J.K. Rowling Cast Out of Harry Potter Reunion

The Harry Potter movies are having a reunion, but a spell has been cast to keep J.K. Rowling and her alleged transphobia away from the festivities.

HBO Max will air the 20th anniversary reunion special but the creator of Harry Potter is persona non grata because she dared to speak the truth about the trans movement.

Twenty years-ago the magic of Harry Potter jumped from the page to the screen as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first movie of the Harry Potter franchise, premiered in cineplexes across the globe.

Now, after 8 total films based on books that sold more than 500 million copies, which raked in more than 7 billion galleons at the box office, Warner Brothers is celebrating the Harry Potter film franchise with a tv reunion set to air on HBO Max on January 1st, 2022.

All the surviving stars of the films and their directors will be there, including Daniel Radcliff (Harry Potter), Emma Watson (Hermione), Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) as well as Helena Bonham Carter (Bellatrix Lestrange), Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid), Ralph Fiennes (Voldemort), Gary Oldman (Sirius Black) and even Draco Malfoy himself, Tom Felton.

But, like a god cast out of an Eden of her own making, J.K. Rowling, creator of Harry Potter and literary hero to a whole generation of readers, will not be there to bask in the glow of her creative genius.

Neither Warner Brothers nor Rowling have explicitly stated so, but it appears that the author of the Harry Potter books who was intimately involved in the making of the movies, wasn’t invited to this Harry Potter party.  

Rowling’s egregious sin for which she has been banished from wizarding world and forced to wear a scarlet “T” for transphobe, is that she is a dutiful progressive on nearly every issue imaginable, but she just can’t bring herself to ignore objective biological reality and therefore refuses to fall under the insidious spell of the subjective lunacy of transgenderism.

The Rowling row heated up last year when, in response to an article that used the term “people who menstruate” instead of the word “women”, Ms. Rowling had the temerity to tweet, “People who menstruate, I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben?  Wimpund? Woomud?”

She followed that up with a tweet saying, “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

I whole-heartedly agree, but Rowling’s naivete is charming, as anyone with a first year Hogwarts education knows that in our damned world of lies, daring to speak the truth is now considered an expression of violent hate, if not an outright crime.

The author of Harry Potter becoming a scapegoat and being crucified on the “T” cross by trans radicals who live in their own imaginary and fantastical world with a bizarre vocabulary all its own, is such a deliriously delicious turn of events, I can’t help but think that Ms. Rowling appreciates both the irony and literary profundity of it all.

Rowling is now the muggle, a person without magical powers, who lives in ignorance of the wondrous wizarding world of the transgender. In her muggledom she is incapable of understanding the transfiguration, the art of turning one thing into another, of the trans, and is so far lost she can’t see the trans for the glorious centaurs that they are.

The real magic in this story is the black arts performed by the woke who have cast a spell that has transformed a resilient woman who left an abusive marriage and rose from abject poverty to build a multi-billion dollar empire, despite being labelled a purveyor of the occult by fundamentalist Christians, by using nothing but the power of her imagination to charm and enchant children and families across the globe, into a pilloried pariah because she “refuses to ‘bow down’ to  a movement seeking ‘to erode women as a political and biological class.”

The insipid ‘pronouned’ woke, who proudly declare their pronouns of choice, and those who are trans or who reflexively support the trans movement, are at war with not just J.K. Rowling, but with the English language and biological and objective reality.

I’m not a Harry Potter fan, but as I’ve watched her be relentlessly chastised in this culture war battle by these malicious and nefarious nit-wits, I’ve become a fan of JK Rowling.  

Unlike the spineless fools at Warner Brothers who have lined their pockets on her creation, and the ungrateful simps like Radcliffe, Watson and Grint, who wouldn’t have careers if it weren’t for Rowling, and who now chastise and shun her, J.K. Rowling actually has a moral, ethical and intellectual compass. Unlike them she won’t play the rigged game of transgender quidditch and bend the knee to appease a loud but absurdly inane movement trying to force everyone to accept a distorted subjective experience as unquestioned objective reality.

Good for her.

Now instead of wasting her time at the HBO Max Harry Potter reunion hob-knobbing with artistic midgets who all lack her genius, resilience and courage, and who degrade themselves by worshipping at the golden calf of transgender wokeness, Rowling can sit in her castle made of money and bask in her own brilliance knowing that she alone in the extended Harry Potter world has the most elusive yet magical power of all…integrity.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 50 - Eternals

On this episode, newly crowned B-listers Barry and I examine the Marvel monstrosity, Eternals, directed by Chloe Zhao. Topics discussed include Ms. Zhao's shortcomings, Marvel's misfires and its murky future going forward, as well as my lamenting "what happened to Harry Styles?"

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 50 - Eternals

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Mayor Pete: Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A contrived, and unintentionally hysterical, hour and half long campaign commercial for Pete Buttigieg, the relentlessly vapid and vacuous narcissistic sociopath White House wannabe.

This year has been a banner one for sycophantic documentaries of political figures.

First there was the eye-rolling, ass-kissing HBO documentary mini-series Obama: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Then National Geographic gave us the insidiously fawning Fauci.

Now Amazon has rolled out what may be the most unintentionally funny bit of homosexual hagiography in documentary history, Mayor Pete, which chronicles Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.

The film starts one year before the Iowa Caucuses with South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg gearing up for his historic run as the first openly gay candidate for the presidency.

The opening sequence begins with a voice off-camera, I think it is Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten Buttigieg, lovingly telling the candidate, “don’t bullshit us, Peter!”

Mayor Pete and its diminutive subject then spend the next hour and half relentlessly bullshitting us, as this movie is less a documentary than it is an hour and a half long campaign commercial.

What’s so funny about Mayor Pete is that the couple at its center, Pete and his husband Chasten, who both appear to have been the recipients of charisma bypass surgery, have all the chemistry of two strangers sitting across from each other in the waiting room of a contagious disease clinic. When the two of them kiss it’s like watching lip-transplant patients trying to kiss for the first time. I suppose it’s a sign of progress that an openly gay man can now run for president and be in just as loveless a marriage as all of the straight candidates he’s competing against.

Another amusing thing about the documentary was that as it wore on, I realized of whom Pete Buttigieg reminded me…it’s the sociopathic serial killer Dexter who, coincidentally, recently returned to television after an eight-year absence. Did Dexter flee Miami after his last killing spree and hide out in South Bend, become mayor, and is now running for president? Find out on Dexter: New Blood.

Like Dexter, the wooden Pete works extremely hard to try to convince people he’s a normal person, yet his dead eyes give away the game. The guy exerts so much energy pretending to be human, he comes across as entirely inhuman.

Like the film that documents him, Pete Buttigieg is so contrived and manufactured I didn’t believe anything about him. I spent half the time wondering if Pete’s face was a skin-mask from one of his alter-ego Dexter’s unfortunate victims, or if he was just pretending to be gay in order to increase his electoral chances.   

Pete so aggressively pushes his homosexuality as his main selling point the ridiculous notion of his sexuality being just a function of branding and not biology started to seem considerably less absurd. Would any Democrat pay any attention at all to Pete if he were straight? No, of course not.

This is why Pete puts his homosexuality front and center, it gives him the precious political commodity of victimhood which translates to credibility in the eyes of identity-obsessed Democrats. This victimhood is enhanced in the movie with two scenes of homophobic protests against Pete, which are so buffoonish they feel staged.

Buttigieg’s husband Chasten too makes being gay the be all and end all of his identity. There’s a sequence in the film where Chasten goes to a gay camp for kids and leads them in the pledge of allegiance to the gay camp flag, and then dresses potatoes up as drag queens, which felt like the funniest skit Saturday Night Live has never aired.

There’s another sequence where Chasten is complaining that all the Democratic candidates have their wives on stage with them on election night in Iowa, except for Pete. Even Pete grows tired of Chasten’s whining at this point and resorts to ignoring him when placating fails.

Another immensely amusing thing about Mayor Pete is watching Buttigieg navigate the victimhood pyramid of the Democratic party.

Pete is constantly seen contemplating, rehearsing and then spouting platitudes regarding race. Most notably at a town hall in South Bend after a white cop kills a black man in the city.

In another scene, Pete is seen strategizing over race and he says of his efforts, “make sure it doesn’t read as very white.” Then the documentary cuts to Pete and Al Sharpton having lunch together in Harlem. Chef’s kiss.

As funny as that is, it pales in comparison to the ass-kissing of Joe Biden that the film and its subject engage in.

For example, after an impromptu conversation between Biden and Buttigieg in Iowa, the film cuts to Pete enthusiastically telling an aide that Biden is “such a good guy!”

Later after Buttigieg drops his presidential bid, he gets a call from Biden, and we eavesdrop on the conversation between the two. Mayor Pete the movie, and Mayor Pete the man, are both so affected and manipulative I couldn’t help but wonder if all of these scenes about Biden were staged well after the events of the 2020 primary.

Biden ultimately made Buttigieg the youngest and first openly gay Secretary of Transportation in U.S. history. In that role his greatest accomplishments thus far are taking paternity leave and saying that some roads are racist.

Fans of Buttigieg shouldn’t fret though, because as Mayor Pete reveals, Pete is addicted to style and allergic to substance, and is also malignantly vapid, vacuous, ambitious, narcissistic and sociopathic, which means he meets all the requirements to be the President of the United States of America. His ascension feels inevitable. God help us all.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass - Documentary Review and Commetary

My Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. An insightful documentary well worth a watch. It isn’t perfect, but it is important.

Oliver Stone’s JFK hit theaters in 1991 and sent shockwaves through Washington and the corporate media because it was a compelling cinematic counter-myth to the equally fantastical Warren Report.

The Praetorian guards of the establishment in the halls of power and press met the film with ferocity as they set out to debunk and defang it, as it directly challenged their narrative and thus their authority. They failed. JFK was nominated for 8 Academy Awards and brought in over $200 million at the box office. More importantly though, it broke the spell of public indifference and somewhat loosened establishment obstruction in regards to the JFK assassination.

In the film’s wake the President John F Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 was passed and the Assassination Records Review Board set up and funded.

Now, thirty years later Oliver Stone is back, this time with a documentary streaming on Showtime, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, which sticks its thumb in the eye of those who mindlessly espouse the “official” story of JFK’s assassination as the truth.

As someone interested in the JFK assassination, and who has read a multitude of books on the subject across the spectrum, from Gerald Posner’s ‘Case Closed’ and Vincent Bugliosi’s ‘Reclaiming History’ to Jim Marrs’ ‘Crossfire’ and James W. Douglass’ ‘JFK and the Unspeakable’, finding a decent documentary worthy of a watch on the topic is a challenge.

Thankfully, Stone has stepped up to the plate with JFK Revisited, a serious work and worthy documentary that offers a coherent, if limited, counter theory to the official JFK assassination story.

The film runs a brisk two-hours, features a bevy of talking heads, including John M. Newman (whose two books ‘JFK and Vietnam’ and ‘Oswald and the CIA’ are terrific), David Talbot (who wrote ‘The Devil’s Chessboard’ – another fantastic book), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., James K. Galbraith, Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Henry Lee, and is a well-paced primer that would be a useful launching pad for anyone interested in diving even deeper into the assassination.

There is a four-hour cut of the film which will allegedly be made available to the public in the new year, and I’m looking forward to seeing that version as I assume it gets more into the specifics of who did the actual shooting, a subject the at-times rushed two-hour version foregoes in favor of more foundational topics.

The film does examine a plethora of fascinating JFK assassination topics though, including Oswald’s numerous and obvious connections to the intelligence community. The Warren Commission’s, the intel community’s and the media’s knowing distortions and deceptions regarding the assassination. The fantasy of the magic bullet theory. The contradictory medical evidence from Parkland Hospital in Dallas and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. The other remarkably similar plots to kill Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa leading up to Dallas, which included other Oswald-esque patsies Thomas Arthur Vallee and Gilberto Lopez. As well as the story of Abraham Bolden, the first black secret service agent, who tried to inform authorities of the Chicago plot but instead of being hailed a hero was railroaded and sent to prison.

JFK Revisited also spotlights the struggle between Kennedy and the political establishment. Kennedy’s famed American University speech of June 1963, where he laid out his vision for a newfound, peaceful American foreign policy, opens the film. This vision is foundational to ‘the why’ of Stone’s theory regarding the assassination as it provides motive for the intelligence agencies and military to act to remove a president they deemed soft on communism and weak in general.

Kennedy wanted to promote anti-colonialism, normalize relations with Cuba, not make the same mistake as the French in Vietnam, and have détente with the Soviets, even including combining efforts in the space race.

The Intelligence community and Pentagon had a very different and much more nefarious agenda. They were busy eliminating Lumumba in the Congo, fomenting a military coup in France, conjuring both the Bay of Pigs and Operation Northwoods – which would use false flag terror attacks on U.S. targets to force a war in Cuba, and pushing for American escalation in Vietnam.

This is why Kennedy moved to reduce the CIA budget by 20%, fired CIA warhorse Allen Dulles (who curiously enough would become a powerful member of the Warren Commission), and famously declared he would shatter the CIA into a million pieces. According to Stone, the CIA beat Kennedy to the punch as it shattered his skull into a million pieces in Dealey Plaza, on November 22nd, 1963.

The gaping, gangrenous wound at the heart of America that rots our national soul, was born on that fateful day, and it still festers and it still matters.

Unlike both malignant political parties and the shameless corporate media, Oliver Stone, whose status as pariah is the fuel that powers all his documentaries, understands this, and he’s trying to heal that wound by seeking out the truth regarding JFK’s killing.

While the establishment may ignore JFK Revisited, the general public shouldn’t. It’s a useful and insightful film for anyone who wants to understand their government and what it’s willing to do in order to maintain its grip on power and the lucrative status quo.

Seek JFK Revisited out and watch it, it isn’t perfect, but it is vitally important.

For other JFK assassination related articles - check these out.

JFK and the Conspiracy Coundrum

JFK and the Media: The House Always Wins

JFK and the Big Lie

Oliver Stone, JFK Revisited and the Establishment Media

The Media Hates Conspiracy Theories…Except When They Don’t

Oliver Stone: Top Five Films

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey: Eternals

On this episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey I review the newest Marvel monstrosity Eternals.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 49 - Dune

On this episode, Barry and I head to Arrakis to ponder Denis Villaneuve's sprawling space epic Dune. Topics touched upon include Villaneuve's appealing style but curious lack of brand, Jason Mamoa as a force of nature, and Barry's highly erotic and inappropriate man-crush on Timothee Chalamet.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 49 - Dune

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Eternals: A Review and Commentary

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Just a dismal, dull and dopey god-awful mess of a movie which is in the running to be the worst Marvel movie ever.

The new Marvel movie Eternals, written and directed by Oscar winning Best Director Chloe Zhao, and starring a cavalcade of stars including Angelina Jolie, is supposed to be the blue print for the newest phase of the multi-billion-dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Kevin Feige, the MCU mastermind who intricately weaved 25 movies into a coherent over-arching narrative that dominated pop culture for almost 15 years, said of the movie, “The impact Eternals will have on the MCU will be nothing less than redefining the cinematic universe entirely.”

That declaration should scare the crap out of Marvel fanatics and Disney executives alike because Eternals is as catastrophically atrocious a cinematic venture as Marvel has churned out in their 26-film run.

The film, which has an ungodly two-hour and thirty-seven-minute run time that often feels eternal, tells the story of the Eternals, a bunch of immortal super-beings sent to earth to protect humanity from the Deviants, a group of vicious, wiry monsters. Superhero movies are often only as good as their villains, and the Deviants are as generic as it gets.

I’d dive deeper into the plot, which frequently jumps back and forth in time, but it’s so convoluted as to be incoherent.

Think of the Eternals as sort Avengers Plus, as they’re more akin to ancient gods than they are to modern superheroes. The Eternals are comprised of Sersi, Ikaris, Thena, Kingo, Phastos, Sprite, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh and Ajak.

Unlike with The Avenger films, which featured well-known characters, many of which had already had multiple solo films to explore their background and inner life, part of the problem with Eternals is that the superheroes on display are not well-known to casual fans. So, the movie must try and develop the characters and the audience’s connections to them on the fly while also attempting to entertain. It fails miserably at all of these endeavors.

The blame for these failings falls on writer/director Chloe Zhao, who is utterly hapless and hopeless at the helm. Zhao, who is respected as a maker of small, intimate, introspective films like Nomadland, is completely out of her depth on the sprawling Eternals as she flounders in every aspect of the storytelling. The pacing is abysmal, the character development nearly non-existent and the dialogue forced, trite and overwhelmed with exposition.

In addition, the visuals of the film are flat, the CGI second-rate, and the action sequences dull, unimaginative and repetitive. Every fight sequence features someone being “unexpectedly” saved from sure death by the swift action of an unseen superhero off-screen swooping in at the last minute, and consistently throughout “Eternals assemble” type shots - where all the characters come together in a line in a movie poster pose, rear their manufactured head.

Another major problem with Eternals is that in our age of wokeness and corporate virtue signaling, it seems more concerned with waving the diversity, representation and inclusion flag than with making an entertaining movie.

The wokeness on display in Eternals is so inane as to be ridiculous. For example, in the comics, Ajak, leader of the Eternals, is a man, but in the movie he’s a middle-aged Mexican woman (an uncharismatic Salma Hayek). Latina box checked.

Makkari, the Eternals’ Flash-like superhero, is no longer a white guy like in the comics, but instead is now a mixed-race woman who is deaf for some inexplicable reason, and of course, is played by a mixed-race, deaf actress, Lauren Ridloff. Disability box checked.

In the comics, Phastos is a muscular bad-ass black man, but in the movie, he’s transformed into a frumpy gay guy played by Brian Tyree Henry. It goes without saying that a gay kiss is featured in the film, no doubt used to hit over the head the people too dense to pick up on Phastos’ homosexuality by the fact that he has a husband. LGBTQ box checked.

Considering that Marvel movies are usually populated by beautiful people in skin tight outfits, Henry is an odd choice to play the first openly gay character in a Marvel movie. Unlike his co-star Kumail Nunjiani, who obviously spent an inordinate amount of time in the gym transforming his body to look more Marvel-ish to play the comic relief character Kingo, Henry looks as if he’s allergic to exercise in general and barbells in particular. I like Henry as an actor, but he is woefully miscast in this role.

Speaking of the casting, the usually luminous Angelina Jolie just looks odd and bored as Thena, and the beautiful Gemma Chan is exposed as being rather anemic as the film’s lead Sersi.

The only bright spot was Richard Madden, who was surprisingly dynamic as Ikaris, so much so that I actually thought he might make a passable James Bond should the opportunity ever present itself.

As of this writing, Eternals has a well-earned Rotten Tomatoes critical score of 49%, the lowest in MCU history. Considering all the blatant woke pandering in the film, and critics’ consistent genuflection at the altar of all things “diverse”, the dismal Rotten Tomatoes critical score is even more damning.

Making money is currently baked into the Marvel cake, and Eternals will no doubt have decent box office returns, but the film is the poster child for Marvel entering the creative bankruptcy phase of its self-destruction.

If, as Marvel guru Feige claims, Eternals is the blue print for the next phase of the MCU, then “get woke, go broke” will be made manifest as Disney/Marvel are killing their cinematic cash cow by worshipping the golden calf of wokeness and sacrificing quality and entertainment at its altar.

Eventually, audiences will tire of this type of hackneyed and hollow identity-politics based pandering and shoddy filmmaking, and Disney/Marvel will have no one to blame but themselves.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Succession is Glorious Fun, but the Oligarchical Media Empire it Dramatizes is a Harsh Reality

HBO’s ‘Succession’ is a glorious guilty pleasure but the oligarchical family run media empire it dramatizes is actually a horrifying and harsh reality.

Four families control the majority of American media, and the Roy family of ‘Succession’ is an entertaining and clever amalgam of the dysfunction of them all.

Succession, HBO’s deliriously addictive and seductive soap opera that follows the travails of the Roy family dynasty and their media and business empire, is back in full swing for its highly anticipated third season.

The show is obviously a work of fiction, but the blueprint of the story is frighteningly familiar to anyone paying attention to our ever-consolidating media landscape lorded over by an oligarchy of just four families.

If you’ve not seen it, Succession is a sort of Shakespearean stew of palace intrigue set in the uber-wealthy and powerful world of monopolized media’s master class. It’s kind of what you’d get if you tossed King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth and Hamlet into a witch’s brew with the Murdoch, Redstone, Cox and Roberts families that control most of America’s media market.

The Roy family of Succession, with patriarch Logan and sons Kendall, Roman and Connor and daughter Siobhan, is most often likened to the media mogul Murdoch family.

The 80-year-old Logan, played with scowling ferocity by the inimitable Bryan Cox, is reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch’s combative and domineering leadership of NewsCorp. Logan’s sprawling media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo and its conservative cable news channels certainly bear a resemblance to the star-spangled simp-fest of Fox News.

Logan’s dueling sons Kendall, exquisitely portrayed by Jeremy Strong, and Roman, a fantastic Kieran Culkin, also bear some similarities to Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, as does their internecine warfare to find favor with, or advantage over, their powerful father.

The scandal that befalls Waystar RoyCo, with accusations of sexual misconduct and the like, is also eerily familiar to the tawdry accusations that knee-capped Fox News and its leader Roger Ailes and star Bill O’Reilly.

But the Murdochs aren’t the only family dynasty running a media empire for Succession to emulate. Another is the Redstone family, long led by Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020.

Sumner’s media empire of Viacom/CBS/Paramount certainly resembled Waystar, and his personal life is akin to Logan Roy’s too, as it’s littered with adultery, charges of cruelty and failed relationships with women.

The most striking resemblance though between Logan Roy and Sumner Redstone is that they both have/had ambitious daughters. Logan’s daughter, Siobhan, gloriously portrayed by the beguiling Sarah Snook, is making a calculated bid for the family throne, similar to Sumner’s daughter Shari, who battled with her father over control of the family business and ultimately took over his vast empire after his death.

Sumner’s son, Brent, who in Roy-esque fashion sued his father and sister Shari, and was eventually bought out after he was removed from the board of Viacom’s parent company National Amusements.

Besides the Murdochs and the Redstones, the Cox and Roberts families are also Succession-like dynasties whose family business is media empire.

Cox Enterprises, with its major subsidiaries Cox Communications and Cox Media Group, is run by James Cox Kennedy, grandson of the company’s founder, James M. Cox, a two-time Governor of Ohio.

Kennedy’s earthy mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his cosmopolitan aunt, Anna Cox Chambers, long had controlling intertest of the family empire in spite of their love/hate, very distant relationship, which seems eerily similar to Logan Roy’s relationship with his estranged brother Ewan Roy.

Kennedy eventually took over the massive company from his aunt at the age of 41, and while the aristocratic Cox family isn’t as prone to paparazzi or media prying as the Redstones and Murdochs, they’re just as powerful.

The same is true of the Roberts family, which founded and runs mammoth telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. Billionaire Brian L. Roberts took over Comcast at the tender young age of 31 from his father Ralph and now runs the media monster that includes NBC/Universal.

Brian’s ascent to corporate power was swift, but despite siblings having no interest in the family business, he still solidified his powerful position as CEO and Chairman by pulling up the drawbridge and literally having his leadership written into Comcast’s articles of incorporation. There will be no sibling coup d’etat at Comcast.

The same is certainly not true on Succession which is why it’s such a fun show to watch. But despite being an eminently compelling and entertaining piece of capitalism porn, the reality it dramatizes is both horrifying and dispiriting.

Having just four families be the movers, shakers and opinion makers controlling so much of America’s media, controlling discourse, manufacturing consent and silencing dissent, is detrimental to democracy if not terminal to the republic.

These aristocrats and oligarchs, despite their pretentious and vacuous displays of philanthropy, are populated by spoiled and sadistic monsters who only care about preserving the status quo in order to secure and ensure their egregious wealth and power.

These monopolist corporate tyrants use their wealth and propaganda power to influence politicians tasked with regulating them to get further expansion of their family businesses, so that they can then use their expanded wealth and propaganda power to further pressure politicians to allow further expansion of their wealth and propaganda power. This endless cycle of corruption is corroding the core foundations of American democracy as it allows these family run media misinformation manufacturers to keep the public perpetually disinformed and deceived.

Ultimately, we can turn off Succession and walk away from its spectacle of egregious privilege and dramatic display of family intrigue, but unfortunately reality is just a less entertaining but more depressing version of the same insidious disease.

I love Succession, I just wish it was total fantasy and not a terrifyingly real glimpse of the four oligarchical families manipulating our minds through their mendacious media machines.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Colin in Black and White: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Colin Kaepernick’s new Netflix autobiography ‘Colin in Black and White’ is the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism that reveals hims to be an entitled, self-absorbed jerk.  

Colin in Black and White is the new mini-series on Netflix that dramatizes Colin Kaepernick’s teenage years where he struggles against racism and to be taken seriously as a quarterback.

Kaepernick, if you’ll remember, once led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl and made a name for himself by kneeling during the national anthem at NFL games to protest against racial injustice, police brutality and systematic oppression.

I utterly loathe flag fetishism as a mindless display of vacuousness, so I never had a problem with Kaepernick’s protests. I disagree with him on some of the specifics of his stance, but I always respected his kneeling. The way I see it, if the NFL wants to turn their games into de facto celebrations of militarism, then players kneeling shouldn’t be beyond the pale.

I also think it’s obvious that Kaepernick was unjustly black-balled by the league for his protests. While I admit that Kaepernick is a very specific and unique QB talent and that his skill set isn’t a fit on every team, it’s ludicrous to think he couldn’t at least have been a back-up somewhere. Of course, that brings up the question of whether he would accept that secondary role and at a price below what he thinks he deserves.

The reason I mention my moderate stance on the controversial Kaepernick is because I want to make it clear I went into watching Colin in Black and White without an axe to grind against the man, quite the opposite actually.

Having said that, let me tell you that Colin in Black and White isn’t just an amateurish tv show so awful it would be laughable as an after school special, it also exposes Kaepernick as being quite a despicable and deplorable human being.

This show is like the Super Bowl of self-pitying narcissism and Kaepernick is Bart Starr, Joe Montana and Tom Brady wrapped into one.

The series opens by literally transforming the NFL combine into a slave auction. Besides the fact that the NFL combine is something so elitist most football players of any race can only ever dream about attending, and that players at the combine have worked their whole lives to get there and are competing to become draft picks and multi-millionaires with generational wealth who’ll be worshiped like gods in our culture…yeah…the combine is EXACTLY like a slave auction.

Colin Kaepernick’s ignorance about the horrors of actual slavery is to be expected though since his social justice warrior pose and victimhood addiction apparently makes him blind, deaf and dumb regarding Nike, the company he has a big endorsement deal with that uses slave labor to make its profits. Of course, Nike is immune from Kaepernick’s social justice posing because they give him a fair share of their blood money.

It’s equally absurd witnessing real-life Colin watch and comment as his teenage screen version pouts and preens like a cheap tart at a red-light street over his anger and disappointment that the best colleges in the country want to give him a baseball scholarship, and Major League Baseball wants to draft him and give him a million-dollar signing bonus, and the prettiest white girls in school throw themselves at him, while all little Colin wants is to get a scholarship to play QB and have a black girlfriend. Boo fucking hoo.

What really turned my stomach though about Colin in Black and White is that Kaepernick’s adoptive, working-class white parents, insipidly portrayed by Mary Louise Parker and Nick Offerman, are depicted as vapid racist caricatures.

The fact that Kaepernick, who co-created this series with Ava Duvernay, would belittle, demean and slander the couple (who are still alive) that raised, loved and nurtured him from infancy, and shelled out big bucks by paying for travel baseball and high-end specialized QB coaches to help him achieve his dream, is repugnant and repulsive.

In one episode where Kaepernick’s adoption is briefly explored, the show frames his soon-to-be parents as deciding to adopt Colin only after another adoption falls through. Kaepernick then chimes in with his woe-is-me wail that “since the day I was born, I’ve never been anyone’s first choice.”

Again, boo fucking hoo Kaepernick, you sad sack clown. Your parents actually chose you. They got up in the middle of the night to feed you and change you, they held you and loved you, they gave everything to you and they moved heaven and earth to make your dreams come true, and because they’re a different skin color than you, you reward them, not with gratitude, or respect, or love, but with a tv show that bends over backwards to publicly ridicule them. That says more about you, Kaepernick, than it does about your parents.

Of course, Kaepernick turns everything into racism because he’s a nitwit incapable of understanding anything else. So, when he and his parents disagree over the usual things teenagers and parents disagree over…hair styles, facial hair, wardrobe, choice in girlfriends, Colin sees this as proof of the racist conspiracy against him.

Due to Kaepernick’s desperate need for victimhood, everyone is racist in his eyes…coaches, referees, umpires, opposing fans, opponents, hotel employees, his parents. The fact that schools weren’t tripping over Kaepernick too is because of racism.

The word that kept popping into my head as I watched this self-pitying shitshow was pathetic.  There is absolutely nothing quite as egregiously pathetic as a grown man wallowing in long past perceived slights from adolescence. Nothing.

Adding to the idiocy is that Kaepernick, dressed all in black with a massive afro, looking like Morpheus from The Matrix wearing a wig as a joke, interjects various tidbits of racial knowledge throughout the show. Kaepernick is so hysterically ridiculous in these segments he seems like a character from Dave Chappelle on The Chappelle Show or Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live.

On the bright-side, Jaden Michael plays teenage Kaepernick on the show, and as bad as the show is, he’s terrific. Despite not having a lick of athleticism in his body, he’s a compelling screen presence and an actor who conveys an intriguing inner life. He’s a talent to watch.

A talent not to watch is Colin Kaepernick, whose NFL career is most certainly over, and considering his dead-eyed appearance on the self-serving, self-aggrandizing, self-pitying, celebration of delusional victimhood, Colin in Black and White, which reveals his truly loathsome nature and intellectual midgetry, one can only hope he disappears from the public eye as well. The sooner the better.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Dopesick: Miniseries Review and Commentary

Hulu’s new opioid epidemic drama, Dopesick, is a must-see mini-series in the age of vaccine mandates.

The series dramatizes the mendacity and corruption of big pharma and lays bare how the powerful in business and government callously and cruelly harm regular folks for ungodly profits and unchallenged power.

Dopesick, the new dramatic mini-series about the opioid crisis on Hulu, is a flawed show, but despite its shortcomings, it’s most definitely must-see television.

The eight-episode series is compulsory viewing because in this age of vaccine mandates, where anything short of unabashed adoration of big pharma and government health agencies, as well as compulsive compliance to their edicts, leaves you ostracized from society, it lays bare the corrosive corruption of capitalism on “science” and exposes egregious government complicity with a pharmaceutical company that directly led to the holocaust of the opioid epidemic.

Dopesick is based upon Beth Macy’s non-fiction book of the same name and that, as well as ‘Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic’ by Barry Meier, ‘American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts’ by Chris McGreal, and ‘Dreamland’ by Sam Quinones, should be mandatory reading for everyone in order to understand the scope and scale of the opioid epidemic as well as the sinister machinations that launched it.

The Hulu mini-series tells the story of the hell unleashed when OxyContin hit the market. Unfortunately, the performances can sometimes be a bit uneven, and the show also does falter when it unnecessarily gets distracted with woke pandering on feminist and LGBT issues, but thankfully that irritant doesn’t diminish the vital tale of big pharma mendacity and government malfeasance at the heart of the story.

Some of the interesting stories featured include Dr. Finnix (a terrific Michael Keaton), a small-town doctor who gets seduced first by the drug company and then by the drug itself, Betsy Mallum (Kaitlyn Dever), a working-class girl who became a slave to Oxy and Federal Prosecutor Rick Mountcastle (Peter Sarsgaard) and DEA agent Bridget Meyer (a dismal Rosario Dawson), both swimming against the tide as they try to hold Purdue Pharma accountable for the carnage it has unleashed.

Also dramatized are the wholly dysfunctional Sackler clan, owners of Purdue Pharma.

The Sacklers are a greedy and loathsome bunch. Arthur Sackler invented medical marketing back in the 1940’s and 50’s, and came up with Valium as “mother’s little helper”, also creating a use for the drug to treat the ever-amorphous ailment of general anxiety.

Arthur’s nephew Richard Sackler (Michael Stuhlbarg) attempted much the same with OxyContin.

In the late 1980’s, Purdue Pharma was in danger of losing its patent on MS Contin, a morphine pill for cancer patients that was the company’s main source of income, and would face a financial calamity when cheaper generic versions of the drug hit the market.

It was in this desperation that OxyContin, a longer lasting version of the opioid oxycodone, was born. The drug was introduced in 1996 and was aggressively promoted.

Purdue created dummy pain organizations and media outlets as their propaganda division to push the narrative of an “epidemic of untreated pain” ravaging America. These organizations, like the American Pain Society, lobbied the medical establishment to make pain the “fifth vital sign”, and succeeded.

Remarkably, Purdue then got the FDA, despite no studies showing this claim to be true, to allow the company to put a label on OxyContin saying that danger of addiction was extremely low. In a stunning coincidence, the FDA official who granted this extraordinary label request, Curtis Wright, months later left the FDA to take a $400,000 job at…Purdue Pharma.

Purdue then unleashed its hyper-aggressive salesforce armed with the carrot of gifts, free meals and vacations, as well as the stick of lawsuits from patients if doctors didn’t prescribe Oxy, into medical offices specifically targeted by a database that focused on painkiller prescriptions, disability claims and loose regulations.  

The salesforce was also armed with a plethora of dubious marketing materials that claimed “less than 1%” of users will become addicted to Oxy.

The sales staff referenced the Porter-Jick study as proof of the ‘less than 1%” claim, and that became the cornerstone of the “pain treatment” movement and was even taught in medical schools across the country.

The stunning revelation about the Porter-Jick study is that it isn’t a study at all. It’s just the anecdotal observations of a crank doctor complaining in a five-sentence letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Purdue’s strategy only became more dubious and depraved as time wore on.

Oxy was supposed to work for 12 hours a dose, but for many people the effect didn’t last nearly that long. Purdue called this issue, “breakthrough pain”, which sounds an awful lot like “breakthrough infections” in regard to Covid.

“Breakthrough pain” was treated by doubling the dose. When the 10mg fails, you go to 20mg, then to 40mg…on up to the mother of all pills the 160mg.

When addiction quickly followed, Purdue claimed that the signs and symptoms of addiction weren’t really addiction, it was an ailment called “pseudo-addiction”, and pseudo-addiction is really just untreated pain and the only remedy for it is…you guessed it…more OxyContin.

The answer to everything was more OxyContin. And of course, with more Oxy comes more addiction, more death, more suffering, more despair, and more profits.

A similar paradigm seems to be in play regarding Covid vaccines, which when they fail results in calls for boosters, which in turn leads to more profit for big pharma. Like with the financial collapse of 2007/2008, failure can be remarkably profitable for big shots.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for or against vaccines, I’m advocating for critical thinking. The gullible and the goaded are fools to take big pharma or government’s word for gospel truth, be it about Covid, WMDs, or anything else, especially when profit and power can be gained by lying. As Dopesick teaches us, the wisest approach is skepticism regarding big pharma and government’s claims and cynicism regarding their motives.

Ultimately, Dopesick is a worthy watch because it tells the ugly truth about what the powerful are willing to do to regular folks, up to and including killing them, in order to make an ungodly profit.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Dune: A Review

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

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. A visual marvel but ultimately a rather barren drama. Readers of the book will follow the action and bask in the film’s staggeringly sumptuous cinematography, but neophytes to the story will be left completely dumbfounded.

Dune, Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel, has long been deemed “unfilmable”, and depending on your perspective regarding director Denis Villeneuve’s new ambitious big budget adaptation, that label may very well still apply.

Dune is a complex and complicated story of empires and religious mysticism set in a future that is structurally not too different from the medieval past. It’s sort of, but not exactly, a cross between Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars…but nowhere near as good as either.

In Dune, the planet Arrakis, a barren and desolate sandscape, is a key piece on the political chessboard because it’s the only place in the universe that has “spice”, which is both a hallucinogenic drug used by the Fremen – the Bedouin’s of Arrakis, but more importantly, a vital element that makes interstellar travel possible. Dune appears to be a loose metaphor for various empires lust for oil in the Middle East over the years.

The machinations that bring the rulers of House Atreidis, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac), Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their teenage son Paul (Timothee Chalamet) to Arrakis by imperial decree to replace the brutish House of Harkonnen, which has ruled the planet for generations, are never clearly spelled out in the film.

In fact, much of what happens in the film is not clearly spelled out, which is why the movie is so impenetrable for those who haven’t read the book. Fortunately for me, I’ve read enough of the book to know what was happening, but unfortunately not enough to why it’s happening.

The film is actually just “Part One” of Dune, and one can’t help but wonder if Warner Brothers is waiting to see how well the movie does at the box office before greenlighting further films.

It seems to me that the problem for Dune is that it’s much too esoteric and unexplainable to be able to generate enough of a box-office bonanza to induce funding for a second picture. This is also why the notion of Dune generating Star Wars/Marvel levels of excitement among audiences seems highly unlikely.

An issue with Dune is that, unlike the first Star Wars, it isn’t a stand-alone movie. Star Wars had a very a satisfying ending all its own – the destruction of the death star. The film’s sequels only added to that experience, they didn’t make it. With Dune, the ending of Part One is in no way satisfactory, and it’s relying on future films to elevate audience’s experiences.

In fact, Dune’s climactic scenes are so mundane and dramatically insignificant it feels like the main story hasn’t yet begun when the final credits roll.

What makes the Marvel franchise so successful is that it can be glorious for audience members who know the source material, as well as digestible and entertaining for viewers who’ve never read a comic book in their lives.

The same is not true for Dune. If you haven’t read ‘Dune’, you will, like the U.S. when it rolled into the Middle East thinking it would impose its will over cultures it didn’t know or understand, be overwhelmed by your ignorance and arrogance. The ‘Dune’ illiterate will be bogged down by their own ignorance-induced boredom, as the muck and mire of world building is a maze for which they lack a map. Forever lost amidst the dust and dizzying detritus of Dune, first-timers to the story will feel like foreigners and will quickly check out.

Director Villeneuve is known for making gorgeous looking films, the proof of which lies in the stunning cinematography of Sicario, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, and Dune is certainly no exception.

The movie is a visual marvel, and if that’s your cup of tea then I highly recommend you see the movie in theatres as opposed to on HBO Max. It really is impressive to behold. But with that said, Villeneuve’s visual feasts are often vast and stunning, but they can also leave you hungry for drama and humanity, and Dune is a perfect example of that too.

Timothee Chalamet is the film’s lead and to be frank, he has always been a mystery to me. A pretty boy with little substance and no physical presence, he feels like a manifestation of a pre-teen girl’s platonic fantasies.

Chalamet is a whisp of an actor and is devoid of the intensity and magnetism to carry a single movie, never mind a big budget franchise.

I suppose Chalamet is just eye-candy, another weapon in Villeneuve’s prodigiously gorgeous cinematic palette. But like much of Villeneuve’s beautifying flourishes, Chalamet feels entirely empty, like a miniature statue of David, or a high-end department store mannequin.

I enjoyed Dune as a cinematic experience because it’s such a beautifully photographed film, but I also understand that my interest in cinematography is not shared among the general populace. And I readily admit that this movie may very well flop, which is disappointing because as frustrating as it is, I’d still like to see Villeneuve make one or two more Dune films as the sort of high-end alternative to other less visually ambitious franchise movies…like Star Wars and Marvel.

Ultimately, fans who loved the book should see Dune in theatres as they’ll most likely enjoy the movie as they marinate in Villeneuve’s cinematic grandeur. But if you haven’t read the book, Dune is, like Arrakis, a very forbidding and foreboding land that is best avoided.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey: The Last Duel

On this episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey, I review Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s new movie directed by Ridley Scott, The Last Duel.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

Halloween Kills: Video Review

My review of Halloween Kills on The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.

Thanks for watching!

©2021

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 48 - Ted Lasso Season 2

On this episode, Barry and I have a bizarre Freaky Friday transformation while we debate season 2 of the Apple TV + series Ted Lasso. Tune in to witness Barry's anger management problem, my kind, gentle and forgiving heart, and to hear a celebration of the genius at NBC/Universal who came up with the marketing idea of Peacocktober.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 48 - Ted Lasso Season 2

Thanks for listening!

©2021

Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier - Documentary Review and Commentary

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Utterly useless piece of establishment media fluffery.

Just as MI6 super spy James Bond is back in theatres with No Time to Die, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is back in the spotlight with the story that refuses to die, in the ABC “documentary” titled Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier.

Steele came to fame as the shadowy force behind the Steele Dossier, the document which sparked a media feeding frenzy and government investigations because it claimed Trump colluded with Russia and that those devious Russians had “kompromat” on Trump in the golden form of a “pee tape”.

Steele’s “coming out of the shadows” consists of him sitting down with George Stephanopoulos and having a cuddle session on fancy sofas in a posh apartment.

Stephanopoulos is the perfect choice for the softball interview since he and Steele have a lot in common - they’ve both worked for Clintons. Stephanopoulos as advisor to President Bill Clinton and Steele as de facto dirt finder for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

ABC tried to stretch the excruciatingly thin gruel of this supposed “interview” into an hour-long documentary by adding talking heads from their own newsroom. They failed, as the end result is a one-hour show that is hilariously shallow and vapid even by ABC News standards.

Out of the Shadows spends considerably more time rehashing the “history” of Russia, Vladimir Putin and Trump than it does actually talking to Steele. Russia is deemed a rogue state virus spreading westward with its villainy, Putin a KGB killer, and Trump a threat to American democracy. In other words, it’s standard establishment media talking points.

Steele’s background is somewhat explored, but being the ever-diligent super spy that he is, Steele never explicitly states that he worked for MI6. I guess he doesn’t want to blow his cover.

What Steele actually says in this interview is of strikingly minimal impact. Thanks to Stephanopoulos’ anti-journalistic, anti-adversarial, deferential approach, no new ground is broken.

It’s well-known that Steele didn’t just compile the dossier, he actively pushed it to media outlets, in effect, actively working to try and scuttle Trump’s election campaign. The fact that he was ostensibly working for Democrats at the time certainly makes it appear as if he was a part of a wider disinformation/interference operation, but of course that’s a topic Stephanopoulos whistles past in this patty cake chat.

Steele admits to no wrong doing or error, despite the U.S. intelligence agencies “eviscerating” his findings after thorough investigation, and the FBI labelling him “untrustworthy”.  

The issue of the “sources” Steele uses doesn’t get the attention it deserves either, as it’s reported that he only used one “key collector”, but Steele is quick to make clear it was “one collector” but not “one source”. That seems like a distinction without a difference.

As the documentary reports, that one collector was not a person in Moscow, but actually someone in Washington D.C. whose name is not revealed. The Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz reported this person claimed that the information being given to Steele was “word of mouth and hearsay”. In other words, Steele was acting less as an intelligence expert seeking truth with his dossier than he was being a gossip columnist spreading rumor and innuendo.

Steele’s declaration, “I stand by the work we did, the sources we had, and the professionalism we applied to it”, is as devoid of substance as the rest of the interview.

The most damning aspect comes toward the end, and even that is soft pedaled, when Stephanopoulos asks Steele about both the dossier’s allegation that Trump counsel Michael Cohen went to Prague to meet with Russian intelligence and about the pee tape.

Cohen denies the Prague meeting ever took place, and since he has flipped against Trump, one would assume he’s telling the truth. But Steele’s resolve remains, as he conjures up a wild scenario where Cohen is still lying because he wants to avoid being charged with treason.

Stephanopoulos of course let’s this utter lunacy pass almost without notice. He could’ve asked Steele how exactly Cohen got to Prague, since his passport shows no travel to the Czech Republic? Or pressed Steele to provide details or at least a passable explanation for how that meeting could possibly have taken place? But he didn’t, he just smiled and continued playing footsie with Steele.

The “pee tape” is the most salacious accusation in the dossier, and despite it never surfacing and no evidence it exists, Steele still stands by the claim…sort of. He says that the tape “probably does” exist but that he wouldn’t “put 100% certainty on it.”

When Stephanopoulos asks why the tape hasn’t come out? Steele replies that “it hasn’t needed to be released…because I think the Russians felt they’d got pretty good value out of Donald Trump when he was president…”

Look, I loathe Trump, always have and always will, but this sounds like the ravings of someone deeply infected with a ferocious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is maybe why he is still taken seriously by the equally afflicted establishment media.

The more you know about Steele, the more readily apparent it becomes that he’s an absolute charlatan and bullshit artist masquerading as a serious intelligence expert. He’s no James Bond, he’s not even George Smiley. He’s more like a cross between Mr. Bean and Inspector Clouseau, who should, like this vacant and vacuous interview/documentary, be relentlessly ridiculed and righteously dis-respected.  

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The Last Duel: Review and Commentary

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MINOR PLOT POINTS AND SPOILERS FOR THE LAST DUEL!! IT IS NOT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. This is one of those rare films that is actually geared toward grown-ups. It has some major flaws, but it’s also well crafted and ultimately entertaining.

This article contains plot points and minor spoilers for The Last Duel.

Despite its best efforts to be a #MeToo movie, director Ridley Scott’s new movie The Last Duel is being chastised by some virtue-signaling critics.

The film, set in France in 1386, tells the true he-said, he-said, she-said tale of Sir Jean de Carrouges (a committed Matt Damon), Jacque Le Gris (a mis-cast Adam Driver), and Marguerite de Carrouges (a terrific Jodie Comer) – Jean’s wife, who claims that Le Gris raped her.

Ridley Scott, one of the great cinematic craftsmen of his generation, makes the wise decision to structure the film Rashomon-style, where the perspectives of three main characters are shown around the same single contentious event.

The story is broken down into three chapters titled “The truth according to…” Jean, Jacque and Marguerite. Unfortunately, Scott tips his rather heavy-hand when he lets on that it is Marguerite’s story that is really the “truth” of the incident.

This choice, to have Marguerite’s subjective experience be deemed the objective truth, greatly undermined both the dramatic and artistic potential of the film. This decision felt like it was made in order to appease the #MeToo mob that can become hysterical over any perceived slights.

The film’s star and co-writer, Matt Damon, knows this all too well, as he caught some serious flak when at the height of the #MeToo mania he dared to say something rational about how there’s a difference between a pat on the backside and rape, which infuriated the pussy-hat brigade.

The filmmakers (Ridley Scott and co-writers Damon, Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener) aggressively let the audience know they side with Marguerite, but excluding the actual rape, her version of events seem just as narcissistic, fantastical and delusional as Jean’s and Jacques’.

Jean and Jacques both self-righteously see themselves as noble and honorable warriors who are kind of heart. Their perspective is, of course, skewed by self-interest, but the filmmakers refuse to hold Marguerite to the same standard.

Marguerite sees both Jean and Jacques as beasts, and that may be true, but her vision of herself is so saintly as to be hilarious, as even the lie she tells is noble. Marguerite is portrayed not only as a loyal and well intentioned wife, but also brilliant. For instance, she effortlessly turns around illiterate Jean’s business fortunes, collecting debts and breeding horses, while he is off fighting a war for money.

As a female character in the film correctly declares, “There is no ‘right’, there is only the power of men!”, which is an unintentional and uncomfortable truth revealed not only about medieval men in question but also about modern-day feminism and its adherents. As The Last Duel shows, feminism is only born in a bubble of prosperity built by the brute force of ferocious men, and it’s a sign of decadence, if not delusion.

Yet, despite The Last Duel’s insipid #MeToo pandering and its cinematic flaws, and even in spite of myself, I actually liked the film and found it entertaining, which is a testament to both Ridley Scott’s directorial skill and my thirst for remotely decent, adult-oriented cinema in our current cultural desert.

Yes, some of the worst hair-dos in cinematic history are featured in The Last Duel, with Damon sporting a mule-kick of a medieval mullet, and Affleck – who chews-scenery as debauched royal Count Pierre, looking like he got a free bowl of soup with his haircut, but the movie also has an undeniable momentum to it that is cinematically compelling and climaxes with the bone-crunching, deliriously satisfying duel.

Unlike me, The New Yorker’s critic and resident virtue-signaler Richard Brody actually despised the film because it wasn’t feminist enough, calling it a “wannabe #MeToo movie”.

Brody got the vapors because Scott dared show the rape of Marguerite twice – once from Jacques’ perspective and once from Marguerite’s. To be clear, the rape is uncomfortable, it’s a rape after all, but it isn’t gratuitous, there’s no nudity and it’s as tasteful as it could be under the circumstances.

Despite this, Brody writes of the rape scene, “I was gripped with unease—not with horror but with a queasy sense of witnessing a visual exploitation of that horror.”

Brody, I’d like to remind you, wasn’t filled with any unease, but rather ecstatic glee, as he once gushed over the Netflix film Cuties, which graphically hyper-sexualized 11-year-old girls to an alarming degree, calling it “extraordinary”.

Maybe if Marguerite were an 11-year-old, scantily-clad girl Brody would’ve felt less queasy about The Last Duel’s rape scene, who knows?

Brody closes his review by chastising Scott, claiming he should’ve displayed “…the cinematic artistry and, even more, the cinematic ethic…” to not “…show the rape even once.”

According to Brody, Scott should have “put the cinematic onus on…himself – to affirm that Le Gris raped Marguerite, to believe her not because Scott himself created his own image of ostensible veracity to justify and prove her claim but because she said so.”

This is Brody turning the virtue signaling up to eleven by basically saying Ridley Scott didn’t rigorously enough embrace the ethic of “believe all women”.

The buffoonish Brody and his ilk are why no artist should ever try to pander to the insidiously woke. No matter what you do, it’ll never be enough. Nuance is never allowed, only reverence for the cause and compliance with the woke’s ever-changing demands.

The bottom line is that The Last Duel definitely has flaws, it’s most potentially fatal one being that it tried to appease the unpleasant and unpleasable #MeToo woke mob. But thanks to Ridley Scott’s craftsmanship, it’s a well-made enough movie to overcome its considerable shortcomings and short-sightedness to ultimately be deemed worthy of a watch.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Convergence: Courage in a Crisis - Documentary Review

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This documentary is devoid of insights and only serves up the same old insipid ideology of identity politics. The film ‘s manipulative thesis uses Covid as a cudgel to divide instead of unite and therefore reinforces the current power structure.

The Covid pandemic has been a difficult time for all of us, except of course for documentary filmmakers, who seem to be living through the most booming of boom times.

In recent months the much-hyped HBO documentaries Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenter: 9/11 – 2021 ½ and Nanfu Wang’s, In the Same Breath, have attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to tackle the tantalizing topic of the Covid pandemic.

Now Netflix is getting into the Covid documentary game with Oscar winning director Orlando von Einsiedel’s Convergence: Courage in Crisis, which began streaming on Tuesday, October 12th.

The film’s thesis is clearly stated as “While Covid-19 exacerbates vulnerabilities across the world, unsung heroes in all levels of society help turn the tide toward a brighter future.”

If you want to truly understand the intellectual impotence and manufactured manipulation of Convergence: Courage in a Crisis, one need only watch the final few minutes as it concludes with a montage of ordinary folks from across the globe singing the song “Lean on Me” in unison.

This scene sparked my PTSD and I began having ferocious flashbacks to the cringe-fest that was the bevy of self-righteous Hollywood celebrities singing John Lennon’s saccharine anthem “Imagine” back in the Spring of 2020. Yikes.

What precedes that sanguine sing-along of “Lean on Me” is just as contrived and seems just as fake as the sing-along itself.

Convergence, like seemingly every other Covid documentary, is devoid of insight because it’s incapable of actually focusing on Covid, and instead uses Covid as a delivery system for its various political, social and cultural agendas.

For example, the film follows the stories of nine different people and couples as they navigate the peril of the pandemic and selflessly help others and fight the disease. These folks live across the globe in London, Miami, Delhi, Tehran, Sao Paolo, Lima, Oxford and Wuhan and do such varied things as treat the sick, clean hospital rooms, drive doctors to clinics and ambulances into poor neighborhoods.

Apparently though, according to Convergence anyway, the only people who were both deeply affected by Covid and also who fought most valiantly against it, were people of color, as they make up eight of the nine stories.

The lone white face featured in the film is Oxford Vaccinologist, Professor Sarah Gilbert, and she gets minimal screen time as she is treated as more an inconvenience to the film’s thesis than as a story worth watching.

A strange example of the film’s political bent is found in the story of Hassan Akkad, a Syrian refugee living in London. Akkad gets a job cleaning the Covid ward in a hospital and uses social media to protest the British government’s decision to not include immigrants like him working as porters and janitorial staff in hospitals in their “bereavement scheme” - which would grant “indefinite leave to remain” status for family members of any immigrant workers who died from Covid.

According to Akkad, the Assad regime tortured him and is currently bombing hospitals, a claim which should be taken with a grain of salt considering director von Einsiedel’s documentary The White Helmets is dubious in its veracity, but even though Akkad is living a good life in London, instead of being grateful he complains that he and his girlfriend deserve better immigration “status”.  

Another example of the film’s insipid ideology is that it declares that Covid isn’t the only pandemic around, that there’s also pandemics of inequality, racism, poverty and “misguided nationalism”. How original.

Of course, George Floyd and Black Lives Matter get a good bit of attention, mostly through the story of Dr. Armen Henderson, a black physician and activist in Miami.

When Henderson gets “racially profiled” by a cop in front of his own house during the pandemic, and his daughter witnesses the event through security cameras, Henderson claims the incident “robbed his child of her innocence”. I’m no fan of the law enforcement community but if you’re concerned about the loss of innocence of black children, blaming the police is about as obtuse as it gets when you consider black on black violence and the eroding morality and ethics of the wider culture.  

Dr. Henderson dreams of a sort of utopia of equity being born out of the dystopia of Covid, a notion also favored by World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Teydros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Dr. Teydros goes so far as to proudly espouse the eye-rolling slogan “Build Back Better” and claims that “opportunities are born from crisis.”

That same sort of sentiment is how we got the War on Terror and the atrocity of Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11 and got billions in bailout money to Wall Street in the wake of the financial collapse of 2007/08. If past is prologue, the idea of using Covid as a catalyst for some great change that will usher in a glorious world of wonder is a chilling proposition that will only further empower the powerful and further enrich the wealthy.

Ultimately, I found Convergence to be an infuriating and emotionally manipulative exercise that decided to use Covid as a cudgel to divide people rather than unite them, thus deceptively reinforcing the status quo.

Covid doesn’t discriminate, it affects everyone and, contrary to the propaganda of this documentary, we’d be better off looking beyond identity when it comes to solving big problems because once something becomes about identity, it stops being about anything else, most especially the truth. The insidiously manipulative and meaningless Convergence is glaring proof of that.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

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The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey: No Time to Die - Video Review

Here’s the latest episode of The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey, where I review the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die. Thanks for watching!

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The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey : The Many Saints of Newark - Video Review

Hello readers! Just wanted to share with you all the premiere episode of my new film review series for RT, The Cinephile with Michael McCaffrey.

First up…The Sopranos prequel - The Many Saints of Newark. Hope you enjoy and thanks for watching!

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Dave Chappelle: The Closer - Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS MATERIAL FROM DAVE CHAPPELLE’S NEW STAND-UP SPECIAL!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!****

My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT. Chappelle is the greatest comedian of his generation, but you better enjoy him while you can because weak-kneed Hollywood would rather virtue signal than entertain.

Firebrand comedian Dave Chappelle’s newest Netflix stand-up special The Closer has, not surprisingly, been met with predictable outrage by all the usual woke suspects.

Headlines like “Dave Chappelle faces backlash for troubling trans jokes” from Newsweek and Deadline declaring that “executive producer of ‘Dear White People’ are ‘done’ with Netflix” because the streaming service dared run Chappelle’s “homophobic” special, jump out when Googling the comedian’s name.

Chappelle has a woke bullseye on his back once again because in The Closer he’s simply does what every great comedian is supposed to do, humorously speak truths that ordinary people are too intellectually conditioned or socially cowardly to dare articulate.

And make no mistake, Chappelle is unquestionably the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, and is in the discussion of the best stand-up comedians of all-time, and while The Closer isn’t nearly his best effort, it does nothing to damage his prestigious position atop the comedy world.

Chappelle opens The Closer by informing his audience that this is going to be his “last special for a minute”. Like Michael Corleone, Chappelle is settling all family business with the aptly titled The Closer, and there was a lot of business stirred up by his recent run of six extraordinary Netflix specials, from 2017’s The Age of Spin up through 2019’s Sticks and Stones.

Chappelle’s uproarious evisceration of the sensitivities and absurdities of white feminists, the LGBTQ community, and trans people in particular, in those numerous Netflix specials has been what has made him public enemy number one among the woke.

In The Closer he once again pulls no punches and peppers his audience with quality bits, like his children’s book titled “Clifford the Big Black N*gger” and his movie idea of a conquering group of entitled aliens returning to earth titled “Space Jews”, both of which are masterly woven and defiantly delivered.

It’s his jaunt through the minefield of feminism and LGBTQ issues though that once again have riled the reactionary woke brigade and incensed the Torquemadas of Twitter. For instance, Chappelle’s blistering insights regarding the class and race issues woven into feminism, #MeToo’s performative idiocy, and the notion that “gays are minorities until they need to be white again”, are ruthlessly on point.

It’s when he once again wades into the dangerous waters of transgenderism though that he is most brutally effective as both a comedian and a philosopher, and is no doubt most offensive to the those with delicate sensibilities laying prone on their fainting couches.

Chappelle declares himself, like Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, to be a TERF – trans exclusionary radical feminist. He also says “gender is a fact”, and transwomen are the equivalent of blackface, which are such blatantly obvious notions yet are so aggressively labelled anathema in culture today as to be blasphemous.

The hilarious heresy continues when he points out that Caitlin Jenner (formerly Bruce Jenner) won a Woman of the Year award the first year she was ever a “woman”, despite never having menstruated, which in Chappelle’s eyes is like Eminem winning “N*gger of the Year”.

Chappelle then shows off his comedic craftsmanship when he subtly shifts gears towards the end of the show while recounting the tale of his friendship with a trans comedian named Daphne. This sequence is exquisitely executed and funny, but also remarkably poignant and moving.  

Chappelle is accused by the woke of “punching down” with his comedy, meaning that he’s a bully against the defenseless and weak, like the LGBTQ community. But Chappelle goes to great lengths in The Closer to point out the absurdity of this charge, as he observes the LGBTQ community’s enormous cultural power. Chappelle’s evidence for his claim is that the rapper Da Baby actually shot and killed someone in a Walmart in North Carolina and his career never wavered, but when he uttered homophobic remarks, the LGBTQ community quickly got him cancelled.

Nowhere is the woke’s cultural power so evident as it is when it comes to reviews of Chappelle’s own work. Sticks and Stones was adored by audiences who gave it a 99 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas critics gave it a paltry 35% rating. You see, to the woke, especially those in the establishment media or those hoping to work in the establishment media, admitting Chappelle’s brilliance and genius is an impossibility because it’s the equivalent of a hate crime.

The woke approach with The Closer seems to be somewhat similar. I’ve read a few reviews of the show, all of them negative, but curiously enough at Rotten Tomatoes, while the audience rates The Closer at 96%, there is, as of this writing, no critical score listed at all, and only one review posted (it’s negative).  

It seems the woke are changing tactics regarding their boogie man Chappelle, and instead of signaling their virtue through their negative reviews, they’re simply ignoring him.

Unfortunately, Chappelle’s current deal with Netflix is up and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t have him back. The woke wave is a tsunami and it has overtaken all of Hollywood. Even if it costs them money, these streaming behemoths would rather signal their virtue and “allyship” rather than give audiences what they want.

My recommendation is to go watch The Closer and enjoy Dave Chappelle’s brilliance and comedic genius while you can, because the woke are gunning for him, and as much as it pains me to say it, they just might get him.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021