bedbug-gate and tried to play the Jewish victim card by saying authoritarians (read: Hitler!) often call people bugs in order to dehumanize them and claimed he didn’t email people at GWU and wasn’t trying to get the guy fired. Of course, after Stephens MSNBC appearance it came out he did email the provost at GWU…and was obviously trying to get the guy axed all for the sin of disrespecting the great Bret Stephens, defender of civility.

To his great credit, Stephens later in the day made the bold and courageous decision to quit…twitter. Wow…what courage.

How about this Mr. Bedbug…how about you make the invitation to come to your house and call you Bed Bug in front of your family to me…and then I gleefully beat you senseless, knock all your teeth out, blind you with a can of Raid, walk out to your garage, borrow your bow saw, come back in and cut your empty fucking head off and leave it on the front porch as a jerk-o-lantern as a reminder of what happens to neo-con, chickenhawk Bed Bugs? Sound good?

Seriously…what the fuck is wrong with people? I get hate mail ALL THE TIME! People say nasty shit to me day in and day out…shit they would never say to my face. You know what I do about it? Nothing. I may want to reply and tell someone to fuck off, but I don’t because it is counter-productive and totally a waste of time and energy. Why would I indulge in that sort of thing and why would I give my power away to complete strangers who I don’t know and don’t care about? I am an absolute nobody and I have the self-discipline not to engage in mindless internet battles with other nobodies…Bret Stephens writes for the New York Times…the New York Fucking Times…and he literally spent time not only searching for a tweet that disparages him, but then tracking down the tweeter’s email address and the address of his boss, then writing an email and sending it. What the fuck is wrong with this limp dick jackass? And as an aside…why in the world is anyone on Twitter? Or any social media for that matter? I do not understand the appeal of any of it.

My advice to Bret Stephens is to stop being a mealy mouthed twat and start being some semblance of a man. Oh…and my directive to every American and every person in the world…is to call Bret Stephens “Bed Bug” always and every time. Thank you for your cooperation.

One final thought while we wait for Bed Bug Bret Stephens and Fredo Cuomo’s testicles to drop…my now number one dream is that someone makes a buddy action comedy about Chris Cuomo and Bret Stephens and titles it “Fredo and the Bed Bug”. It could be a cross between Kafka’s Metmorphosis and Tango and Cash. You’re welcome Hollywood.

LADY KICKER

There was another video making the media rounds this week…this one of US Women’s soccer player Carli Lloyd kicking a 55 yard field goal during a Philadelphia Eagles practice. The video received enormous amounts of media and social media attention and stories swirled about whether Lloyd would kick in an NFL pre-season game. Lloyd got into the mix as well declaring that teams had reached out to her and she was seriously considering the offers. Over on ESPN, America’s Human Resources Sports channel, across the board all of the talking heads thought this was a terrific idea and that Lloyd “of course” could do it.

Take a look at the video.

Lloyd does hit a 55 yard field goal…this is true…but the story is utter nonsense. Watch it again and notice that Lloyd takes like seven steps running up to the ball and then faces no wall of 300 lb men impeding the ball’s progress. Carli Lloyd is a great female soccer player…she is not going to play in the NFL. Because we watch the game on television and it seems like a video game, we regular people are numb to the size, strength and speed of NFL players. The men playing in the NFL are as close to super-human as we have on the planet. These guys, who are most likely greatly aided in their physical and athletic development and performance by PED’s, are gigantic or lightning fast or both.

If Carli Lloyd were to try and kick a field goal like regular kickers have to…namely with a maximum of three steps to the ball and over a wall of giant men trying to block it, she would not fare very well. Lloyd has a strong leg…for a woman…but anyone who has the slightest grasp of biology understands that Lloyd’s leg is not as strong as the men she would compete against. Her leg is no doubt stronger than mine, and the vast majority of non-kickers in the world…but she wouldn’t be competing against me…she’d be up against the best of the best.

This story, just like the USWNT equal pay story, is manufactured nonsense and is a sign of the madness of our age and the delusional nature of wokeness. Carlie Lloyd is not as good a kicker as the men in the NFL just like the USWNT are not as good as even an elite boy’s high school team nevermind the USMNT. Enough with this woke posturing and posing and virtue signalling and pandering. Enough, enough, enough. Maybe we can put all this nonsense to rest if we let Ms. Lloyd kick in a real NFL game and then the kick is blocked and we have to watch her be absolutely and utterly obliterated by players scrambling to get the ball or block for someone returning the kick. That sight would be horrifying but also clarifying…which is maybe why we need to see it happen so all of these girl power clowns can understand that they are not physically equal to male athletes…and never will be.

GRANDPA BIDEN

My father was a true blue conservative who voted Republican almost always, and on the very rare occasion he didn’t vote Republican he voted third party and not Democrat because he really hated the Democrats. In 2016 my father faced a conundrum because he absolutely loathed Donald Trump, and had for the entirety of Trump’s public life, but he also had a searing hatred for Hillary Clinton. My father avoided having to make a decision in the 2016 election by dying, exactly three years ago today. In many ways his death felt more like a getaway than a passing, as I am sure on some level he was thrilled to not have to live in a country with either Trump or Hillary as President.

During a conversation with my father in his final months, I asked him if there was any Democrat he would vote for against Trump, and he said he would definitely vote for Joe Biden if he were the nominee. I have thought of that conversation often as the 2020 campaign has staggered to its start.

Biden is certainly the establishment and centrist favorite. His main selling point is that conservative people like my father, who was born the same year as Biden, would cross the aisle to vote for him. I wonder if my father would feel the same way about Biden now that he did three and a half years ago though?

Biden, to me, looks extremely feeble and frail. I know he leads in the polls and everything, but the fact is he looks really, really old and not entirely there mentally. Biden’s cognitive ability is reminiscent of a punch drunk boxer who has convinced himself he has one more great fight in him….think Ali taking on Larry Holmes (although Biden is no Ali…and Trump is no Larry Holmes...I guess it is more the equivalent of Gerry Cooney taking on Butterbean).

It isn’t just the gaffes with Biden that have raised red-flags for me, it is the far-away, cloudy look in his eye…he looks not all there, like a doddering old Grandpa haunting a holiday party. The standard pundit counter point on Biden’s age is to say that Trump is also in his 70’s, so age won’t be a factor. I despise Trump, but the cold, hard reality is that Trump may be crazy, but he sure doesn’t seem old and frail. In fact, Trump’s manic madness makes him seem, in a terrifying way, sort of vital, present and engaged. Sanders is older than Biden and Warren is also in her seventies, but neither of them seem frail or cognitively impaired in the slightest, in fact they are both full of piss and vinegar.

I was talking to my French-Canadian friend, “Spider” Geau-Geau, about this recently and he made a surprisingly astute observation about the cognitive difference between Trump and Biden…he pointed out that Trump not only doesn’t drink alcohol…but never has. I thought this was a very insightful point, especially from a raging alcoholic, and an alcohol induced rage-a-holic like Monsieur Geau-Geau. As someone who is sober for more than a quarter century, I can attest to both the dangers of alcohol to the brain and the remarkable mental and cognitive benefits of sobriety.

At the end of the day, I think Biden will absolutely wilt as the campaign goes on. If Biden makes it all the way to the general election as the nominee, I think he will completely wither under the demands of running for the presidency at his age and in his condition, and for this reason I think that Biden is, counter intuitively, a bad choice to take down Trump.

As of this moment I have Trump as the odds-on, hands-down favorite…but things could certainly change.

CHAPPELLE

I watched Dave Chappelle’s new stand up comedy special on Netflix last night and thought it was very good. I wouldn’t consider myself a Chappelle super fan, for instance, as remarkable as this is to say, I have never seen his iconic sketch comedy show Chapelle’s Show. When some people learn that fact about me they are stunned and startled because apparently the show is right up my alley. I didn’t skip the show during its run out of malice towards Chappelle, but because when the show was running I either did not have a tv, or I did not have cable (the show aired on Comedy Central). I have caught Chappelle’s last bunch of stand-up specials on Netflix over the years though, and I think he is very funny and I am notoriously difficult to please when it comes to comedy. What struck me about Chappelle’s most recent routine, and the reason why I am writing this, is that he and I seem to have very similar political and cultural opinions. In fact, a couple of times our opinions were so similar he even told jokes based on the same ideas I have tried to articulate in my writing over the years.

I am not saying that, like Little Bill Maher’s flaccid and impotent staff, Dave Chappelle is scouring my writing trying to poach my ideas and insights…all I am saying is that Chappelle and I share much in our world view. The only recognizable difference I can discern between us being that I think I casually say the “n-word’ considerably more than he does. (Relax…that is what the young people call a “joke”)

In all seriousness, I don’t know if Chappelle is a reader of my work, but…he certainly could be…and appears to be a fellow traveler…and that is enough for me. Anyway, if you get a chance to see Chappelle’s new Netflix special, and I do recommend it, you’ll get to hear some of my political and cultural views expressed in much more comedically satisfying ways.

Speaking of alleged plagiarism…I wrote a widely-read and well-received op-ed for RT last week titled “Celebriphilia epidemic sweeps US: Forget knowledge and wisdom, get guidance from the stars”. The piece was about America’s irrational adoration of celebrity…which I named as celebriphilia…and how people turning to celebrities for medical advice is asinine. My article ran on Monday, August 19th at RT…and the New York Times ran a remarkably similarly themed op-ed on Friday, August 23rd titled “Who Cares What Celebrities Think About Vaccines?” by Carolyn Lylstra. Once again it seems I am ahead of the New York Times, and the paper of record is reduced to simply putting the veneer of domestication onto my feral ideas. This is not the first time this has happened…and I am betting it won’t be the last. Readers should be extremely unnerved that a freelance dope like me is setting the agenda for the New York Times editorial page and thus the world media!

My advice to the New York Times, which I offer for free, is to fire that thin-skinned, neo-con, chickenhawk with the perpetually bunched panties, Bed Bug Bret Stephens, and hire me to infect the minds of Americans from the lofty perch of the most respected newspaper in the world. I won’t shill for Israel (which seems to be a requirement at the Times), won’t regurgitate the establishment line…ever, and will be a relentless thorn in the side, if not a fist in the face, to the nefarious people in power in this country…including those on the New York Times payroll…but on the bright side, I won’t get into twitter spats with people who call me mean names. My good friend Thomas Friedman has my contact information, so I look forward to hearing from you…or from Bed Bug Stephens who will no doubt be shocked and horrified by the uncivil nature presented in this column.

©2019

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary: A Review

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

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This film is mildly amusing but lack any and all insight into it’s subject.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary, directed by Ben Berman, chronicles the difficulties of making a documentary about the moderately famous magician/prop comic, Amazing Jonathan, as he mounts a comeback while suffering from a terminal medical condition. The film is currently streaming on Hulu.

Jonathan Szeles, otherwise known as The Amazing Jonathan, is a third rate, c-level comedian who hit it big and became a Vegas mainstay with his relentless and hackneyed magic-comedy. From 2001 to 2014 he was a year-round headliner in the City of Sin and made a nice fortune for himself doing so. In 2014 he was diagnosed with a heart condition and given one year to live…so he retired from performing. Four years later he was still alive and so decided to head back out and do some more shows, and director Ben Berman decided to document it all.

The Amazing Jonathan Documentary is a film about desperation, the desperation of Jonathan to find meaning and purpose in the last years of his life, and the desperation of Ben Berman not only to find a story to tell when the truth is elusive, but to make a name for himself.

The Amazing Jonathan is an amusing persona, and getting a glimpse into this character’s supposed reality is often-times chuckle-inducing. Amazing Jonathan is, to put it mildly, detached from objective reality, and our brief jaunts through his subjective reality are certainly revealing of the oddity of his peculiar head space.

The problem though is that documentarian Ben Berman only gives us ever-so-brief glimpses into the persona of The Amazing Jonathan, but never breaks through the armor of that veneer and gives us the Jonathan Szeles living deep with in it. In this way the film is little more than a reality tv show that gives viewers canned and manipulated “performances’ and considers them to be “truth”.

In addition, Berman must deal with a series of absurdities regarding the actual film making process, and thus must scramble to adapt to new circumstances and try and cobble together a coherent narrative. Berman fails to overcome these obstacles for a variety of reasons, the most glaring is that instead of keeping the film focused on Jonathan, he makes the film about himself.

Berman switches mid-way through the film to using ham-fisted attempts at personal poignancy, psychological profundity and displays of artistic despair, in order to fill in the gaps of the story due to his inadequacies as a documentarian. These Berman performative sequences all ring hollow, manufactured and exploitative and radiate with an odious shamelessness. In short, Berman comes across as a very bad actor, and yet he tries to make himself the star of his movie because he thinks he is so interesting despite his obvious lack of charisma and likability.

Berman’s attempt at participatory documentary film making feels painfully self-serving and narcissisticly masturbatorial. In order to pull off this style of documentary film making, the director must be a unique yet pleasant character, think Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, not a nebbish desperate for attention, which is how Ben Berman, who is neither unique nor pleasant and is no Michael Moore or Morgan Suprlock, comes across. Berman goes to such great lengths to make a spectacle of himself in this film that when it isn’t painfully embarrassing it is plain annoying. The film devolves to become such a self-serving enterprise that Berman basically turns it into a blatant job interview.

The behind the scenes, movie making insider stuff, will no doubt resonate with anyone who has ever made a movie, particularly a documentary. Jonathan is an erratic nightmare of a subject, and Berman being stuck in his house of horrors does deliver some comedy, but that doesn’t make it even remotely insightful or worthwhile. Watching Jonathan torture Berman is satisfying on a sadistic level for the viewer and a masochistic level for Berman, but we came here to try and understand Jonathan, and none of that stuff gives us any deeper understanding of who he really is or what drives him.

What is so frustrating about The Amazing Jonathan Documentary is that Berman’s narcissistic focus distracts from Jonathan, and leaves his story, in essence, untold. I was left with a nagging feeling after watching this movie that, as difficult a nut as Jonathan is to crack, a more talented, more skilled, more dedicated and less vain film maker would have been able to break through and expose the actual truth about Jonathan. In essence this film is a documentation of Berman’s utter failure to do his job, which is to peel back the layers of The Amazing Jonathan and reveal the complexity and truth at the core of this strange and twisted man. Instead Berman gives us his reactions and responses to dealing with a difficult and temperamental performer…oooh…how groundbreaking….we’d get better insights watching The Bachelorette.

In conclusion, The Amazing Jonathan Documentary is an occasionally intriguing, but ultimately underwhelming documentary experience. Sadly, while the film is amusing in parts and absurd in others, it all feels a bit too self-serving and contrived to be of any genuine value. That said, if you work in the entertainment industry or on documentary films, you will probably appreciate the movie a bit more than the average Joe only because you will have had, at least once, similarly bizarre experiences with obliviously entitled talent.

©2019

American Factory: A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR MOVIE INFORMATION/SPOILERS!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!****

My Rating: 3 out 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. See it just to see the depressing and fast-approaching future for all American workers…and to see the consequences of America’s pro-corporate/globalist policies over the last forty years.

American Factory directed by Steven Bognar and Julie Reichert, is a documentary that chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Chinese company, Fuyao, opening a factory in Dayton, Ohio. The film is the first to be distributed by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, and is currently streaming on Netflix.

American Factory is an infuriating film that will surely get your nativist hackles up and leave you red…white and blue with anger…I know it did with me. It is nearly impossible to watch this film and not walk away loathing the American working class for their self-sabotaging stupidity, the American ruling class for their avarice and corruption, and China and Chinese nationals for their arrogance, condescension and all-around disgusting deception.

The film starts with the closing of a GM plant outside of Dayton in 2008, allegedly due to the economic collapse. My biggest problem with this film is revealed in that simple assertion of blame because it is supposed to give context but is actually entirely, and deceptively, devoid of context. You cannot tell the story of American Factory and Fuyao’s move into Dayton without explaining the fertile ground upon which that story takes root. That fertile ground is the blood-soaked soil of post-organized labor America, and it began to take shape during the Reagan presidency when blue collar union workers voted for the flag-waving Republican former B-movie actor en-masse in 1980, and then Reagan swiftly turned around meticulously went about destroying organized labor in America.

The ground was further fertilized when Democrat Bill Clinton came to office in the 90’s and proceeded to do to America’s manufacturing base what Reagan did to organized labor…destroy it. Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement which was a boon for the investor class and ruling elites but was like a nuclear bomb dropped on blue collar workers and the working class in America. Manufacturing jobs fled the U.S. and in their wake left former bustling cities and towns looking like Hiroshima and Nagasaki after World War II. The American worker has never recovered from the back to back Reagan-Clinton double devastation.

To add insult to injury Americans followed up the disaster of Clinton by deciding they had to suffer through the even more pro-globalist, pro-business, pro-investor class, pro-ruling elite administration of George W. Bush. The Bush regime’s tenure was such an economic holocaust that it not only left the working class and blue collar workers in a pile of steaming rubble, but obliterated the middle-class and once prosperous middle-class neighborhoods with the housing bubble and subsequent collapse, followed by prodigious corporate bail outs.

The final bit of context is that this film is distributed by Barrack Obama’s new production company Higher Ground…and he has some nerve attaching himself to this movie as it is the equivalent of O.J. Simpson’s production company Good Husband distributing the Oscar winning documentary O.J.: Made in America. Obama is just as responsible for the cataclysm that American workers face today as his despicable predecessors Reagan, Clinton and Bush II. It is astonishing that Obama is getting praise for distributing this documentary highlighting the plight of working class Americans, when…you know…he could’ve done something to actually help them during the eight years he was President of the United States but chose to side with Wall Street instead.

When Obama came into office the economy was in ruins and he had the greatest opportunity of any president since FDR to make significant and lasting structural changes…but instead he chose to double down on business as usual and backed the Bush TARP plan and appointed to his administration or took on as his advisors globalist, neo-liberal, free trade, deregulating Wall Street whores like Little Timmy Geithner, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin and his acolytes, the same pricks who were responsible for the economic collapse in the first place. Obama chose to bail out corporations and shareholders and as a result they got richer, and everyone else got a whole lot poorer, and he also chose not to go after the Wall Street criminals who created the whole mess (or the Bush war criminals…but that is a story for another day).

Obama proved with his handling of the economic crisis and healthcare that he is a really disgusting charlatan who ran on “hope and change” but ruled on “fuck the working people”, just like his predecessors. Liberals and Democrats desperately need to disabuse themselves of the notion that Obama is a “good guy” and was a good president. A good way to do that is to watch the Flint, Michigan section of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 11/9, and to educate yourself on Obama’s pro-corporate/globalist economics and then watch American Factory.

Once you have the genuine context for American Factory in place, then you can understand and become enraged by the same man, Obama, who along with his fellow establishment errands boys Reagan, Clinton and Bush, caused this catastrophe, having the temerity to comment on the horror of it.

American Factory shows America being colonized by not only foreign money, but foreign workers and foreign work culture. The globalist/NAFTA induced exodus of American manufacturing jobs in the 90’s to the cheap labor havens in China and elsewhere, hollowed out America and now foreign investors are coming in like carrion to pick away at the corpse. The systematic de-unionization of the American worker is now being exploited by billionaires, in this case a Chinese one, who come to our country and openly and blatantly shit on American workers, American culture and America…and we not only let them, we give them titanic tax breaks to thank them for it.

The American workers at the Fuyao plant in Toledo reveal themselves to be just as cowardly as the men in government who put them in this situation. The Chinese nationals treat these American workers with such disrespect and disdain that it is both shocking and repugnant. The Chinese nationals do the same to American laws as they routinely ignore environmental and work place safety laws, putting American employees at great risk. And if someone gets hurt on the job? Fuck them…they are fired.

The workers are so scared, so frightened and so weak after forty years of Reagan/Clinton/Bush/Obama, that they are totally devoid of any backbone. These workers should be ashamed of themselves for rolling over like dogs to these repugnant and despicable Chinese invaders. The shots of American workers groveling as they shake hands with the piggish billionaire owner of Fuyao, the grotesque Cao Dewang, who fancies himself a modern-day capitalist version of Chairman Mao, is revolting. One of Dewang’s most illuminating moments of assholery comes when American workers ever so gently resist against his authoritarian rule and he blames it on their anti-Chinese racism…classic. How does no one take a wrench to this vile asshole’s head and crack it wide open? How do none of the American workers show their Chinese overlords what a good old American beating looks like? Yes, they would lose their jobs and maybe go to jail, but at least they’d send a message to their enemies that Americans still have some self-respect, dignity and balls…for as the saying goes, “it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.”

The most infuriating thing about this film is watching the American workers expose themselves for their staggering stupidity and weakness. How can anyone do anything so dumb as to trust any company, nevermind a Chinese one, to do the right and treat their employees well? How can anyone be so stupid…so mind-numbingly stupid, as to vote away their only chance at leverage and give away their only weapon?

I hate to say this but it needs to be said…if you are that stupid and that weak that you cannot stand up to your oppressors, cannot think strategically and tactically, not only don’t vote to empower yourself but vote to disarm and neuter yourself, and are so gullible as to put your trust into a corporation after watching corporations rape working people over the last forty years, then you deserve the shit sandwich you are being force-fed.

American Factory does a lot to reinforce negative stereotypes of both the Chinese and Americans, it does this by only giving viewers a shallow glimpse into the people living out this culture clash.

The Chinese workers are shown to be slavishly dedicated to their country and company over family, single-mindedly disciplined, and diabolically deceptive. The Chinese nationals are shown as two-faced rats, conspiring to destroy their American counterparts. The Chinese nationals are proud to take advantage of American hospitality by befriending American workers for the sole purpose of gaining disparaging information on them in order to ultimately fire them.

American workers fair no better in the film. The American workers who go to China do everything they can to reinforce the stereotype of the fat, lazy American, which the Chinese already whole-heartedly believe. For instance, when the American workers go to a corporate meeting in China they waddle in wearing sports and concert t-shirts and looking overall like a disheveled collection of complete and total unprofessional shlubs.

The American worker’s time in China is like a bad SNL skit come to life life. It is astounding that these embarrassments lack the intelligence and social grace to understand that maybe they should put their best foot forward and at least wear a button down shirt and try to carry themselves with some remote semblance of dignity.

Nothing is so cringe worthy as the fat, weepy American who gets emotional watching a bizarre group wedding during an event at corporate headquarters. This blubbering jackass ends up being consoled by a bunch of incredulous Chinese workers who look at him like he is some comic American mascot, like the Philly Fanatic or something, that has gone insane.

American Factory shows that America’s demise is undeniable. The workers in this film are symbolic of America, they prove themselves to be worthless and weak. God help us if we ever get into a shooting war with China because they will absolutely kick our fat, stupid asses. That is the thing that becomes crystal clear while watching American Factory, that we actually are at war with China right now, but only China seems to know and acknowledge this. The Chinese workers in America are soldiers on the front line for China, and they have knives sharpened and ready to plunge into American’s backs at the first chance they get, but the Americans are oblivious and have been softened by relentless conditioning to do nothing but repeat soft platitudes about how “ we are all one”.

I actually have great respect for these Chinese workers and their patriotism and devotion to China, as well as China’s commitment to its long term strategy to dismantle American economic and global hegemony, I just wish it didn’t come at the expense of my country. I also wish that the U.S. had the same level of dedication, discipline and forethought that China does, and instead of fighting against its working people, fought for them.

The most insidious of the Chinese nationals highlighted in American Factory is the new president of the Toledo operation, Jeff Liu, who has lived more than half of his life in America (and may actually be a citizen, it is unclear) but absolutely despises America and Americans. To be clear, Liu is an enemy of the American people in every way, shape and form, and deserves to be dragged out of his office and beaten senseless by an angry mob of Ohioans. Liu is a walking advertisement to severely restrict immigration, even legal immigration, into America. Our top colleges and universities are overflowing with students from China who come here to get an education only to then turn around and use it as a weapon for China to undermine this country. American Factory exposes this deadly deception and charade, it is like the Lenin maxim that “the capitalist will sell you the rope with which you intend to hang him” brought to life in Technicolor.

It isn’t just the Chinese nationals who are revealed to be duplicitous, as there are numerous American traitors in Fuyao management who sell their soul and side with the Chinese in their struggle against American workers. I would also be willing to bet that American elites and those on Wall Street and in the management/investor class will watch this movie and deeply empathize with Cao Dewang and his struggles to run a business and not with their fellow Americans and their desperate struggle simply to survive.

The war waged on American workers isn’t only being waged by the Chinese but across the board by all in management, the investor class and the ruling elite. As the end of the film shows, all workers are under siege and the race to make them obsolete and entirely expendable is well under way. The dream of management and the elite is to make the American worker an extinct species, and with the unions a perilously endangered species, extinction for all American workers is becoming more and more inevitable. The dream of the ruling class will be a nightmare for the rest of us.

In terms of the actual filmmaking on display, American Factory is a good…but not great, film. The film is nicely paced and does a good job of not interfering with the subject it is documenting, but the failure to adequately give proper context to the struggle playing out on screen undermines the film’s credibility and impact. The film also gives us glimpses into different peoples, both American and Chinese, and their lives around the factory, but these glimpses are much too short and shallow to give us any insight beyond caricature, and thus we are left with stereotypes and not insight.

In conclusion, this film is unintentionally an indictment of the establishment and the globalist, pro-business, pro-free trade, anti-union politicians and media elite who are responsible for the carnage that has devastated the American worker. I can’t imagine that anyone with half a brain in their head and a functioning heart in their chests could watch this film and not, at least once, throw something at their television screen. If you want to see the not-so-distant future of all America and the present day reality for blue collar workers and how Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama used free trade, unfettered immigration, both legal and illegal, and deregulation to turn first world America into a third world country…go watch American Factory (and the Flint section of Fahrenheit 11/9)…and remember the person who is distributing this film is complicit in the calamity documented within it.

©2019

Rojo: A Review

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

My Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An exquisitely well-made and deliriously insightful film that, although set in Argentina in the 1970’s, tells an uncomfortable truth about our current time.

Language: Spanish with subtitles in English

Rojo, written and directed by Benjamin Naishtat, is the story of Claudio, a small-town lawyer navigating the moral and ethical maze of 1975 Argentina. The film stars Dario Grandinetti as Claudio, with supporting turns from Andrea Frigerio, Alfredo Castro and Diego Cremonesi.

I knew absolutely nothing about Rojo when I made the trek to the local art house to see it the same week I saw Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. After suffering through the abysmal cinema of the first half of 2019, it was an absolute joy to stumble upon this hidden foreign gem the same week Tarantino’s surefire Oscar nominee hit big screens.

Rojo is an exquisite piece of cinema and art that boasts as impressive and compelling an opening scene as any film in recent memory. The movie sinks its teeth in early, but then wraps itself around you so slowly, and seductively, you won’t notice until it is too late and you are deep in its grip. Once captive to its unflinching exploration humanity, its subtly haunting sub-text, and off-beat charm, you are gifted a brilliant mix of psuedo-Lynchian oddities, and a plethora of unnerving personal, psychological and political insights.

What makes Rojo so exquisite is that it is most definitely THE film for our time. Set in the 1970’s in Argentina, the film tells the story of how fascism thrives in the moral and ethical vacuum in our hearts and souls. Even the most minute moral or ethical corruption can give authoritarianism a foothold in our hearts, from which it, like the film itself, wraps itself around us and squeezes not only the life, but humanity, out of us all. Rojo reveals that all of us are complicit, either explicitly or implicitly, with the brutality of authoritarianism, and are so easily seduced through selfishness or laziness to aid and abet in horrors we think we are incapable of committing.

Rojo beautifully uses symbolism to tell a much deeper story, such as the castration of a bull to show how primal masculinity must be isolated and neutered in order to eliminate true threats to any fascist movement, or a recurring theme of flies to show how authoritarianism treats an incessant but weak resistance…by tiring it out so that it is too exhausted to be a threat. Under authoritarianism, exhaustion is a major issue as we the people are reduced to nothing more than flies, buzzing from one instigation to another, and ultimately are left with nothing but a carcass or a pile of shit to feed upon.

Besides being a compelling and insightful story, the film is fascinating to look at. Cinematographer Pedro Sotero shoots the film so that it looks like grainy film stock from the 1970’s, which enhances the feel of authenticity. Sotero shows himself to be a master craftsman as he uses some delicious 70’s era zooms, camera movement and optical tricks (like my old friend the split diopter!) that create both a familiarity and an overall sense of uneasiness that permeates every shot in the film. .

The cast is spectacular, with lead actor Dario Grandinetti gives a nuanced, intricate, subtle, magnetic and thoroughly captivating performance. Grandinetti’s Claudio is at once arrogant and petulant but also insecure and fragile. Grandinetti’s ability to make Cluadio so painfully ordinary, yet unaware of his ordinariness, is a testament to the complexity of the character and the enormity of the actor’s talent. Grandinetti is a special actor and he is at his very best as Claudio.

As for the rest of the cast, Andrea Frigerio does solid work as Claudio’s wife, Susana, as does Diego Cremonisi who plays a mysterious stranger. The most interesting, bizarre and entertaining character though is Detective Sinclair, played by Alfredo Castro. Sinclair is like a cop from a David Lynch movie, and his unstoppable persistence and insistence is comically unsettling, as he is a wonderful representative of the rabid relentlessness of fascism.

With Rojo, writer/director Benjamin Naishtat proves himself to be a cinematic force with which to be reckoned. One of Naishtat’s greatest skills is his ability to create such a believable sense of place (he is greatly aided by his cinematographer, and his set and costume designers) as well as his thorough understanding of human nature and psychology. Naishtat uses cinema to tell greater and important truths not just about his characters and Argentina in the 1970’s, but about us and America today, and that is a rare and precious skill.

In conclusion, I was absolutely captivated by this somewhat off-beat, but entirely insightful foreign film that, even though it is set in Argentina in the 1970’s, spoke more clearly about America and the American people than most Hollywood movies could ever imagine.

I thoroughly encourage any and all cinephiles to make the effort to go see this film if they can find it. I also encourage non-cinephiles who have a bit of an adventurous mind, to seek out and give this movie a chance either on cable, Netflix or any other streaming service where you can find it. The reason I am imploring people to give this movie a chance is not only because I want more movies like it to be made, but also because this movie is a warning to all of us that we need to be ever vigilant to the growing menace of authoritarianism and fascism…not just in the world, but in the one place where it can do the most damage…in our own hearts.

©2019

Celebriphilia Epidemic Sweeps US: We Look Now To The Stars For Guidance

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 37 seconds

CELEBRITY-OBSESSED AMERICANS LOOK TO THE STARS FOR GUIDANCE

Americans are blessed to have a plethora of benevolent celebrities who are willing to share their infinite knowledge and wisdom with them.

After a thorough examination by a team of top-notch doctors, I was recently given some very disturbing news…I was diagnosed with an acute case of stage 4 platonic celebriphilia. In case you don’t know, celebriphilia is a disease where the afflicted have an abnormal and overwhelming adoration of celebrity.

My medical team, which includes Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew and Dr. Oz, tells me that the symptoms of celebriphilia include feeling a false sense of familiarity and intimacy with celebrities which leads to the afflicted projecting an inordinate amount of inappropriate intelligence, wisdom and expertise upon celebrities.

My celebriphilia first manifested itself a few years ago when Academy Award winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow created her “lifestyle brand” Goop. Through Goop, Gwyneth sold new age, alternative therapies and devices at exorbitant prices, including “vaginal eggs” that were meant to be inserted into the vagina in order to aid “hormonal balance, and feminine energy”.

After re-mortgaging my home in order to finance the purchase, I bought a dozen vaginal eggs from Gwyneth. Now if you are wondering why I would buy vaginal eggs whose miracle powers were debunked in a lawsuit, especially since I don’t have a vagina, then you obviously do not have celebriphilia.

The way I see it is this, if I had a vagina, I would trust my friend Gwyneth to tell me (and sell me) the right wonder egg to stick into it in order to cure whatever ails me. If I’m going to trust anyone regarding my non-existent vagina, you can bet your bottom dollar it would be the woman who played Pepper Potts in the Iron Man movies…that alone makes her an authority in vaginacology.

The same is true of anti-vaccination proponent Jenny McCarthy. Jenny is a TV host and former Playboy model, which is the celebrity equivalent of being a Phd in immunology, which is why I faithfully obey her when she orders me not to vaccinate my kids because they could get autism.

Suzanne Somers starred on Three’s Company forty years ago, which is equal to getting a Master’s Degree in Bio-Genetic Engineering, and so when, contrary to mainstream medical opinion, she claims that “bio-identical hormone therapy” is the fountain of youth…I trust in Suzanne’s knowledge and wisdom.

You may think my Celebriphilia is so severe I need to take some medication to temper it…well…you’d be wrong. Kirstie Alley and her Scientology Lord and Savior, Tom Cruise, have informed me that psychiatry is a “quack” science and psychiatric drugs are dangerous. Kirstie was on Cheers, where everybody knows your name…and Tom Cruise is…well…TOM CRUISE!! So they definitely know what they’re talking about and I trust their expertise implicitly and will remain untreated, thank you very much.

My celebriphilia isn’t limited to just medical questions, the infection has spread to my thoughts on foreign policy and politics too. Thanks to celebriphilia I now blindly trust in Hollywood to tell me what to think. When Hollywood churns out star-studded, pro-war, pro-empire propaganda films and tv shows that have their scripts controlled by the Pentagon in exchange for military equipment, personnel, access and budgetary relief, I absorb the indoctrination unquestioningly.

We celebriphiliacs only get our news from rebellious comedians like John Oliver, Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert, and believe in every establishment talking point they sell us. I whole-heartedly put my faith in these second rate hack comedians desperate to stay in the good graces of their corporate overlords to tell me the unvarnished truth.

As a celebriphiliac I get all my insights regarding Russia from Rob Reiner, who is an expert because he played Meathead on the 1970’s sitcom All in the Family. When Meathead tells me that we are at war with Russia because they stole our election in 2016, I treat his anti-Russian proclamations with all the respect it deserves.

To get my political opinions I go to all the top experts…Robert DeNiro, Matt Damon, Bruce Willis, Brie Larson, Alec Baldwin, Tim Allen, Angelina Jolie, James Woods, Chris Evans and George Clooney. Sometimes these experts have conflicting opinions on political matters, like maybe Bruce Willis and Alec Baldwin disagree on tax policy, or Tim Allen and Chris Evans have opposing thoughts on immigration. In order to resolve these deeply troubling quagmires, I do the logical thing and choose what I believe by siding with the celebrity who has the most Twitter followers.

Luckily for me, I am not alone in being afflicted with celebriphilia, as it is a raging epidemic in America. Here in the U.S.A. we adore our celebrities so much we actually vote them into high office. In the last forty years alone we have elected a senile, bad B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan, and a silver-spooned, D-list reality tv con-man, Donald Trump, to the presidency.

In my state of California, the epicenter of the celebriphilia epidemic, we have elected a sex-abusing, steroid-injecting, son-of-a-Nazi, movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to two terms in the Governor’s mansion, and the city of Carmel-by-the-Sea elected Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood, to be mayor twenty-five years before he berated an empty chair at the RNC convention in 2012.

We American celebriphiliacs not only forgave these men for their shortcomings, we also imbued them with a wisdom, competency and expertise they did not possess, all because of their status as celebrity.

You may think that because I suffer from celebriphilia and treat celebrities like experts on things well outside their skill set, that I am insane. If the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results”, then considering the level of corruption, incompetence and malevolence on display by “real” establishment experts in government, Wall Street, Big Pharma and the media over the years, be it in regards to 9-11, WMD’s and the Iraq war, the housing bubble and ensuing 2008 economic collapse, the 2016 election, Russiagate and the opioid epidemic, then listening to, believing in, or trusting in these “official” experts is equally as insane as buying vaginal wonder eggs from Iron Man’s wife, Pepper Potts.

The bottom line is this, I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on tv, but I have seen other people play them on tv, and I am a certified celebriphiliac, which I think qualifies me to make a formal diagnosis of what ails celebrity obsessed, and expert-addled America. After careful study and deep thought I have come to this conclusion…contrary to popular opinion, America is not losing its mind…just like me, it has already lost it.

This article was originally published at RT.com.

©2019

Angry Americans, Shark Attacks and Synchronicity II

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes 29 seconds

I took a little vacation last week and headed out for some sun and fun on Cape Cod. The beach was great, and except for my one close call where I barely escaped/survived a harrowing shark attack*, my time on the Cape was thoroughly enjoyable.

What was not so enjoyable was getting to the Cape. Air travel has devolved from being a modern marvel of man’s ingenuity to being a crucible bordering on a crucifixion. The Passion of My Flight began at 4 am when I had to get up to get to LAX to run the gauntlet of both airport traffic and TSA security. My flight to Boston was delayed leaving LAX for 45 minutes because of traffic on the runway, but at least we were right on time to run into a “microburst” at Logan airport which forced us to divert to Bangor, Maine, of all God forsaken places. For three interminable hours my flight was held, Dog Day Afternoon/hijack-style, on the tarmac at Bangor while we waited to refuel and for Logan to recover from its “microbursting”.

To be fair, my stay in Bangor was not nearly as bad as it could have been. Part of what made it tolerable was that the passengers in my section all bonded over the misbehavior of two passengers who were kicked off in Bangor. I didn’t see what happened, but was informed by a gaggle of gossipy flight attendants, or as I condescendingly call them “stewardesses”, that once we landed in Bangor a guy in his 30’s or so, declared he was going to exit the plane to have a smoke. The stewardesses informed him that, no, he was not allowed to leave the plane and was not allowed to smoke. Joe Camel was having none of it and since the stewardesses had opened the cabin door in order to ventilate our plane, he forced his way off the craft and onto the tarmac to light up. The funniest part of this story, and a strong indicator of this guy’s extraordinary genius, is that he was trying to smoke right next to the fuel truck that was refueling our jet….what could possibly go wrong? To the flight crew’s credit, they put up with none of the Marlboro Man’s nonsense and called the police who quickly escorted this gentlemen to his barred Bangor accommodations for the evening (I can attest that I did actually see the Maine State troopers drive up to our plane).

To the further delight of our section of passengers, the stewardesses also informed us that Smoking Man was traveling with his mom, who was also kicked off the plane for her bad behavior, as she had berated the flight crew as they had her son arrested. The crew shared with us that this woman, who sounds lovely, had also cursed at them throughout the flight because they failed to point out the Grand Canyon to her when we flew over it. While I did not enjoy my brief time in Bangor, I can only imagine that this mother and son combo REALLY disliked their extended stay in Bangor.

My return flight was no walk in the park either, as it was delayed at Logan for 3 excruciating hours before we ever boarded, and this was after I got to the airport two hours early in order to once again, run the gauntlet of traffic and security. Frustrations were running high at the gate as passengers tried to gather information on when exactly we would be leaving. Not surprisingly, airline staff on the ground were not fountains of abundant knowledge.

As far as I know, there were no arrests on this flight but there was a very tense confrontation between a middle aged father and a younger mother sitting behind him. What started it all I have no idea, as I had earplugs in…but by the time I removed them the confrontation was close to becoming a conflagration.

The younger woman, who was maybe in her thirties, had a smaller child with her, around 5 or so, and she was cursing up a storm at the guy in front of her who was with his teenage son. The guy told her to watch her mouth and not curse out his son, and she continued to “motherfuck” the both of them. The middle aged guy raised his voice threateningly in response, and then the woman played shocked and appalled that a man would raise his voice to her, and then the stewardesses arrived and did nothing but watch the argument escalate. Like the “microburst” at Logan on my earlier flight, this storm revealed flashes of shocking intensity but then dissipated into an uneasy quiet.

From my very brief observations of these two people before, during and after their confrontation, I can say with some level of certitude that both of them seemed like pretty shitty, self-absorbed human beings. The guy struck me as a total douchebag, as I had a brief interaction with him before we boarded and sensed he rated high on the asshole scale. The woman was no ray of sunshine either, as she struck me as just as entitled and obnoxious as her male opponent. If a fist fight had broken out between the two I am certain that I would have intervened, but only to punch them both in the face and lock them in the aft lavatory.

So why do I share these stories with you? Am I morphing into a travelogue writer or something? No…I share them because I think these anecdotes reveal a great deal about the current state of America and the American psyche.

One of the first things that stood out on my travels was that our infrastructure is a disaster area. Traffic both to and from LAX and Logan was an utter catastrophe. There are too many cars and too many people and not enough space. And it isn’t just the roads that are too congested…the skies are as well as my plane hit traffic trying to take off from LAX which was just as bad as the traffic on the drive to the airport.

The fragility of our infrastructure was highlighted by my flight being diverted from Boston to Bangor due to a 15 minute storm. Yes, the storm was a very intense one, but it did only last 15 minutes, and yet I had to sit in Bangor for three hours. No doubt other Logan bound flights suffered the same fate in Portland, Hartford, Providence and other mid-major cities across the eastern seaboard. The diverted flights then put strains on their new airports in the form of parking spaces/fuel etc., and then air travel along the east coast would be delayed and backed up because Logan had to land and take off the flights that were diverted/delayed before they let other flights already scheduled leave/arrive.

When you think about our civilization and how tenuous it is…it is pretty chilling. I mean, if there was some sort of solar flare or some other catastrophe that hit the U.S. and knocked out power, we would devolve into Mad Max/Escape From New York/Planet of the Apes territory in a matter of days, if not hours. It would be nice to think that a disastrous event would bring people together and illuminate the angels of our better nature, but as some of the passengers on my flight proved, that is unlikely. Considering that my toddler son behaved markedly better than full blown adults on my flights who could not control themselves or their impulses, is a pretty strong indicator that chaos is just a heartbeat away at any given moment.

In regards to the passenger misbehavior on my flights, the thing that stood out to me is that there is a palpable anger coursing through the blood of Americans. People are just really, really pissed off right now. I cannot recall a time in my life where tensions have been this high in America. People are stressed and scared and completely on edge, and the underlying tension and anxiety creating American’s anger and fury is only gaining in intensity as it expands across the country.

The Smoking Man who refused to listen to the stewardesses and tried to smoke on the tarmac while the plane refueled is a wonderful symbol of the epidemic of narcissistic entitlement spreading across the country. This guy wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it, and was willing to risk potentially blowing up an airliner with 200 people on board just to satiate his desire/addiction.

The funny thing is that everyone stuck on that plane in Bangor was so irritated and aggravated by our situation (our delay/diversion), that I am sure that if Smoking Man had caused a big headache that encompassed all of the passengers in my section, we would have torn him limb from limb like a ravenous mob. I take no pride in saying I know I would have gleefully participated in, if not instigated, that riotous behavior towards any scapegoat stupid enough to present him/her/itself.

It seems to me that America is rapidly losing its mind. We have devolved into a combustible people looking for offense, slights, or excuses to vent the rage that boils just beneath the surface of our seemingly mundane and terrifyingly meaningless lives. This perpetual state of stress, tension and anger blinds us to reality and causes us to see only those things that reinforce our worst instincts and impulses about other people and feeds our sense of dissatisfaction and disenfranchisement.

As to why we are so angry and stressed…well…the causes are legion. As previously stated, our dilapidated infrastructure is a cause of stress as it creates irritants like traffic both on our streets and in the skies. Economic and financial pressure creates stress among millions who have to work longer and harder to make less and pay for more. Politics no doubt is a force multiplier of these stresses and anxieties as absolutely everything in our culture is politicized beyond recognition. Trump, love him or loathe him, is also a major contributor to American anxiety and tension as he is virtually everywhere. It is impossible to escape Trump, or talk of Trump, or opinions of Trump, no matter where you go or what you do. Social media is a toxic vehicle in and of itself, but in the age of Trump it has become a dealer of all things Trump 24/7, that keeps the addicted high on their own supply of Trump love/hate. The media, cable news in particular, are non-stop Trump and have devolved into reality television where Trump is the character they love to hate.

I also think Americans are suffering an existential crisis, where our lives have been stripped of purpose and we are left adrift in a vacuous sea of vapid consumerism devoid of any philosophical, religious or spiritual meaning. This emptiness used to manifest itself as a sort of listless malaise and ennui, but has now morphed into a volcanic rage and fury ready to erupt in order to release the pressure building deep inside its dissatisfied core.

It seems to me that we are on a very dangerous trajectory that is fraught with peril. As the events of the last week have shown, people of all persuasions (political and otherwise) are filled with anger and hatred and are a hair’s breath from snapping and hurting or killing lots of people. As much as I hate to say it, I fear that there is no turning back from the madness that is infecting us all…and when Trump is re-elected, and from my discussions with people on my travels I think he is going to be, this country is going to detonate and we will all be caught up in the conflagration.

America is a tinderbox and tense, anxious and stressed people are going to ignore the warning signs, throw caution to the wind, and try to satiate their selfish desires and addictions by lighting up next to a fuel truck which will cause this whole shithouse to go up in flames. Sadly we are no longer equipped with the personal or national infrastructure to be able to extinguish that inferno.

My observations of Americans during my recent journey made me think of the 1983 song "Synchronicity II” by The Police. The song is off of the band’s fifth, final and best studio album, Synchronicity. Sting’s insightful and prophetic lyrics speak to the meaninglessness of our modern lives and the primal darkness that lurks just beneath the surface of our civilized/middle-class veneer, and are accompanied by an edgy and grating guitar that haunts and pesters like an infectious bug crawling just beneath our skin. This song could be America’s new national anthem.

SYNCHRONICITY II

Another suburban family morning/ Grandmother screaming at the wall/We have to shout above the tin of our rice krispies/We can’t hear anything at all

Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration/But we know all her suicides are fake/ Daddy only stares in to the distance/ There’s only so much more that he can take

Many miles away/ Something crawls from the slime/ At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning/ The factory belches filth into the sky/ He walks unhindered through the picket lines today/ He doesn’t think to wonder why

Secretaries put and preen like cheap tarts at a red light street/ But all he ever thinks to do is watch/ And every single meeting with his so-called superiors/ Is a humiliating kick in the crotch

Many miles away/ Something crawls to the surface/ Of dark Scottish loch

Another working day has ended/ Only the rush hour hell to face/ Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes/ Contestants in a suicidal race

Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance/ He knows that something somewhere has to break/ He sees the family home now, looming in his headlights/ The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache

There’s a shadow on the door/ Of a cottage on the shore/ Of a dark Scottish lake/ Many miles away/ Many miles away

Sting is right…and that primordial beast crawling out of an ancient Scottish loch is no longer slouching towards America…it is here, it is angry and there is no stopping or controlling it.

*Shark Attack - My shark attack story is this…there have been a plethora of shark sightings on the Cape this summer, so much so that the Boston Globe even had a front page story with the headline “Sharks on Cape Cod: Just how scared should we be?”. The Globe answers its own question with a resounding…”VERY SCARED!”. For this reason and because the absolute only thing in the entire world that I am afraid of is sharks, I was not going to go into the Atlantic during my vacation. I was assured by everyone I spoke with that the location of my Cape beach was on the Martha’s Vineyard sound, which would have no seals at all, and since it has no seals there would be no sharks. People were adamant that our beach was safe and that no seals had ever been spotted there and certainly no sharks. I admit I found this story to be at best dubious, but due to peer pressure I relented and trepidatiously ventured into the dark unknown of three feet of Atlantic ocean.

Except for the fact that there were dozens of shark sightings at other Cape locations, the vast majority of my Cape vacation went well…UNTIL…on my second to last day, I narrowly escaped death at the hands of a massive and ravenous Great White shark.

What happened is this…as I exited the water with my toddler son, I glanced east along the beach and saw…something. I stopped and focused my gaze to the spot where there was an anomaly in the water. There was a group of about ten kids playing on flotation devices in that exact spot and my mind raced back to the movie Jaws, where a little kid, Alex Kintner, gets eaten by the shark while riding on a flotation deviced, blood splattering everywhere. I could feel the camera zoom in on my face just like it had on Chief Brody when he saw the shark attack Alex Kintner on the flotation device…my mouth went agape as I saw…something!

Then the lifeguard blew their whistle and frantically yelled for everyone to get out of the water. I threw my son to my wife and ran down the beach towards the commotion. People were standing in my way so I courageously knocked them over and pushed them into the water in order to keep a barrier between me and the hungry shark. Then…the beast poked its massive head above the water, baring its razor sharp teeth…it was as clear as day…it was horrifying…it was a ferocious….SEAL!!!

To be clear…I’ve seen seals before…but this seal was absolutely massive. He deceptively rolled over onto his stomach in a playful manner and dove under and surfaced again, much to the delight of the crowds gathered at the beach but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that I had just come within inches of being mauled by a shark…because as everyone knows…where there are seals…there are sharks!

I was assured by the same liars and deniers who told me that a seal had never been spotted on this beach before that the seal I just saw was just “lost”. “Lost” my ass..that seal knew EXACTLY what it was doing. And regardless of whether this seal is “lost” or not...what is to stop a “lost” Great White from following this seal, coming to this beach and taking a giant bite out of my obviously delectable ass?

In conclusion…when I say I survived a shark attack what I mean is that I saw a seal playing about twenty feet from the shore at a part of the beach where I wasn’t swimming. This was a close call indeed.

©2019