Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 46: CODA

On this episode Barry and I reveal our mastery of sign language by silently discussing the Apple TV movie CODA, which stands for 'children of deaf adults'. The discussion hits upon such diverse topics as the luxury of sleeping on a bus, a Hallmark version of Good Will Hunting, deaf actors vs actors playing deaf, and how John McTiernan would make a great deaf heist movie.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 46: CODA

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Is TV Too Woke?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 12 seconds

Is TV too woke?

As someone who works with a lot of producers, writers and directors who all privately tell me that if their TV project isn’t woke in conception and rigidly diverse in execution, then it won’t ever move forward, the answer is eye-rollingly obvious.

Unsurprisingly, the epidemic of wokeness is just as virulent across the pond in the UK TV world as it is in Hollywood and New York.

Proof of this was evident at the Edinburgh TV Festival panel discussion of TV professionals unironically titled “Diversity of Thought: Is TV Too Woke?”

At the discussion, Ash Atella, the producer of The Office and The IT Crowd, admitted, “I’m in a lot of meetings now where people tell me, ‘This will never get on because it’s not woke enough.”

The reality is that any sentient being with eyes to see, ears to hear and a brain to think, can tell you that TV is so awash in wokeness as to be hysterical.

Whether it be ideologically biased, identity-obsessed news coverage, or entertainment featuring the performative absurdity of a black Anne Boleyn, the obscenity of white male erasure in Marvel’s What If?, or incessant LGBTQ cheerleading, the trend is clear, the woke revolution is most certainly being televised.

What’s interesting about TV’s woke affliction is that while it’s obvious to regular people, many industry insiders are either afraid to speak publicly about it or blind to it.

A specially commissioned Ipsos Mori survey supports this notion, and shows that the TV industry in the UK is wildly out of step regarding wokeness compared to the viewing public. The survey found that 62% of British TV viewers believe political correctness on TV has gone too far, while only 19% of TV industry professionals agreed. It also revealed that 40% of viewers were proud of the UK, as opposed to 20% of TV professionals, and that 23% of viewers were ashamed of the British Empire while 63% of TV insiders shared that sentiment.

Obviously, TV professionals live in an alternate universe to audience members, and that is reflected in the lack of ideological diversity we see on our screens. But TV doesn’t care about ideological diversity, only in the surface diversity of identity.

The Egyptian-born Atella, who is a big proponent of diversity in TV, gave voice to the reality of the pro-diversity agenda and its effect when he told the panel, “I’m amazed how fast the white people have thought, ‘We can’t get on television’, that’s come in hard and fast in the last two years, and it’s a bewildering experience to be in those meetings after 15 years of the opposite. Now white people think there’s no place for them.”

Well, “the white people” think there’s no place for them in the culture because news channels consistently label them evil and entertainment endlessly denigrates them.

The corporate behemoths that run Hollywood have made it very clear too that white people, straight white men in particular, are not welcome in the industry.

For example, Disney and Amazon have made their worship of all things “diverse and inclusive” official company doctrine with insidiously specific identity quotas that above all target reducing straight white males from the creative and production process.

The same is true of the Academy Awards, which have made racial, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation box-ticking, as well as straight white male exclusion, mandatory, in order to be eligible for awards contention.

The woke bias of other panelists in Edinburgh, such as Louisa Compton, Head of News, Current Affairs and Sport at Channel 4, was also exposed, as was a shocking level of contempt for the audience.

Compton first claimed that being woke is benign as it literally means, “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone, which seem like fairly important principles.”

Compton heads a news division and the fact that her fidelity is to the subjective principles of “being alert to injustice and not wanting to offend anyone” as opposed to searching for the objective truth, is alarming but illuminating.

Compton did admit that wokeness can “alienate some audiences who feel that the world is moving on faster and leaving them behind” and also claimed, “I don’t think anyone in TV would be surprised to hear that a lot of the people who work [in the industry] think differently to the audiences we’re making progress for.”

Broadcast journalist Mobeen Azhar shared a similar holier-than-thou attitude when speaking of the type of shows needed to “move forward the people who think PC’s gone mad, because it hasn’t.”

To Compton, Azhar and their ilk, wokeness is the proper religion populated by the evolved and the pious, and they and their fellow TV professionals are working hard to make “progress for” and “move forward” those knuckle-dragging barbarians in the audience who feel left ”behind”.

Wokeness is now the state religion and entertainment and news its propaganda wings, brimming with missionaries like Compton and Azhar, filled with self-righteous superiority and evangelical zeal.

To these people TV is just an indoctrination machine used to do the public service of spreading the good news of the woke gospel to help spur evolution among the filthy, backwards proles.

So, is TV too woke? If you don’t think so then either you don’t watch TV or you’re a self-involved, delusional TV executive suffering from a severe case of stage 5 wokeness. Hopefully it’s the former and not the latter, as that’s the decidedly healthier and more enlightened choice.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Woke Wet Dream of Marvel's New Series 'What If...?'

The new Marvel series ‘What If…?’ is a woke wet dream where white male superheroes are replaced by women and minorities

The Disney+ show presents itself as innocent entertainment. But its woke agenda is red meat to rabid race hustlers and the identity obsessed desperate to disappear the scourge of white men from popular culture.

‘What If…?’, the new animated Marvel series, follows in the footsteps of the recent live-action Marvel series ‘WandaVision’, ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’, and ‘Loki’ in expanding the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The series consists of nine narrative-bending episodes, the first of which premiered on August 11, followed by the second on August 18, with new episodes available every following Wednesday.

If the first two episodes are any indication, ‘What If…?’ will devoutly pander to the newfound politically correct religious faith of Disney (Marvel’s parent company), as the show’s premise can basically be summed up as ‘What if the woke had a time machine and used it to destroy the Marvel universe?’

The first episode examines an alternative time-line where, during World War II, white guy Steve Rogers doesn’t turn into super soldier Captain America. Instead Agent Carter, a British woman, gets injected with the super soldier serum and becomes the superhero Captain Carter.

Captain Carter not only battles Hydra, Red Skull and the Nazis, but also the greatest villain of all… the patriarchy. She shows her true girl power by overcoming sexism and misogyny from condescending white males in the military power structure. You go, girl!

In the second episode, based on the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ storyline, the Ravagers are sent to earth in 1988 by the Celestial Ego to capture his child, Peter Quill, but they mistakenly take T’Challa, Wakanda’s child prince instead.

Unlike the selfish, stupid and white Peter Quill/Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) from the movies, the black T’Challa/Star-Lord (voiced by Chadwick Boseman in his final performance) is so good, selfless and wonderful, he actually convinces Thanos to abandon his genocidal plans and join him on his noble Robin Hood-esque adventures.

The message is clear in ‘What If…?’: if Thanos’ genocidal plan killed just white men, all of whom are awful, then the woke would happily go along with it in the Marvel universe and our own too.

Episode two of ‘What If…?’ so inspired Dr. Jason Johnson, a black talking head on MSNBC, he wrote an article titled, “Disney +’s ‘What if T’Challa became a star-lord?’ is a repudiation of mediocre white men”.

Johnson declares the episode is “a total repudiation of the mediocre white men who’ve been centered in most of the Marvel movie’s blockbuster films.” This is a curious take as Tony Stark was a child prodigy scientific genius before he became Iron Man, Bruce Banner was a renowned physicist before he became the Hulk, Stephen Strange was a brilliant surgeon before he became Dr. Strange, and Thor is a Norse god for goodness sake. There’s not a whole lot of mediocrity on that list of white guys centered in Marvel movies.

Johnson then rants that he doesn’t like movies or TV shows “about selfish, privileged mediocre white men who stumble through life, making costly mistakes that invariably hurt others along the way, but somehow in the end they get to be the hero…”  And yet he was a big fan of President Obama, a selfish, privileged black man who made costly mistakes, like siding with Wall Street instead of Main Street, that invariably hurt others, like working class people, but somehow ended up being a hero in mainstream culture. 

Johnson adores ‘What If…?’ because it shows “what real heroism, through Black guy magic, can actually look like”, which raises the question: what the hell is ‘black guy magic?’ God willing it’s better than the cheesy white guy magic of David Copperfield.

Johnson’s inanity continues with, “White men are bombarded with messages every day telling them they’re special no matter what they have or have not done or earned.”

Are those messages subliminal? I certainly haven’t seen them in the cavalcade of commercials and TV shows where all white guys are punchlines, because they’re the one group that can be ridiculed without fear of cancellation.

As a white male who aspires to the impossible dream of mediocrity, I’ve never experienced this alleged relentless messaging about being “special” regardless of what I “have or have not done or earned”, and neither have any of the other white guys I know.

The irony of all this “mediocre white man” hating is that Johnson is the poster boy for mediocrity himself. He’s an unoriginal mid-wit who has carved out a career on TV and in academia through the sheer force of his kiss-assery and corporate leg-up programs desperate to put a black face on establishment talking points.

He shamelessly belches out mendacious and mindless talking points meant to protect the powerful and maintain the status quo, so that he can keep sucking on the corporate media teat. For example, he once argued with a straight face that billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the oligarch’s oligarch, was “not an oligarch”.

He also got suspended by MSNBC and fired by The Root for calling the black women working on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign the “island of misfit black girls”.

It’s amusing that the Bloomberg oligarch defense and the egregious “black girls” statement sound an awful lot like something one of those mediocre white guys Johnson hates so much would say. To Dr. Johnson, physician of mediocrity, I say, “heal thyself”.

As for ‘What If…?’, I’d love to live on a timeline where corporate media clowns and race hustling hacks like Jason Johnson didn’t exist, and where wokeness didn’t ruin everything it touches. Unfortunately, that timeline doesn’t exist, and I won’t even get to see it imagined on some corny animated show either – it’s just too unbelievable.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

In the Same Breath: Documentary Review

New HBO documentary ‘In the Same Breath’ examines the horror of Covid and the Chinese and American government’s initial misinformation campaigns in response to the outbreak.

The film shows that trusting government, whether it be socialist or democratic in nature, is a fool’s errand.

In the Same Breath, the flawed but at times fascinating new documentary airing on HBO and HBO Max, chronicles the inept response and often deceptive practices of both the Chinese and U.S. governments in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic and the power of propaganda to shape perception.

The documentary features some harrowing and horrifying footage from within Wuhan during the height of the Covid outbreak. Scenes of patients gasping for air and dying, and families struggling to decide whether their elderly mother should die in a hospital parking lot waiting for care that will never come or admit death’s inevitability back in the comfort of their apartment, are gut-wrenching.

One of the most unnerving sequences in the film is when a CCTV camera captures the very beginning of the pandemic when it records a cavalcade of people from the Wuhan fish market coming to a clinic with a cough and high fever. The doctor who greets and treats them then develops the same symptoms and goes from hospital to hospital looking for care, but is turned away every time, and later dies.

Director Nanfu Wang, best known for her searing documentary One Child Nation about China’s one child policy, obviously has insights into the Chinese mindset and she is unforgiving when it comes to the Chinese government.

In the Same Breath spotlights the relentless drumbeat of misinformation from the Chinese government that at first diminished the disease’s power, with officials declaring it doesn’t transmit human to human and dissenters arrested for their heresy. When the truth became undeniable, the government shifts into propaganda mode and stories of brave front line medical workers flood the Chinese tv market, with the message that the government and people of China are working hand in hand to defeat the Covid menace takes hold.

Wang, an American citizen born and raised in China, is a skilled documentarian who has a keen eye for Chinese propaganda but a bit of a blind spot for her own American political bias.

The two main villains of In the Same Breath are the corrupt Chinese government and the incompetent Trump administration. Both are deserving of scorn, but at least in the American side of the coronavirus pandemic story, this documentary feels a little shallow as it isn’t just the Trump administration that has misinformed and deceived regarding coronavirus, it’s been the entire political and media establishment.  

The documentary almost seems quaint when it ponders potential Trump authoritarianism when in his absence vicious tribalism and covid misinformation have continued to flourish unabated.

To her credit, Wang does briefly highlight some Democrats as being misinformation agents too, and excoriates Dr. Anthony Fauci, for his repeated deceptions, especially early in the outbreak.

What Wang doesn’t do is challenge the orthodoxy of HBO’s decidedly liberal audience. For example, the scientists and medical professionals who signed a letter in the summer of 2020 saying that protesting against the lockdown was dangerous and but that protesting for Black Lives Matter was mandatory because of the alleged epidemic of racism in America, are never mentioned, never mind ridiculed. This egregious event is tailor made for Wang’s thesis but is undoubtedly a bridge too far for the bigwigs at HBO and their liberal audience.

She also studiously avoids the controversial lab-leak theory.

Wang’s main focus is that she’s afraid of what people in power will do to maintain and expand their power, especially during a pandemic. She highlights China’s numerous authoritarian abuses and the Chinese people’s not only acceptance of those abuses, but outright praise for them, to make her case.

This all seems very relevant to the hotly debated vaccination issue here in the U.S., but unfortunately In the Same Breath only covers 2020, so that issue is never raised.

I’m devoutly agnostic on the vaccine question, but it’s striking to me that the same Chinese tactics and techniques regarding Covid featured in the documentary are currently either being copied or mirrored by the elite in the U.S

For instance, Wang makes a strong case that China has undercounted the number of dead in order to make the government seem more effective, turning a possible 30,000 dead in Wuhan into just 3,000.

In contrast, the U.S. corporate media have used a bait and switch approach where the highest number is always the one featured, possibly in an attempt to scare people into compliance. For example, in the early days of Covid the death toll made headlines, then it subtly shifted to the number of positive tests, and now to the percentage of sick who are unvaccinated.

Wang also expresses frustration with the U.S. government’s refusal to share accurate data with the American public, a sentiment she admittedly shares with ‘deplorable’ Trumpers.

China bullied people into silence and compliance by making emotional and nationalistic pleas, while in the U.S., the argument for people to take vaccines is also emotional – do no harm to grandma, and collective – we need to work together for herd immunity.

The bullying impulse is strong in the pro-vaccine movement too, as restricting liberties and requiring vaccine passports for government aid have remarkably become the default position among elites, many liberals and the media, despite resulting in obvious racial disparities.

As for In the Same Breath, it’s a flawed documentary, but if viewers can overcome its limiting bias and see the authoritarian forest for the partisan trees, it’s worth watching for no other reason than to remind of the insidious and nefarious nature of power and how easily freedom is suffocated by governments meant to protect it.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Chris Evans goes full Captain America, assembling a cavalcade of warmongering Washington avengers to discuss the Middle East

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

The gullible Hollywood star exposes himself to be a useful idiot for the military/intelligence industrial complex by producing a blindly orthodox new six-part discussion series on Yemen, Iran, Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

As the U.S. limps out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, and millions suffer and die under the most brutal of American-induced maladies from Syria to Palestine to Yemen and across the Middle East, I implore you to fear not as Captain America is now on the case.

Chris Evans, the movie star best known for playing the patriotic leader of the Avengers, Steve Rogers, in the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, is out to solve the world’s problems and has set his dazzling blue eyes and decidedly empty-head on the mess that is the Middle East.

In 2017, the dreamy Evans founded a civic media organization titled “A Starting Point” which he unironically claims is “non-partisan”. Thankfully for humanity, on August 31st, A Starting Point will air a new six-part series titled “Influence and Power in the Middle East” where “experts” discuss Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Palestine.

I was hoping that this series would feature such Captain America adjacent luminaries as Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor and The Hulk, but unfortunately the line-up of speakers is considerably less impressive.

“Influence and Power in the Middle East” features a cavalcade of archaic establishment asses like George W. Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Leon Panetta, and everybody’s favorite raving lunatic and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.

This is literally a murderer’s row of Washington warmongers, nefarious neo-cons and CIA criminals who have raped and pillaged the Middle East for the entirety of their kiss up-kick down careers. This is the equivalent of having Ted Bundy on a dating podcast to share his insights about women.

In addition, apparently former CIA operative Will Hurd is going to “host” these discussions, one could only hope that his experience “hosting” detainees during torture sessions in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be replicated with these vile villains.

If I wanted to see Hadley, Haass, Panetta, Bolton and a cavalcade of National Security lackeys and CIA shills spout their obscene and absurd military/intelligence industrial propaganda, I’d just turn on cable news, as CNN, MSNBC and Fox seem to exist solely to platform and/or employ these types of repugnant reprobates.

Speaking of the mainstream media, it’s nice to see Chris Evans, one of those hopeless Hollywood fools who endlessly espouses diversity in movie casting, emulate media business-as-usual with his A Starting Point charade by casting only people slavishly addicted to establishment orthodoxy for these discussions…no diversity of opinion here!

For example, Richard Haas and Dr. Jon Alterman, two pro-Israel shills, will discuss Palestine. I’m sure that will be immensely enlightening.

Another example is having Leon Panetta and John Bolton tackle Iran. Bolton is the John Bonham of banging the drum for war with Iran. You know what won’t get mentioned in that stultifying, establishment-friendly discussion? The U.S. shooting down of Iran Air flight 655, a civilian airliner, over Iranian airspace in 1988, killing all 290 men, women and children aboard.

What would be considerably more useful, noble and interesting would be if Chris Evans had used his oversized public stature to actually feature diverse opinions from diverse people, like…I don’t know…maybe have actual Palestinians discuss Palestine, and Iranians discuss Iran, and Syrians discuss Syria and Yemenis discuss Yemen. You know, platform people who never ever get a platform in American media.

And if Captain America really had a pair, he’d have Jamal Khashoggi’s widow and 9-11 victims’ family members come and discuss Saudi Arabia.

But we all know that Chris Evans is entirely devoid of not only testicular fortitude, but of brains.

Evans is such a moron that in 2016 he actually flew into a rage because he believed that Marlon Brando had literally anally raped his co-star Maria Schneider on camera at the behest of director Bernardo Bertolucci while filming Last Tango in Paris in 1971. Think about how breathtakingly ridiculous that is for a moment.

To be clear, Brando did not actually rape Schneider or have any genital/sexual contact with her while filming Last of Tango in Paris, any more than Clint Eastwood really shot people while filming The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The sex between Brando and Schneider was entirely simulated, but when the egregiously gullible Evans read about a mis-informed rumor that the Brando story was true, he donned his white knight savior costume and valiantly tweeted.

“Wow. I will never look at this film, Bertolucci or Brando the same way again. This is beyond disgusting. I feel rage."

He followed that gem up by tweeting, “They should be in jail." The punchline being that Evans was unaware that Marlon Brando had been dead for a decade by the time Captain America courageously hit send on that tweet.

The reality is that Evans isn’t just an empty-headed imbecile but also a shameless establishment shill. This buff buffoon is no doubt great at doing pull-ups, but he has the intellect of a toddler in pull-ups.

Chris “Captain America” Evans obviously set out to prove with his ‘serious’ A Starting Point venture that he wasn’t just another vacuous but impossibly handsome Hollywood pretty boy, but by the looks of the “Influence and Power in the Middle East” guest list, I can confidently declare “Mission Not Accomplished!”, as he’s only proven himself to be just another useful idiot for the money-hungry and bloodthirsty military/industrial complex and corrupt Washington establishment.

Captain America famously said: “I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from. “ However, it would appear Chris does like bullies, especially if they’re from Washington.

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Suicide Squad: A Review and Commentary

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!***

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. A significant upgrade over 2016’s Suicide Squad, this movie is a stylized, at times amusing, blood-soaked comic book comedy that boasts a shockingly subversive political message at its heart.

This article contains spoilers to ‘The Suicide Squad’.

Despite garnering mostly good reviews and generating positive word of mouth, I didn’t watch director James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad when it hit theatres and HBO Max on August 5th here in the U.S.

I was, pardon the pun, ‘gun-shy’ about the film because I’d suffered through the previous cinematic crucifixion that was Suicide Squad, the David Ayers directed movie monstrosity from 2016.

Still bearing the scars from the Suicide Squad atrocity, I expected Gunn’s new pseudo reboot, oh-so-creatively titled The Suicide Squad, to be more of the lifeless, corporatized, Pentagon approved propaganda that passes for blockbuster entertainment nowadays.

That expectation was based on the fact that Warner Brothers is notorious for squeezing the artistic life out of their superhero movies and that leaked documents revealed that the Department of Defense were, not surprisingly, nefariously involved behind the scenes in the making of The Suicide Squad, no doubt assisting in extraction of anything remotely interesting from the final product in exchange for the use of military members as extras and the use of an Osprey aircraft.

But then a funny thing happened when I watched The Suicide Squad, I actually found a shockingly subversive movie wrapped in the usual corporate comic book cloak.

Now maybe I’m wearing my tinfoil hat too tight, but it seems to me that Gunn’s greatest accomplishment with The Suicide Squad was sneaking its remarkably subversive political message past his controlling corporate overlords and censorious Department of Defense bureaucrats.

How else to explain a mainstream comic book film that boasts ‘9-11 was an inside job’ symbolism at its narrative heart, and anti-American imperialism at its sub-textural center?

The plot of The Suicide Squad is that two ‘suicide squads’ of super-villains are taken out of Belle Reve prison in Louisiana and sent on a mission by the U.S. government to invade a small island off of South America, Corto Maltese, which was ruled by an American-friendly dictator now deposed by a hostile military coup.

The first group of suicide squaders hit the Corto Maltese beach like the Bay of Pigs invasion force, and meet a similarly gruesome fate.

In another tinfoil hat moment, during this initial ‘Bay of Pigs’ type invasion fiasco, Blackguard (Pete Davidson) storms the beach and gets his brains blown out by a high-powered rifle, just like JFK did in Dallas, and yes, both of their heads went “back and to the left”.

When supervillain Savant (Michael Rooker) tries to run away from the fray, U.S. government official Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) detonates an explosive device implanted in his head in a Stalinesque lesson to the others to never retreat.

This is not exactly standard issue Pentagon propaganda.

This invasion is simply a distraction so a second suicide squad, led by Bloodsport (Idris Elba) and made up of Peacemaker (John Cena) – a super patriot and psychopath, Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and King Shark (Sly Stallone), can arrive unnoticed on Corto Maltese.

As the Suicide Squad go on their odyssey, they mistakenly massacre a group of rebels intent on overthrowing the anti-American military junta due to Ms. Waller’s order to “kill anything they see”.

Again, not exactly the usual pro-America message the Pentagon prefers.

The Squad’s mission is to break into a heavily fortified tower named Jotunheim that houses a powerful, one-eyed Sauron-esque alien named Starro, which can control entire populations of people by taking over their brains.  

The U.S. were complicit in capturing Starfish from space and now that an unfriendly government has taken over Corto Maltese, they want the Suicide Squad to blow up Jotunheim and kill Starfish.

The Suicide Squad eventually get to Jotunheim and, hold onto your tinfoil hats, they place C4 explosives on each floor of the tower. But the plan goes awry and the explosions happen too early, thus the tower only partially collapses.

The visual similarities of the demolition of the Jotunheim to the WTC towers collapsing on 9-11 are pretty blatant, and one doesn’t have to be a “conspiracy kook” to notice them.

For instance, Bloodsport escapes the tower’s initial collapse and finds himself atop what is left of the Jotunheim, but then the floor he’s standing on collapses to the floor below, which begins a cascading collapse where each floor pancakes onto the one below with Bloodsport surfing the crumbling building to the bottom.

The symbolism when Bloodsport arrives at the bottom of the tower is striking, as he finds super-patriot Peacemaker poised to execute Ratcatcher at the behest of the American government so as to keep a computer file detailing the U.S.’s involvement in Project Starfish from ever coming to light.

Donning an Izod shirt and short shorts, and brandishing a flag-waving, violent self-righteousness, Peacemaker is Reagan’s America incarnate, who’d do anything to maintain America’s ‘shining city on a hill’ image.

In the aftermath of the tower’s collapse, Starro escapes and sets out to control or kill the entire population of Corto Maltese but the U.S. government doesn’t care as long as America’s connection to the alien is forever hidden.

Speaking of hidden, in a nod to Operation Paperclip, Jotunheim was built by Nazis who escaped Europe after World War II, which is not the only Nazi symbolism in the film. Javelin, part of the first suicide squad invasion force, is a former Olympian who uses his javelin as a weapon. He’s German, a model of Hitler’s dream of Aryan supermen, and Harley Quinn, who has a crush on him, uses his javelin to pierce the eye of Starfish and ultimately destroy the alien, with the help of hordes of hungry rats (it’s a long story).

As for Starro, the beast released by the tower’s destruction, it’s symbolic of the mindless militarism and neo-conservate group think belched up by America after the twin towers were destroyed. Similar to America’s militarism and neo-conservatism, which led to the disastrous and failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, Starfish’s invincibility is punctured by a rag-tag group with primitive weapons (javelin) assisted by the reviled that live in the shadows (rats).

With an authoritarian, deceptive, murderous American government slaughtering friendly rebels and shrugging at the massacre of innocent women and children, a super-patriotic sociopathic serial killer, Nazis and implying 9-11 government nefariousness, this movie is definitely not the usual Pentagon approved propaganda.

The Suicide Squad is, like most comic book movies, a corporate money grab and commercial for future corporate money grabs, but it’s also a movie with a gloriously subversive political message hiding in plain sight. That’s either a testament to James Gunn’s creative stealth or to the winless-in-wars-over-the-last-80-years Pentagon beginning to slip in the propaganda department too. Regardless of how the message got there, the reality is that the film’s alternative politics are one of the things that make it at least a somewhat interesting and worthwhile watch.

All Gunn had to do with the The Suicide Squad was make it not as awful as Ayer’s Suicide Squad. A major step in the direction for the project was jettisoning the abysmal dead weight of the always dreadful Will Smith as Bloodsport and casting Idris Elba in his stead. Elba is an actor, Will Smith is a poseur.

The rest of the cast acquit themselves well enough, with Margot Robbie and John Cena as the standouts. The elevation of the acting can be attributed to Gunn as Viola Davis was utterly abysmal in the first film but actually does pretty well in this one.

The bottom line is this, I’m no Gunn fanboy, but it’s obvious he succeeded in his task by making a very stylized comic book comedy with a rip-roaring soundtrack that is best described as a foul-mouthed, blood-soaked, raucous romp akin to a second or maybe third-rate Deadpool…and I guess that’s good enough.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Homeroom: Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A manipulative and meandering documentary devoid of insight or originality.

New Hulu documentary ‘Homeroom’ isn’t an uplifting depiction of the next generation of activists, it’s a depressing celebration of misguided victimhood.

The film is a divisive piece of racial propaganda that will be lauded by mainstream critics for its politically correct and socially acceptable intolerance, racial resentment and prejudice.

Homeroom is the new critically-acclaimed documentary that follows a group of politically engaged, minority Oakland High School students as they navigate their tumultuous senior year as it’s interrupted by Covid and the George Floyd protests.

The documentary, which premiered on the streaming service Hulu on August 12th, is the final installment of director Peter Nicks’ “Oakland Trilogy” (The Waiting Room and The Force) and boasts Black Panther director Ryan Coogler as its executive producer.

The main protagonist of Homeroom is high school senior Denilson Garibo, an undocumented immigrant who’s an ambitious member of the All-City Council (ACC) which represents the 36,000 students of the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD).

OUSD has its own police force and well before George Floyd’s murder Denilson and his fellow ACC member Mica, are pushing to have the school board abolish the school police in order to spare budget cuts in other student programs.

Denilson loves politics and certainly plays the part very well. Ever fluent in the emotionalist lingo of the moment, Denilson talks of students feeling “triggered” and “unsafe” around school police, of the “constant criminalization of black people”, and that he will stand up for “black and brown students”…apparently the white and Asian students are out of luck.

Denilson and his cohorts do seem like nice kids, but like most teenagers (and people) they also seem insufferably vapid as they’re constantly on their phones, even taking calls, in the middle of class. They aren’t so much concerned with education, something painfully obvious from their poor diction, vocabulary, and abysmal lack of logic, as they are with distracting themselves and reducing their attention span.

Their slavish addiction to social media isn’t harmless as it distorts their perception of reality by relentlessly inundating them with messages feeding their victimhood identities and fomenting anti-white sentiments.

For example, reports of Breonna Taylor’s slaying, videos of Ahmoud Arbery’s gruesome killing and George Floyd’s murder are passed around these kid’s social media echo chamber like confirmation bias baseball cards.

This focus on white violence against blacks is further reinforced when a black teacher gives a passionate lecture about a black female former student from the school who was stabbed to death in an Oakland park by a white man.

Director Nicks never challenges this distorted racial narrative but rather reinforces it as an objective truth.

The objective truth is that according to FBI crime statistics, the vast majority of black people murdered are killed by other black people. The same is true of whites, of course, as murder tends to be an intra-racial act.

But Nicks has no interest in truth, only in propagating racial propaganda that perpetuates victimhood and resentment.

An interesting example of Nicks’ biased approach is the brief clip shown of Amy Cooper, the infamous Central Park ‘Karen’ who called the cops on Christian Cooper (no relation), a black birdwatcher who told her to leash her dog, as an example of the unbridled evil of white people.

What is interesting about the use of this clip is that Kmele Foster recently investigated the Central Park ‘Karen’ incident and came away with a much more nuanced view of the situation. Basically, Amy Cooper isn’t the entitled, one-dimensional racist villain the media portrayed her as and Christian Cooper isn’t the martyred saint they made him out to be.

But Homeroom, its protagonists and director Nicks have no interest in, or tolerance for, such nuance and complexity regarding race, only in branding scapegoats.

For example, Denilson shamelessly decries the white middle class people attending school board meetings, claiming they’re “hijacking” it, and then tells a white board member he expected her to vote against his initiative because she’s white. Other minority students in the film say that gentrification, an influx of white residents, has driven them out of their neighborhoods.

Of course, if whites didn’t attend the school board meeting, they’d be branded as aloof and not caring about the community. And demonizing white people for moving into a black neighborhood is the evil of “gentrification”, while whites moving away from a black neighborhood is racist “white flight”.

That same circular illogic will also apply to Oakland Unified School District’s police. When they are abolished, crime will undoubtedly go up in schools, and then these same activists will claim that no one is protecting minority children.

The bottom line is that Homeroom is the sort of biased racial propaganda that we need much less of in our culture. It’s rightfully unimaginable that a white teacher would ever be celebrated for lecturing his class on black on white crime, or that black school board members would be singled out for their skin color, or that “middle-class blacks” would be admonished for attending a school board meeting.

All of this racial resentment is cheered as “activism” by the filmmaker, whose sole focus is on multiple African-American, Latino and Asian students, but not a single white student, despite whites making-up the largest percentage of Oakland’s diverse population, 35%.

As someone who has worked in California schools I sympathize with the student-activists featured in Homeroom. I can also unfortunately attest that the school-to-prison pipeline is very real and that major educational reforms are desperately needed, but the hyper-racialization and intolerance showcased in Homeroom and the wave of activist indoctrination taking hold in schools across the state (and country), are not the answer and will not lead to a happy ending for anyone involved, especially minority students.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union - Documentary Review and Commentary

New HBO Obama doc is race-obsessed establishment pablum meant to distract from the nefarious nature of American governance

The dull and derivative docuseries chooses hagiography over history and style over substance as it white-washes the sins of America’s only black president.

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is the new three-part HBO documentary that sets out to chronicle Barrack Obama’s rise from obscurity to the highest office in the land.

The roughly five-hour series, which features no new interview with Obama but rather relies on archival footage and a plethora of sycophantic talking heads, premiered on HBO on August 3rd, and on HBO Max on August 4th, the former president’s 60th birthday. What do you get the man who has everything for his birthday? If your director Peter W. Kunhardt you give the gift of a shamelessly reverential, hagiographic documentary.

Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is one of those insipid, paint-by-numbers, deferential documentaries that is steadfastly committed to never challenging either its subject or its audience that results in a banal viewing experience painfully devoid of insights.

Designed to do nothing but placate Obama true believers with some ‘no-drama’ nostalgia, the series is resolute in its decision to never give voice to any serious oppositional perspectives. Yes, there are a few talking heads, like the brilliant Cornel West, who delicately air disagreements, but even those are couched in solemn genuflection to Saint Obama.

Not once is someone who actually opposed Obama on principle interviewed or allowed to speak for themselves. The series uses this echo chamber approach in order to appease its target audience of liberals who demand all contrarians and conflicting arguments be purged from their purview, banished forever for their heresy from the kingdom of those “on the right side of history”.

Instead, the filmmakers choose to read minds and project racial animus onto those who fought Obama.

Disagree with Obamacare? Racist! Oppose the stimulus package? Racist!

Ironically, the hyper-racial lens through which the series examines Obama’s meteoric rise and rule is less a monument to America as a racist nation than it is a testament to Obama’s failure and shocking political irrelevance just five years after leaving office, as well as to the intellectual vacuity and lack of imagination on the part of elite establishment liberals.

In this way the docu-series is the perfect revisionist modernization of the Obama myth in that it’s addiction to hyper-racism causes it to be utterly blind to any other topic.

For instance, there isn’t a single mention of Obama’s prodigious use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, but there is an extended focus on black Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates being mistakenly arrested by Cambridge police.

There’s no mention of Obama’s immigration policy which resulted in massive deportations and routinely placing “kids in cages”, but there is a focus on Trump’s racist demagoguery and birtherism.

Obama’s complicity in the death and suffering in Yemen, Libya and Syria is verboten, but there is ample time spent on Obama’s love of basketball and his black-centric musical taste.

And of course, Obama’s extra-judicial assassination of American teenager Abdulrahman al-Awlaki is memory-holed but George Zimmerman’s killing of teenager Trayvon Martin is highlighted.

This hyper-racial perspective not only allows the filmmakers to ignore Obama’s egregious sins but to also roll out a cavalcade of kiss-ass clowns like Michael Eric Dyson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Charlamagne tha God, Keegan Michael Key and Jelani Cobb (an executive producer on the series) to spout vapid and impotent inanities about how white supremacy is the DNA of America. The fact that voters, the vast majority of which were not black, overwhelmingly elected a black man to the presidency, not once but twice, would seem to refute that claim.

With its maniacal focus on style over substance, Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union fits perfectly into the usual establishment approach toward all things political.

Style is how Obama got elected, as his cool, thoughtful demeanor and eloquence were in stark contrast to Bush’s cowboy buffoonery. In turn, Trump’s reality tv/wrestlemania shenanigans got him elected post no-drama Obama, and Biden’s creepy grandpa routine got him elected because he contrasted Trump’s erratic freneticism (speaking of which, Biden is shown in archival footage in the documentary but never speaks, no doubt because that would alert viewers to his steep decline since his halcyon VP days).

But regardless of which specific stylistic mask is worn and by which president, its objective is to cover the never-changing agenda of the American political establishment which is imperialism and militarism overseas and corporatism and fascism at home. No matter who or what party is in charge and no matter how they behave on the surface, that insidious reality will never be challenged or changed, and this is why Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union exists…to reinforce that duplicitous and distractionary style over substance paradigm.

Obama, the first black president, wasn’t elected to change the substance of American policy, he was elected to distract from it, and this docu-series gives ample ammunition to the gullible and mindless to continue to focus on race and identity politics instead of on the voracious malignancy of U.S. policy, most specifically the cancer of America’s rigged-casino capitalism and the insatiable beast of the military/intelligence industrial complex.

In conclusion, if you’re a “Hope and Change” sucker searching for a short-lived, rather vapid injection of Obama-era nostalgia, then Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union is definitely the documentary mini-series for you. But if you’re more interested in cold, hard truths and unflinching insights about Obama, his presidency and America, then this is a five-hour waste of time.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 45: Black Widow

On this episode Barry and I head back to the MCU and do battle with Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. A wide array of topics are discussed including ScarJo's falling star, Florence Pugh's bright future, Marvel's few missteps and The Rock as Humphrey Bogart.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 45: Black Widow

Thanks for listening!

©2021

HBO's 'The Prince' Animated TV Series: A Review

HBO’s new animated series ‘The Prince’ ruthlessly cuts the very deserving target of the British royal family down to size.

No doubt delicate viewers will find it repugnant, but the flawed show is funny enough to overcome what some may deem offensive.

HBO’s new aggressively irreverent animated series The Prince, which debuted on HBO Max on July 29th, sets its comedy sights on the target rich environment of the British royal family and relentlessly fires a ferocious fusillade of mockery at the monarchy.

The series, which is made up of twelve, 13-minute episodes and features such notable actors as Orlando Bloom, Allen Cumming and Sophie Turner, was first scheduled to premiere in the spring but HBO pushed that back out of sensitivity regarding Prince Philip’s death in April.

After having watched The Prince, which savagely lampoons all of the royals, I don’t think that deferential gesture will ease any hurt feelings among the Windsors.

The Prince’s caricatures of the royals are relentless and vicious. For instance, the Queen is a cruel, foul-mouthed, farting crime boss, and Prince Philip, a decrepit near cadaver.

Prince Charles is a spineless, big-eared, mealey-mouthed coward who berates his bride Camilla, a horse-faced mute, to get in the good graces of his mother.

Prince William and his wine-hound wife Princess Kate, are absolutely miserable and headed to divorce, are indifferent parents, and are incapable of doing even the most intimate of things without servants.

Speaking of servants, all of the royals are absolutely brutal towards ‘the help’. This is best portrayed by the devoted butler Owen (Allen Cumming), a sad-sack widower, and the two gay butlers, all of whom must delicately navigate the ever-shifting minefield of the monarchy or else find themselves fired…or worse.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are two of the more hysterical royal portrayals on the show, maybe because the caricatures of them seem more realistic due to their being such cartoonish people in real life.  

On The Prince the two of them are living in Melrose Place in Hollywood, and are subtly cross-eyed, which for some reason made me chuckle.

Meghan is a talentless actress and social climber leading the clueless Harry around by the nose, while Harry (voiced by an utterly brilliant Orlando Bloom) is such a dolt he cannot remember the name, or gender, of his baby, is astonished by the magic of refrigerators, and is so dumb as to be virtually unemployable.

That doesn’t stop him from trying though, as he reveals to Meghan that as a little-boy he dreamt of being a massage therapist, to which Meghan replies that as a little girl she too had a dream…of being a princess. A dead-eyed Harry then declares, “you kinda fucked that up”. Yes she did.

Meghan’s acting failures lead her and Harry to the Hollywood gutter of reality tv and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and then she brings reality tv to the royals, which culminates in a fistfight between the Queen and Lisa Rinna over a perceived slight to Ms. Rinna’s husband Harry Hamlin.

Then there’s Meghan and Harry’s HGTV show “Royally Screwed”, where they try and fix up houses on a budget for regular people. It goes about as well as you’d expect.

Considering the roasting Harry and Meghan receive on The Prince it’s no surprise that the show is on HBO as opposed to Netflix, as Harry and Meghan have a deal with Netflix rumored to be worth $100 million, and no doubt flex their royal muscles to squash the series and “protect their brand” if given the chance.

The main protagonist of The Prince though is Prince George, the 8-year-old heir to the throne and son of Prince William and Princess Kate, who is portrayed as an effeminate and obliviously and obnoxiously entitled child.

Prince George is basically Stewie Griffin from Family Guy but just a few years older, which should come as no surprise since the creator of The Prince is Gary Janetti, a writer for Family Guy.

And that is the biggest problem with The Prince, that it’s derivative of Family Guy.

The Prince follows the Family Guy formula with children acting like adults, adults acting like children, an extended musical number, and when mixed with Machiavellian palace intrigue, it all feels like ‘Family Guy Goes to Buckingham Palace’.

That’s not to say that the show isn’t funny, just that it isn’t original.

Some have been offended that The Prince is targeting a real-life 8-year-old, Prince George, with its comedy, and I suppose there’s some legitimacy to that. William and Kate are certainly displeased with the show, but to be honest, and maybe this is the Irish in me, I’ve a very hard time accepting a British royal, regardless of age, as a victim in any circumstance. It’s like with the Oscar winning movie The King’s Speech where we’re supposed to feel bad for the King George VI because he’s some stuttering, muttering jackass. No thank you.

Overall, The Prince is a mindless, quick watch. The episodes are short (13 minutes), don’t ask for much mental effort, and occasionally make you laugh…there are worse things in life. While I found it certainly could’ve been better, I also found it to be funny often enough.  

The best way to judge if The Prince is worth watching is to answer the question, do you like Family Guy? If Family Guy is a bridge too far for you, then The Prince is not a journey worthy of taking. But if you like exceedingly irreverent comedic shots taken at all things royal, then The Prince may very well be your cup of tea.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

'They Are Us' and the Tragedy Trap

The shutting down of ‘They Are Us’, the film about the Christchurch massacre of 2019, is the right thing to do for the wrong reason

Artists and audiences need time and emotional distance from a tragedy and trauma before they can make and appreciate any worthwhile cinema about it.

Last week pre-production for the film They Are Us, which intended to dramatize Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the killing of 51 Muslim worshipers by a white supremacist in Christchurch in 2019, was shut down due to outrage from New Zealand’s Muslim community which deemed the project “insensitive” and “obscene”.

The film, which had Rose Byrne set to star as Ardern, is now “on hold” and may have a difficult time exiting its self-induced purgatory. And maybe that’s for the best, at least for the time being.

I’m conflicted when it comes to this controversy, as I don’t believe that any group of people being offended, even righteously offended, by a film should ever stifle a project, but I also think that making a movie out of a recent tragedy is a bad idea because it rarely produces worthwhile cinema.

Generally, when a movie rushes to recount a recent tragedy it’s either cynically exploiting trauma to make a quick dollar, or it’s a piece of propaganda meant to manipulate the public.

In the case of They Are Us, it may very well be a combination of the two.

It’s highly curious to make a film focusing on a politician’s reaction to a recent real-life tragedy when that politician is still active in the political arena. It seems likely that They Are Us would be cashing in on a horrific tragedy by making a two-hour campaign commercial for Jacinda Ardern, which doesn’t exactly sound very artistically compelling.

The They Are Us controversy brought to my mind Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014), which told the story of Chris Kyle, a famed Navy SEAL murdered in 2013.

Kyle’s father told Eastwood “disrespect my son and I’ll unleash hell”, so the director dutifully made a hagiography that played up Kyle’s legend and ignored his fabulist tales of punching Jesse Ventura, shooting carjackers and sniping looters in New Orleans.

American Sniper was a propaganda popcorn movie and made tons of money by watering down not only Kyle’s complexity but the Iraq War’s as well. While commercially successful, artistically it was ultimately forgettable as it shamelessly promoted myth in favor of exploring truth.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion They Are Us would follow the same empty path regarding Ahearn and the massacre. Truth is that time and emotional distance are needed for artists to make noteworthy cinema about tragic events and audiences to be able to make sense of them.

For example, the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Vietnam was 1968 and it took a decade before Hollywood could adequately make a movie about that war. Deer Hunter (1978) and Apocalypse Now (1979) were the first to successfully ponder the Vietnam fiasco, with Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) and Born of the Fourth of July (1989), and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) continuing the exploration nearly a decade later.

Time and emotional distance greatly aided these films, their filmmakers and the viewers who digested them, as artists and audiences simply weren’t capable of diving into the horror of Vietnam in its immediate aftermath.

Oliver Stone has often gone back to examine the unhealed wounds of the American psyche. Twenty-eight years after JFK’s assassination he made his masterpiece JFK (1991), and twenty years after Richard Nixon’s downfall he made the brilliantly astute Nixon (1995).

The previously mentioned Vietnam war films and the Oliver Stone historical dramas succeeded artistically because they were constructed on a foundation of reason, and upon that foundation emotion and drama were built, whereas films made closer to traumatic events are usually built on a flimsy foundation of heightened emotion and therefore lack all meaning and purpose besides emoting and manipulating.

Speaking of manipulation, a perfect example of a movie exploiting an event for propaganda purposes is Zero Dark Thirty, which purported to tell the tale of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Zero Dark Thirty premiered in December of 2012, a quick year and nine months after Bin Laden’s killing, and was propaganda meant to lionize the Obama administration and the intelligence community as it played up the effectiveness of torture and played down its barbarity.

Similarly, United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass, premiered four and half years after 9-11 and exploited the raw emotion of that trauma to indelibly imprint upon the public’s consciousness through drama the government’s version of that heinous event.

Greengrass also made 22 July, about the 2011 massacre in Norway. 22 July came out in 2018, and like United 93, even some time had passed from the traumatic event it recounted, the emotional trauma was still too fresh. Both films are well made but the wounds they probed were too fresh for any valuable insights to be uncovered.

In contrast, Greengrass’s greatest film, Bloody Sunday, about the Bloody Sunday massacre in the north of Ireland by British troops in 1972, came out in 2002, thirty years after the events depicted. And while that movie is viscerally jarring and emotionally unnerving, it’s also powerfully poignant and insightful in ways that United 93 and 22 July simply aren’t because it had the benefit of time, distance and perspective.  

As for They Are Us, maybe a decade from now a worthwhile movie about the Christchurch massacre could be made as both artists and audiences will have had time to process that tragic event and be open to insights and interpretations of it that they’re immune to in the current, more emotionally fraught moment. Any movie made sooner than that will most assuredly only be exploiting trauma, rather exploring it for deeper meaning.

 A version fo this article was published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Episode 44 - Bo Burnham: Inside and the State of Comedy

Knock, knock. Who's there? Barry and I, that's who, and we're here to talk about comedy! On this episode we start out by sparring over comedian Bo Burnham's Netflix special Inside, and then end the program by giving our somewhat dire State of the Comedy Union address.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Episode 44 - Bo Burnham: Inside

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Oliver Stone, JFK: Revisited and the Establishment Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 43 : WandaVision/Falcon and Winter Soldier/Loki

On this unique episode Barry and Mike take a look at three Marvel series streaming on Disney Plus - WandaVision, The Falcon and Winter Soldier, and Loki. Topics discussed are the joys of Elizabeth Olsen, Tom Hiddleston's Loki long game, and Kevin Fiege as Marvel Timekeeper.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 43 : WandaVision/Falcon and Winter Soldier/Loki

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Space Jam: A New Legacy - A Review

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 23 seconds

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: YIKES!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Passion of Mel Gibson

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 44 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Black Widow: A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 47 seconds

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Popcorn Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

America: The Motion Picture - A Review and Commentary

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes and 22 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 42: No Sudden Move and Top Five Heist Movies

On this episode Barry and I try to make sense of director Steven Soderbergh's latest half-hearted effort No Sudden Move, and then shift gears for a wild discussion on their top 5 heist movies of all-time. Topics discussed include Frank Oz out in the cold in Montreal, the brilliance of Michael Mann, and an open invitation to John McTiernan.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota - Episode 42: No Sudden Move and Top Five Heist Movies

Thanks for listening!

©2021

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

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 19 seconds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021