All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items
I wonder who got custody of Shia LaBeouf.
And so it begins. When a film franchise is based on the likability and heroic stature of the main character and you go out of your way to mock and belittle that character you might be undercutting your fan base, just a little. https://t.co/Bcsi2PXVbb
— orionscoldfire (@orionscoldfire) June 29, 2023
That post I wrote a few days ago about Disney’s woke movies losing money at the box office and some of the comments I got have inspired me to spend some time looking back at some of the good movies that have been made over the years. What I’ll start out doing is put together a list of categories like comedies, dramas, and genre films like film noir, sci-fi, fantasy, westerns, war movies, etc. Then I’ll start getting people to give me their favorites. We might even divide it by decades or at least eras (30s/40s/50s, 60s/70s, 80s/90s, 00s/10s/20s)
At some point we can get some polls up to find out what the popular favorites are on the site. Now this is tricky. With the exception of some of the regulars, most people are pretty uninterested in commenting. What I was thinking is if you know any movie fans encourage them to show up and contribute movie titles and when we get to the voting to pick their favorites.
Feel free to leave comments on how to enhance the process to get a good list together. I know there are some specialists in such sub-genres as “schlock science fiction” and of course these will not be neglected.
In the next installment Ill start the ball rolling with my own best of lists for the various categories.
| OCF Goes to the Movies | |||||||
| Comedies | Dramas | Science Fiction | Fantasies | Westerns | Film Noir | Historical Drama | |
| 30s/40s/50s | |||||||
| 60s/70s | |||||||
| 80s/90s | |||||||
| 00s/10s/20s | |||||||
So, let’s talk about something less depressing than the train wreck that is Western Civilization. Let’s laugh at the misfortune of Hollywood. And specifically let’s mock Disney and their putrid movies. Look at this article and the underlying video.
They include Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3.
Two of the titles were outright bombs — Strange World and Lightyear — while two others are still in theaters, The Little Mermaid and Elemental.”
🚨🚨 Disney Is Bleeding Out At The Box Office | Here's How Much They've LOST https://t.co/vHlzQtiEVX via @YouTube #elemental #TheLittleMermaid #LittleMermaid #GuardiansOfTheGalaxy #GuardiansOfTheGalaxyVol3 #Disney #Pixar #PixarElemental #BoxOffice @Disney @Pixar
— Valliant Renegade (@ValliantRenegad) June 22, 2023
Now, admittedly, Disney has deep pockets. They can absorb losses that would bankrupt smaller companies and move forward. But let’s think for a moment about how they will analyze these problems and what their idea will be to address them.
They will see that these films include heaping doses of progressive girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias and they will assume that the problem is too many racist and sexist Americans refusing to celebrate wokeness sufficiently. After all, what parent wouldn’t want to send his kids to a movie with a gay kid as the main character? Or why wouldn’t a Buzz Lightyear origin story benefit from a lesbian kiss? Why would this make parents uncomfortable?
So, their solution to this rejection of woke content will be … doubling down on girl power, gay themes and anti-white and anti-male bias! Now how could that possibly fail?
So, I’m incredibly happy for Disney. This winning strategy may be able to do the impossible; namely bankrupt the largest remaining Hollywood studio. And just to keep things hopping along comes the fifth Indiana Jones movie. And from everything I’ve heard it’s going to be a humdinger. Picture if you can an eighty-year-old Harrison Ford shuffling around the set getting hen-pecked and brow beaten by his “god-daughter” as she performs the heroic stunts and he gets lost in the caves and probably soils himself. Oh yeah, that’s gonna be box office gold.
There is some word on the street that some of this is beginning to dawn on Disney’s front office and there might be a program to step back from the precipice of woke financial suicide. But that wouldn’t be my favorite outcome. I really hope they give us some more Captain Marvel and Rey Skywalker and She-Hulk and whatever trans-super-hero they currently have on the drawing board. This is really good stuff. It will reinforce to parents just how screwed up the role models that Disney pushes on their kids are. It will dovetail with the gender dysphoria that seems to have magically exploded among the teen and pre-teen age groups that are Disney’s target audience.
So, yeah, I do hope that other studios start to return to healthier cinematic fare. It’s high time that some of them figure out that there is an enormous domestic and international audience for healthy role models in the super-hero genre and in other genres too. But for Disney I hope they never turn back. If they crash and burn it would be a powerful lesson for the corporate world. And it comes right at the point where conservative boycotts seem to be picking up steam.
What a wonderful coincidence.
Tyler Cook is the blogger known as the Portly Politico. He writes about music, politics and all manner of things from the point of view of his corner of South Carolina. And personally, I think he’s a very good guy.
Tyler has written a book, “Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams” that I would describe as a travelogue. It chronicles his various trips to small towns in his state along with a trip to the Grand Canyon and environs. The writing is a first-person account of the trials and tribulations that go along with travel. Tyler describes the various sights and activities that he partakes in and we get his take on the experience of exploring the environment he sojourns through. There are local festivals and local cuisine and we even travel with him on a river rafting excursion with his girlfriend.
As far as my recommendation, this book is for those who are looking for the Millennial take on the road experience. Tyler enjoys experiencing the small-town world of his neck of the woods. Reading this will provide you with that sensibility.
Here’s another film that I won’t have the spoiler alert attached because I won’t spoil any surprises. My review will have more to do with the nature and the quality of the film than the plot synopsis.
The basic plot is that a psychiatrist, Dr. James Martin (played by Jordan Belfi) goes to a prison to interview a death row prisoner, Edward Wayne Brady (played by Sean Patrick Flanery) to determine if he’s sane enough to electrocute. But when Martin enters the interrogation room, he discovers that the prisoner claims to be a demon from Hell possessing Brady’s body. For the sake of convenience, he tells Martin to call him Nefarious.
And the great majority of the film is the interaction between Martin and Nefarious. And that brings us to the question of what type of movie is this? Is it a religious film? Is it a horror movie? Is it a suspense film. I guess it’s little bit of each. I’m not giving anything away by saying it’s not a gorefest. The most visually disturbing scene is a prison electrocution. But that’s hardly in the league of things like Saw. I guess you call it a horror film in the same way that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a horror movie. I would say that a psychological drama might more closely describe the atmosphere of the film.
And the film is definitely an attack on the lack of respect for human life that our civilization exhibits with respect to its attitude toward abortion and euthanasia. And it was produced by a Christian production company, “Believe Entertainment.” So, from these perspectives this is a religious film.
But whatever else it is, it’s also a well made and compelling film. The characterizations by the two lead actors are highly entertaining. Flanery’s Nefarious is mesmerizing. He has all the best lines and he plays the part over the top and to the hilt.
Belfi does a very good job of portraying a somewhat smug member of the intelligentsia, an avowed atheist who comes up against a persona who tears away many of his comfortable assumptions about himself and his way of life. And to the film’s credit it’s not a simplistic strawman exercise. It’s done with skill and very effectively.
Now none of this is to say that Nefarious is a perfect film. There are a couple of scenes that were less successful. But overall, it was compelling and kept my interest throughout. And now here is my recommendation. I recommend this movie but with a caveat. I paid twenty bucks to see this movie! Camera Girl thinks I’m crazy and I kind of have to agree. That’s an awful lot of money.
I’ll review it soon. Liked it.
Just watched Nefarious. Very well done. Chilling. https://t.co/5DClHyVNYp
— orionscoldfire (@orionscoldfire) June 20, 2023
Since this is a true story, I’ll skip the spoiler alert but I also won’t give away any surprises.
Matt Damon and Christian Bale star in this dramatization of Ford’s grudge match with Ferrari to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race. Damon plays Carroll Shelby, the legendary race car designer and Bale is Ken Miles a race driver who partners with Shelby to design a car that can give Ford the victory over the Ferrari in the race that they perennially win.
The movie highlights the contrast between the passionate individualism of Shelby and Miles and the hierarchical and bloodless conformity of the Ford upper management that looks to interfere with Shelby’s team at every turn.
I’m not a racing fan or a car connoisseur. But the movie provides an infectious excitement that reminds me of that same feeling in movies about the American space program of the 1960s. There’s a conquering spirit that strives for greatness and pushing the boundaries. It captures the optimism that America still had in those times and it is exhilarating.
Both Bale and Damon provide excellent performances. Bale especially disappears into the role. I won’t elaborate much more except to say this is a surprisingly compelling movie and I recommend it highly.
Tonight, I continued my retreat from reality with another super-hero escapist film. I turned on the 2002 version of Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire. Now Spider-Man is one of the goofiest comic book characters. Spider-human genetic mutations that render its victim enormously strong and able to shoot webs from his wrists that allow him to climb and swing from Manhattan skyscrapers is just about as absurd as anything imaginable. But what you discover if you watch the film is that the movie has heart and despite the ridiculous premise and the even more ridiculous villains, it holds your interest and the characters are likable.
The plot as I said is ridiculous but it follows its own logic and the story arc is your basic quest by the young man to find his inner hero. But this being a super-hero movie it has much more spectacular episodes than growing up, getting a job and winning the girl. He has to defeat a super-villain who also happens to be his best friend’s genius scientist father. Well, of course he is!
I’m not going to review this movie. No one needs the plot of yet another Spider-Man movie. What I’m trying to do is show that even something as silly as this movie can be a good movie. But maybe the most important part of the movie is when it was made. In 2002 it was still possible to make a movie where race and gender weren’t the defining characteristics for selecting cast and plot lines. Peter Parker was still allowed to be a white kid from New York City and he could still have a crush on a good-looking white girl. Currently there is a quota system in Hollywood and that combination of ethnic and sexual choices would violate the intersectional imperative. Either Peter would have to be black or his love interest would have to be a boy. And that’s just the way it is in 2023.
And that sums up the problem with Hollywood today. They’ve eliminated fun from movies. The new super-heroes have to be joyless women proving that they’re every bit as good as Luke Skywalker or Indiana Jones only politically correct, incredibly smug and completely boring.
This has already been the undoing of the Star Wars franchise and from what I’m hearing it’s about to put the last nail in the coffin of the Indiana Jones saga. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe is also being transformed. When you eliminate Iron Man and Captain America and replace them with Captain Marvel and whatever other screechy girl characters they dream up like She-Hulk or Thor-ette it goes without saying that boys and young men will stay away in droves. It’s almost as if destroying the fun for men is more important than making money. And it is.
But the good news is that the old movies are still there to see and enjoy. And eventually when Disney has finally committed cinematic suicide there will still be creative types who will know how to use these old films as templates for how to create entertaining and profitable movies. After all people haven’t changed. Hero slays the dragon and wins the beautiful princess has been around at least as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey. It certainly will survive the Woke Wars.
I hope.
I won’t frame this post as a movie review. I won’t synopsize the plot or provide a detailed opinion on it as a movie. Instead, I’ll use watching the movie as the launching pad for a rant. Because rants are fun (for the writer). Unloading on a movie that disappoints and especially one that trades on the good reputation of an earlier installment feels like a noble action.
I’ll start out by saying I really enjoyed the original Iron Man movie. Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges and the supporting cast; Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow, provided plenty of entertaining content to this comedy/adventure movie. That movie was fun, exciting and highly entertaining.
Alternatively, Iron Man 3 is none of those things. It’s a complete waste of time. The plot is confusing and essentially meaningless. All of the characters are annoying and uncompelling. Even Downey’s Tony Stark is surprisingly uninteresting and poorly written. He is suffering from anxiety attacks based on his experiences in the Avengers movie that occurred before this film. He has several of them during the movie and they just seem so contrived and pathetic that it feels like really lazy writing. So, by the end of this movie, I’m feeling fairly unhappy with the time I’ve wasted watching this crapfest.
So, this is what you get with these movie franchises. The first one is probably very good. There’s good writing, good acting and an original idea. But two or even three sequels down the road you end up with a crappy director, hack writers and a much less talented supporting cast. And voila, an awful movie.
Now it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been movie series where the quality was more or less maintained. Downey, himself for instance, was in one such. His two Sherlock Holmes films were almost equally interesting and entertaining. But in general, Hollywood has an equation where sequels are a money-making strategy where quality is abandoned after installment one.
So, what’s my point? Well, there isn’t one. Except that I was so annoyed watching this movie that I wanted to carp and moan about my outraged sensibilities. Robert Downey Jr. is an amusing actor who can carry a picture to great effect if you give him a decent plot and some good lines to recite while he mugs for the camera. It would have been entirely possible to allow his character to carry this movie without any expensive supporting cast if they had only invested in an actual story!
And so, the takeaway is “caveat emptor.” Do your homework when it comes to sequels and make sure you don’t pay for a movie that is just a pale shadow of its predecessor. Luckily, I watched this for free on my cable service. But I did waste more than two hours of my, at this point, limited time left on this mortal coil.
And shame on you Robert Downey Jr. You’re better than that. Now go make the third Sherlock Holmes movie. And don’t let them phone it in!
Matt Walsh gives an amusing review of Disney’s remake of A Little Mermaid by comparing it to Burger King. Personally I think he’s unfair to Burger King in this comparison. But I did enjoy his rant. It was well ranted.
One of the new Little Mermaid songs has gone viral…and words cannot capture how terrible it is.
If in one day I heard this song, my house burned down, I lost my job, & was diagnosed w/ a terminal illness, the song would still be the worst thing that happened to me that day. pic.twitter.com/oj5gc6awjW
— The Matt Walsh Show (@MattWalshShow) May 30, 2023