Bad News – Good News

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So last night was the 97th Oscars.  Now, of course, I didn’t watch them.  I’m too old to waste several hours of my life watching boring awards show drivel about movies that no one in his right mind would actually watch and that’s even if seeing them was free of charge (which they are not).  I didn’t watch them but earlier I did hear about some of the best picture contenders.  One of them was the impossibly bad and unthinkably stupid “Emilia Pérez” which I mocked mercilessly in a post based on the movie trailer.  Another leading contender “The Brutalist” was a 3.5-hour epic about an immigrant architect from 1930s Hungary which includes the male protagonist being raped by his boss.  And a case could be made that wasn’t the worst part of the movie.  Matt Walsh reviewed it here so I was spared the horror of even watching the trailer.  And I hear the best picture winner was a movie called “Anora” which was about a sex worker that apparently contained a good 45 minutes of something resembling pornography.  Wow.

And so there we are for Hollywood 2025.  The best of the best are movies that no one would go to see and if anything actually entertaining somehow sneaks in then it will be panned by the critics and consigned to anonymity.  So that’s the way things have been run for the last fifteen years or so.  At this point even the wildly popular fantasy and superhero movies have been forced to conform to racial and gender social justice casting and plot requirements so that all the fun and excitement have been sucked out of them.  So, mission accomplished, Hollywood has murdered itself as an entertainment industry.  Requiescat in pacem.

Alright, let me try for the good news a bit.  Generation Z doesn’t go to the movies.  They play video games; they watch movies based on the video games they like.  And these movies about video games are written by “influencers” that play the same video games and have literally millions of young people following them on-line.  In other words, Netflix or some other media company will provide resources to an influencer to make a movie based on the fact that a guaranteed audience in the millions already exists for this product.

As an example, there is a guy on-line who reviews movies.  He calls himself “The Critical Drinker.”  He has 2.24 million subscribers and who knows how many casual watchers for his review videos.  He is also an author of suspense and espionage novels.  And because of his following (which is not particularly large as influencers go) he recently had a short movie made from one of his stories.  Now I’ve only watched ten minutes or so of this video but looking at the production quality, it’s equal to any of the series of this sort that gets made by Amazon or Netflix or the other studios that are taking away business from the old guard companies in Hollywood.  And recently I listened to a podcast where one of my favorite unwoke (meaning normal and entertaining) urban fantasy novelists Larry Correia was talking about these very things with The Critical Drinker.  And putting two and two together I’m guessing that people on my side of the political divide are thinking it might finally be possible to get movies made without the gatekeepers poisoning them or just plain stopping them as they’ve always done up till now.

Now, I’m not a Pollyanna.  A lot of the stuff that the kids watch is pretty goofy stuff.  The storytelling isn’t Dostoevsky.  In fact, it isn’t even Mickey Spillane.  But that’s alright.  You have to start somewhere.  The main thing is a pipeline has to be established where an audience and a creative type can trade money for entertainment without the woke gatekeepers controlling everything.  And that’s what I think is already beginning to happen.  Sure, it’ll start at the level of video game fan fiction.  But that’s no different from the pulp novels and the early movies like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.  From such humble beginnings can come much better work.

Now, will I live to see anything worthwhile come of this?  Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Ukraine – Endless Death

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I’ve probably said too much already about the Ukraine War but it’s one of those horrible things that can’t just go away.  So, ignoring it is just denial.  At this point there are no longer any good options.  Both sides have lost so many men that they feel they must win in order not to appear to have sacrificed a generation of young men for nothing.  But one of them will have to.  And if I were to guess I’d say it’s the Ukrainians that will lose.  But I think it will take another year for them to get to the point of collapse.    By then, the Russians will have lost a million men and the Ukrainians will have lost two million.  At that point the Russians will be so enraged that they’ll inflict crippling conditions and may increase the ceded territory beyond the four provinces they’re currently claiming as theirs.

And most of the blame for this should be laid at the feet of the neo-cons who put together this whole war during the Obama and Biden administrations.  They organized and sponsored the color revolution and armed the Ukrainians and told them that with the aid of the United States and Europe they would not only beat Russia but they would become a part of NATO.  The neo-cons saw this as an opportunity to test out all of their weaponry on a battlefield against the Russians without having to risk many of their own troops or nuclear war.  And they figured it would bleed the Russians dry and then humiliate them in the eyes of their own people and thereby destroy Putin.

Well, they were half right.  We have managed to cause the Russians great harm.  But from where I stand what we’ve accomplished is making them our implacable foes for the next hundred years.  And we’ve thrown them into the arms of China and hastened the end of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.  Well done, neo-cons.

But now Donald Trump is stuck with this mess.  That sideshow he put on with Zelensky in the oval office is part of some plan to get the Ukrainians receptive to a peace treaty.  I assume what he’s setting up is a take it or leave it deal where he negotiates with Putin, and then Zelensky gets his side to accept.  Well, Trump likes to negotiate but I’m not sure how much give there is on the Russian side.  I think the things that are written in stone are:

  • No NATO membership ever.
  • Permanent Ukrainian neutrality.
  • Substantial reduction in Ukraine’s military.
  • Some proviso against the Azov leadership ever holding power again.
  • Complete protection of Russian ethnic institutions (language, religion, etc.) in Ukraine.
  • Substantial territorial transfers to Russia.

I think there is probably some give on exactly how much land will have to be ceded to Russia.  I think the Russians are very tired of the meat grinder that transfers Ukrainian territory to Russia at a rate that translates to just a few square feet per hour but also can be measured in hundreds of deaths per week on each side.  It’s a sickening spectacle.

I don’t envy Trump’s job in trying to negotiate a peace treaty.  Not only does he have Putin and Zelensky to reckon with but he also has that pack of idiots in Europe.  The clown car filled with all the globalist “leaders” from Britain, France, Germany and all the rest of those useless countries will be howling and shrieking and demanding that we provide enough arms and money to continue the war until the last Ukrainian is dead.  If he does manage to negotiate an end to the war, he shouldn’t just get a Nobel Peace Prize they should also take back the one they gave to Obama.

But I’m not so certain anything but time will end this war.  If (when) the Ukrainians are forced to capitulate the outrage they will experience because of the brutal conditions of surrender will probably result in a witch hunt for the leaders who were responsible for this debacle.  I’m guessing that if Zelensky doesn’t have a bunker in a friendly nation that won’t extradite him he’s not going to live much beyond the end of the war.

And there will be other consequences of this brutal war.  What’s left of Ukraine will be destabilized and there are hints of Hungary, Poland and Romania looking to make territorial claims based on ethnic enclaves that were long ago added to Ukraine.  All in all, the fallout from this brilliant geopolitical catastrophe threatens to haunt the world long after we’re all dead.  Once again, well done, neo-cons.

Something Revolutionary and Unprecedented; Storytelling

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Today I had one of my grandsons over for a visit and after lunch Camera Girl asked if he wanted to watch the movie, “Catch Me if You Can.”  And he said sure, so I went looking for it in the DVDs.  But mysteriously it was missing.  So, she gave me a lot of grief because she said if I had said we didn’t have it she would have rented it at the library.  So blah, blah, blah … I said okay let’s watch “Captain America – Civil War.”  And he said sure.  Well aside from the commercials (I recorded it a couple of days ago) that I had to annoyingly fast forward through it was the typical Marvel Universe CGI extravaganza.  Well, mostly.  Since it wasn’t billed as an “Avengers” movie it didn’t have the full ensemble; Hulk and Thor were missing.  But with all of the minor heroes and the addition of Bucky (aka the Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Ant Man and Spiderman it was pretty damn crowded.

And because the title included the words civil war, what most of the action scenes consisted of was the heroes divided into two opposing factions battling each other.  So, Iron Man and his crew were battling Captain America and his backers.  Now it’s not a hundred percent clear whether they meant to kill each other.  I guess we’re supposed to assume not.

But here’s the thing.  The offensive and defensive capabilities of these various characters are woefully mismatched.  Even without Thor and Hulk who are basically unkillable, the abilities of the minor characters who are basically normal human beings without any special armor or weapons, are laughably insufficient to either harm the stronger characters or even survive a serious fight with them.  Take one obvious feature.  How does someone who can’t fly fight with someone who can?  And there are plenty of other problems like that.  It leads to an absurdity where the weaker characters are just dancing around trying to avoid being squashed flat by the heavy hitters.  And this looks ridiculous.  It looks like a jar full of hornets buzzing around in a jar, to no particular result.  And this is especially egregious with the female characters.  Even though somehow Black Widow (basically Scarlett Johansson in tight leather pants) is able to easily fight and kill a half dozen much larger men without effort, it defies all the laws of physics that she can attack a man in an armored suit that’s so heavily built that it allows him to survive anything short of an artillery shell going off in his lap.  He shouldn’t even notice her attack and she should basically break every bone in her hands punching him.

Now of course superhero movies are based on the idea of fantasy.  So sure, let the girl fight her way through the bad guys.  That’s what we expect.  But in general, the mixing of unkillable and highly lethal characters with humans whose only superpower is wearing a spandex costume, just doesn’t make very entertaining cinema.  The only time these movies make good watching is when two powerful and very evenly matched characters are set against one another.  So, in the original Iron Man movie Tony Stark and his former partner; Obadiah Stane have powered suits that at least are in the same ballpark of capability.  This allows brains and experience to allow the fight to resolve itself in an interesting way.  In the original Captain America film Steve Rogers and Johann Schmidt are both super soldiers (biologically enhanced) and therefore on a relatively level playing field.  In the original Thor movie, the antagonists are both immortal Norse gods.  This level playing field in each movie makes the conflict less improbable and more interesting as theater.

So, I am not surprised that stacking more and more heroes and villains of completely unequal and confusing capabilities just makes the action scenes an unholy mess with very little tension or enjoyment.  And now it seems the audience has grown tired of all this crowded hyperactive choreography.  It’s grown stale and annoying.  And the numbers are going down at the box office.  Maybe it’s time for the Marvel Universe to try something revolutionary and unprecedented; storytelling.

Maybe They Can Work for Tyson Chicken

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Donald Trump is a very old man.  He’s seventy-eight or thereabouts.  And, sure, he’s wealthy so he doesn’t have to worry about his kids or grandkids starving.  So why is he doing all this?  Some people say it’s for pride.  He wants to be remembered as a great man.  Maybe.  But would he be going through everything he’s been through for the last ten years just for pride?  I tend to doubt it.  Now, I don’t doubt that part of it is associated with pride.  I think he felt disrespected by the Democratic elite that mocked at the idea of him running for president.  And I’m sure he wants revenge on the people who have made his life miserable since he became president in 2017.  I think he’d love to punish as many of them, as severely as he possibly can, for all the dirty tricks and harm they’ve caused him and his friends and family.

But I still don’t think that’s the whole reason.  I think it’s because he’s an American and it angers him to see this country lose the characteristics that made it a great country.  He doesn’t want his descendants to live in a banana republic.  He doesn’t want them to live in fear of the secret police.  Basically, he wants them to be free.

And I believe this because that’s the same thing that motivates me to rail against the Deep State and the Fake News and root for Donald Trump and his insane crusade to “Make America Great Again.”  I’m not blind.  I know Trump is a huckster.  He runs casinos, sells steaks or bibles or golden sneakers or whatever the rubes will buy.  He’s PT Barnum with a hair transplant and a permanent tan.  But I believe down to my feet that he is just as angry about what the people in charge have done to this country as I am.  I know that he sells snake oil to the suckers but I think it angers him to see these regular people getting shafted by the likes of Barack Obama, George Bush, Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney.  Maybe he feels that these people are his marks and he has the right to cheat them a little bit but in return they shouldn’t be impoverished, dispossessed and replaced by whoever can be loaded on a boat, marched across the border and put to work in a Tyson chicken processing plant.  In other words, he thinks the American dirt people are still Americans and deserve at least the right to exist.

Of course I can’t prove any of this.  Maybe I’m wrong.  Maybe he’s just crazy and he’s just doing this to satisfy some megalomaniacal craving for the spotlight.

But it doesn’t matter.  Because for whatever reason Donald Trump is fulfilling the wishes of me and about a hundred million other Americans who’ve watched this country systematically degraded and reduced to an anarcho-tyrannical police state where criminals run amok and law-abiding people have to keep their mouths shut to avoid being sent to a gulag.  He’s figured out how the system works and he’s single-mindedly taking it apart piece by bloody piece.  And it’s beautiful.

So, I can’t prove what I think about Trump but along with everyone else on my side we’re watching this spectacle in the way I imagine the fundamentalist brethren would feel if the rapture suddenly came upon them; shocked but ecstatic.  When all of the things you’ve been hoping for years would happen suddenly do, it makes you giddy.  And that’s how it’s been since January 20th.  And if he can keep this up for a few more months I’m starting to believe he can actually beat the Deep State and fix this country permanently (or at least for the foreseeable future).  So, keep breaking stuff Mr. Trump.  Reduce Washington DC to rubble and send the managerial state to the unemployment line.  Maybe they can work for Tyson Chicken.