Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 151 - Song Sung Blue

On this episode, Barry and I harmonize while singing the blues over the absolutely insane Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson film, Song Sung Blue. Topics discussed include how this movie is totally bananas, how mind-blowing it is to watch, and how on earth did Kate Hudson get nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this performance?

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 151 - Song Sung Blue

Thanks for listening!

©2026

Song Sung Blue: A Review - A Bizarre and Bewildering Bio-Pic

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

My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. This is one of the strangest stories and movies I’ve seen in a while. It isn’t the slightest bit good, but it could be something worth watching just to see the absolute insanity of it all.

Song Sung Blue, starring Kate Hudson and Hugh Jackman, is a bio-pic that chronicles the tumultuous life and times of Mike and Claire Sardina, a duo who back in the 1990s performed as Lightning and Thunder – a Neil Diamond tribute band.

The film, which is written and directed by Craig Brewer and is based on the Greg Kohs book of the same name, hit theatres on Christmas Day and is now available to stream on Peacock…which is where I just watched it.

I don’t know how else to say this but…Song Sung Blue is one of the most batshit crazy movies I’ve seen in a long time. What makes it all the more insane is that it is actually a true story.

I went into Song Sung Blue expecting a sort of light-hearted, feel-good, little love story or rom-com type of movie featuring Jackman and Hudson doing their usual charming movie star turns, getting some laughs, and singing some Neil Diamond songs – a decent enough formula.

The film certainly seems like just that exact thing through the first hour of its two-hour and twelve-minute runtime. Then, literally out of nowhere, things go absolutely apeshit. And when I say absolutely apeshit…I mean…ABSOLUTELY APESHIT.

I will not give any spoilers about this movie at all because that wouldn’t be fair to readers and also you wouldn’t believe me if I told you anyway. Let’s just say that Song Sung Blue is definitely not a romance or a rom-com or a feel-good sing-song fun time. No, Song Sung Blue is definitely a drama…a bad, hackneyed drama, but a drama nonetheless.

Apparently, the Mike and Claire Sardina story – which is essentially a modern version of the Book of Job chronicling the plagues through which these two poor people must suffer, is somewhat well-known, but it wasn’t well-known to me, and frankly, it is so insanely crazy that it feels fake…like something conjured in the mind of a psychologically-twisted soap opera writer who is very drunk and also on copious amounts of psychedelics.

Writer/director Craig Brewer struggles mightily to make this outrageous story feel the least bit real. It’s shot like a bad Hallmark channel movie, and it features some of the most bizarre scenes and sequences you’ve ever seen in your life. The one overriding characteristic of the film is that it is drowned under a gigantic tsunami of schmaltz.

There’s a bevy of paper-thin, cardboard cutout characters that do not in any way resemble human beings, who all have hearts of gold and soft-smiles. There’s a cavalcade of ludicrous situations made all the more ludicrous by the ham-fisted way in which they are executed. There’s also a hospital sequence that, like much of the rest of the film, feels like an SNL skit that was cut from the show because it was too over-the-top, unintentionally funny and also it made no sense.

Kate Hudson has been nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her work as Claire – Thunder to Mike’s Lightning. Hudson does all the things she thinks she’s supposed to do…wears frumpy clothes, talks with a Midwestern accent, and all the rest…but what she doesn’t do is even try to hide the fact that she is trying really hard to act. Everything she does seems fake and completely devoid of any genuine humanity. It is all posing and preening and seems like someone not particularly good at acting trying really hard to actually act and signal to you that she’s acting.

Hudson, who has in her life been married to two prominent singers – Chris Robinson (of The Black Crows) and Matt Bellamy (of Muse), has fancied herself a singer in recent years and even put out an album in 2024. It seems like she took this role so she’d have a chance to sing on screen…no shame in that I suppose…but it all feels so forced and not organic and more than a little performative in a self-conscious, cutesy way.  

Hugh Jackman, always one to want to break into song and/or dance, does his usual Hugh Jackman stuff as Mike. He pushes way too hard and overacts a helluva lot, and it all feels like a sort-of-gay, theatre-muffin Wolverine is now the lead singer of a Neil Diamond tribute band.

Jackman’s singing, which is not something I think is generally very good, actually fits this character as he is not supposed to be all that great…so mission accomplished. But the more complicated emotional acting stuff needed from Jackman is not nearly as successful.

There are a cornucopia of supporting turns by the likes of Michael Imperioli – as a Buddy Holly impersonator, and Jim Belushi as a bus driver, and Fisher Stevens as a dentist, that are all rather cringe-worthy in their vacuity….so there’s that.

The strangest thing about this movie is how it tackles some rather enormous dramatic material in the most thoughtless and frivolous of ways. It is such a tonally deaf and emotionally obtuse movie that it frankly feels kind of offensive towards the real people it is dramatizing and their sizable real-life suffering.

Maybe I am either over or under-thinking the whole thing. Maybe making a schmaltzy, saccharine and slightly unhinged movie about two slightly unhinged people who make a life out of singing the saccharine and schmaltzy anthems of Neil Diamond is the point of all this. If so, then…I guess they did their job. But unfortunately, the movie just doesn’t work except in having you continually shaking your head and dropping your jaw in disbelief at what just happened on the screen.

I was thinking that this might be the type of movie that certain segments of the population might seek out and enjoy. Older audiences who are Neil Diamond fans might seek it out. And Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson fans as well. But I can’t help but think that they would have the same expectations that I did going in and really be shocked, and probably disappointed, at what they find.

Those who go into the film knowing it is a drama might receive it a bit better, but only people who like a rather broad and basic type of drama will truly enjoy it – and I don’t say that as a negative judgement on those people, just in an attempt to properly categorize the film.

The bottom line is that I don’t think this is a good film…but it might be a fun film to watch just to see how batshit it really is – just know that going in and it will make the viewing experience more worthwhile. So, if you want to spend a little over two hours laughing at the poorly rendered misery of two very unfortunate real-people…then Song Sung Blue might be for you.

©2026

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Review/Commentary with Spoilers

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!! IF YOU WANT TO AVOID THEM READ THE SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark by being shown one version of events in the first half of the film, and then in the second half they’re shown that the first half was all a ruse played on them by Blanc and Cassandra/Helen.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in and the movie’s super villain and stupid villain.

Then there’s Dave Bautista’s Duke, the meathead, men’s rights bro du jour who’s a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate.

And there’s also Kate Hudson’s Birdie, who is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

The most painfully obvious and cringe-worthy bit of white self-loathing and virtue signaling by Rian Johnson though comes in the fact that the crux of the story is that tech guru Miles Bron is not really a genius at all but rather a conman who stole the idea for his trillion-dollar tech company Alpha from the true genius – a black woman…Cassandra, and then used his money muscle and a corrupt judicial system to get his other friends to back his claim of having come up with the brilliant idea.

By the end it’s revealed that, just like in Knives Out, the white people, and in this case in particular the white guy – Miles, are irredeemably awful. And the minorities, most notably a black woman – Cassandra/Helen, are the real heroes and geniuses. And of course, the white women (Claire/Birdie) and black guy (Lionel) end up siding with the black woman (Cassandra/Helen) at the crucial moment because they, unlike Miles, definitely are redeemable because they aren’t white men.

That the ultimate revenge on Miles by this collection of minorities and white women comes in the form of destroying one of the greatest works of art ever created by man – just because Miles loves it, feels like an argument ISIS or the Taliban would make when they destroy the art of their enemy – or the rationalization used by those climate catastrophe clowns when they glue themselves to paintings. How about this…let’s keep art, particularly great classic and ancient art, out of political debates, arguments and activism? Art is about beauty and Truth, so let’s not desecrate it with our petty political bullshit.

Speaking of petty political bullshit, my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

There is one not-evil white guy character in Glass Onion, Derol, a slacker who lives on Miles’ Island. Derol is an acceptable white man because he’s a mindless loser who’s nearly invisible to everyone else – his catch-phrase is literally “I’m not here!”. That he’s played by Noah Segan, the actor who played the buffoonish white cop in Knives Out only buttresses my original thesis further.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - A Spoiler-Free Review

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

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. And insulting, insipid and insidious cinematic venture that is abysmally written, directed and acted.

Back in 2019 I wrote an article about the blockbuster murder mystery movie Knives Out, and it caused quite a kerfuffle.

The article, titled “Knives Out Sharpens the Blade of Anti-White Racism”, made the argument that the Rian Johnson directed, Daniel Craig starring whodunnit featured a pernicious anti-white racism hiding in plain sight.

This article pissed a lot of people off, but curiously, no one actually refuted its thesis, instead deciding to attack me personally - the good old argument-ad-hominem in action.

It's true that some people attempted to argue that Knives Out wasn’t anti-white but was just targeting the rich for denigration, but they obviously didn’t watch the movie or fully read my article as that assertion was factually incorrect (a poor white maid and a working-class white cop are both deemed bad - greedy and moronic respectively).

Regardless, as I wrote in my review, I found Knives Out to be “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.”

My opinion was most definitely in the minority as Knives Out raked in $312 million at the box office and boasts a 97% critical score and 92% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes.

That said, I still I think I was right, not just about the film’s odious racial politics but also about its quality.

Which brings us to Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the newest Knives Out movie currently streaming on Netflix.

In a case of ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’, I found Glass Onion, written and directed once again by Rian Johnson, to be poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable.

The film, of course, stars Daniel Craig as the ‘world’s greatest detective” Benoit Blanc, or as I call him Benoit Ballz. I liked Craig as James Bond, but his Benoit Blanc, who is officially out of the closet in Glass Onion (will Craig himself soon follow?), is like the bastard son of Foghorn Leghorn and Forest Gump who got his own Murder, She Wrote franchise.  

Craig’s southern accent is so excruciating it would be cringe-worthy in a dinner theatre performance at a truck stop in Saskatchewan, in a major studio feature film it’s an absolute abomination.

Thankfully though for Craig, Janelle Monae arrives in Glass Onion with a different but equally amateurish southern accent too. Yay!! Bad acting definitely rules the day in Glass Onion.

In addition to Monae, the entire cast is a who’s who in this whodunnit, with Edward Norton, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom, Dave Bautista and Kate Hudson playing prominent and poorly-written roles as the soon-to-be suspects.

The plot of Glass Onion is as derivative as it is predictable as it involves Miles Bron (Edward Norton), a tech billionaire, and the collection of sycophants who rely on him for their success who come to his Greek Island to have a murder mystery weekend that ultimately ends up being a real murder mystery. These include governor/mom Claire (Kathryn Hahn), Men’s Rights Activist Duke (Dave Bautista), former model /current influencer/entrepreneur Birdie (Kate Hudson), scientist Lionel (Leslie Odom), and Miles’ former business partner Cassandra (Janelle Monae).

Through circumstance, Benoit Ballz…oops, I mean Benoit Blanc – the world’s greatest and now gayest detective, also arrives on the island and does what he does best…solve a murder…but what murder? Well, that’s a long, and ultimately, not the least bit interesting story.

As for the mystery of this Knives Out Mystery - I literally knew who the bad guy was, and what his dark secret was, the second I saw him, and I’m not exactly the ‘world’s greatest detective’.

The truth is that Glass Onion is a horrifically flawed film in almost every way. The writing, directing and acting are notable only due to their glaring inadequacies.

As for Rian Johnson’s writing and directing, the structure of Glass Onion, and the mystery it unravels, is so poorly constructed and executed as to be cinematic malpractice. The audience is never given a character with which to connect and share a perspective. In fact, every single character in the story knows more than the audience does almost throughout the entire film.

In a murder mystery it’s best to have the audience share perspective with the detective or another protagonist, and that gives viewers an opportunity to solve the crime along with the detective/protagonist as they learn new information – this is filmmaking and storytelling 101. But in Glass Onion, the audience is deceived and left in the dark.

This approach is, frankly, insulting to the audience, as it undermines the credibility of the film by leaving viewers alone out of the loop for the duration. Making the audience into fools for believing what they are shown, and then repeatedly, unbelievably and moronically altering the reality that has been established throughout is truly, truly insulting.

Also insulting are, once again, the vacuous politics of the film. Glass Onion desperately tries to be so of the present moment that it feels like a twitter argument between thirsty twenty-somethings trying to grow their follower count…and that’s not a compliment. The painfully trite politics are so shallow, so vapid and so reactionary, the movie feels like it was written during a teenager’s furious tantrum post a Thanksgiving shouting match with their conservative grandparents.

The vapid political and cultural immediacy of Glass Onion ends up being tedious and tiresome, with, shock of shocks, Miles Bron being an obvious Elon Musk (scapegoat du jour in current liberal circles) stand in. Dave Bautista’s Duke, the gun-toting, meathead, men’s rights bro du jour is a stand-in for internet lightning rod of the moment Andrew Tate. And Kate Hudson’s Birdie is every empty-headed internet celebrity/influencer who tweets politically incorrect things and claims they’re “speaking their truth”.  

What an original and compelling collection of characters. Yawn. The truth is these people aren’t interesting in the least on the internet, why would I want to spend two hours and twenty minutes with them in a movie?

I won’t get into the specifics in an attempt to avoid spoilers, but I will say that my article declaring and bemoaning the anti-white racism of Knives Out looks more and more brilliant and insightful as every moment passes as it was proven correct by the obvious racial preferences also on display in Glass Onion. You may agree with the film’s racial preferences – they are certainly very fashionable at the moment, but you can’t deny them.

My argument all along is that the blatant anti-white racial prejudice on display in Knives Out, and now Glass Onion, is repulsive and unacceptable and would be just as repulsive and unacceptable if it were targeting blacks, Latinos, Asians, Jews, gays, lesbians or the transgendered.

The reality is that anti-white racism (with racism defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity") is not only tolerated nowadays but celebrated. This is an unhealthy, toxic and dangerous turn of events and it can only lead to very bad things.

Speaking of bad things, Glass Onion, despite its 93% critical and audience score at Rotten Tomatoes, is a shitty movie. I keep hearing and reading people calling it a “fun” movie and that’s why they like it. I found it not fun at all, but entirely insulting, insipid and insidious.

After watching this movie, I couldn’t help but ponder the current state of our culture where raging sub-mediocrities like Glass Onion and Top Gun: Maverick, are celebrated as being “great” movies. Even the people who like those films admit on some level that they are absurd and ridiculous, but yet they still claim they’re “great” often times because of the absurdity and ridiculousness.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that our standards, whether they be for art, cinema, literature, music, TV, theatre, or politics and personal behavior, have in the last few years gone through a precipitous decline and a lowering of the bar to the point where we now except the most-base of garbage and consider it sublime and supreme.

I even find myself at times falling under the spell of this cultural degradation as I occasionally try to elevate my opinion of movies and tv shows I see in order to avoid constantly being the executioner lopping off one head of a movie/tv show after another. Believe it or not, that can become tedious even for an axe-wielding cinephile like me.

But the truth is, for good or for ill, I just can’t do it, I just can’t deny reality and lower my standards to say something mediocre is great or something shitty is mediocre. I can’t and I won’t. As I say to people who accuse me of being negative, “don’t blame me, I didn’t make the shitty movie/tv show. Blame the people who made the piece of shit!”

In regards to the “poorly constructed, abysmally executed, politically trite, culturally patronizing, profoundly racist and exceedingly dull and predictable” Glass Onion which I highly recommend you skip…don’t blame me for this piece of shit, blame Rian Johnson.

©2022

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

On this episode, Barry and I jet off to a private Greek island to try and solve the mystery of who murdered cinema as they talk all things Glass Onion - A Knives Out Mystery, the new star-studded Rian Johnson movie on Netflix. Topics discussed include the structure of successful whodunnits, the absurdity of Daniel Craig's egregious Foghorn Leghorn impression, and the tragic lowering of cinematic standards.

Looking California and Feeling Minnesota: Episode 98 - Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Thanks for listening!

©2022