Posts Tagged → Hollywood
A Tale of Two Men, Two Peoples
We have in the past couple weeks been able to observe the best and worst of human behavior in America. Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the outpouring of grief and love on the one side, and the mockery, cruelty and evil on the other, has stratified Americans like few other events.
Even the George Floyd response (before the resulting burning, looting, and murdering riots) had some basis in widespread earnest initial belief that Floyd had been unfairly killed by a policeman, which crossed all political and ideological boundaries.
Not the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Starting the day of his assassination until just a few days ago, I have spent a good deal of time with mainstream liberal Americans at different events, and I can tell you there is no sensitivity there, that I can detect. No sorrow, and no open animosity, either. Indifference mostly, as far as I can tell. Unless we scratch the surface…
Last week, at a mostly liberal soiree in a special place, a nice looking older woman approached me and chatted with me. Her name tag said she was from New Jersey, so I made some humorous quip about the unfavorable Pennsylvania view of New Jersey’s polluted environment and its erratic drivers.
“Oh no, I live in the center of the state, near Princeton,” the nice lady replied. “Though I have to admit I also live near HIS golf course, if you know what I mean. The TRUMP golf course.”
Her eyebrows arched up and down with implied meaning. Apparently rotten-to-the-core Princeton is just fine, but a pretty golf course has all sorts of problems for her.
Said I, using one of my standard golf-related quips, “I do not play golf, I hunt. Because there is not a golf course anywhere on this planet with sufficient liability insurance to allow me to pick up a club. I am safer to be around with a shotgun chasing after geese in the water hazards than swinging at a ball.”
She smiled wanly, un-used to meeting anyone at a posh soiree who does not at least pretend to like golf. When our pregnant quiet moment was at its ripest, I followed up with “Besides, I am a huge Trump fan. And I don’t think we should all be shooting at each other over these differences, because we are all Americans and can work out our differences with our words.”
What she said surprised the hell out of me: “No, we shouldn’t.” And then she was gone, a scowl on her attractive visage. As if anyone on the Trump side of things has been shooting anyone, anywhere. Or maybe she meant that we shouldn’t be using our words…?
There are two different peoples here right now, inhabiting our country. Each one orbiting two different men, Christian activist Charlie Kirk, on the one hand, and once-humorist pagan Hollywooder Jimmy Kimmel, now fired and late of late night TV, on the other hand.
While some Americans oppose Charlie Kirk’s policy preferences on intellectual grounds, I guess, a lot of them also seem to be seething with hatred or animosity about him and anyone associated with him. This is strange to me, because Charlie Kirk never hurt anyone. He was a gentle person, civil, generous, a listener, he asked questions. He did politics the right way: He talked. What on earth about him would make people filled with hate?
Yes, he had some strong opinions based on his Biblical values, the same values that founded America. And….guess what? His political opponents also have strong views, based on God only knows what, because I do not know. Does having strong opinions simply make a person a bad person? If so, then the hate should flow both ways. But it does not.
It appears that the ever-angry, lying, mis-informing, wildly partisan Jimmy Kimmel is fully representative of the political Left and the Democrat Party partisans right now. When faced with consequences for his poor behavior (mocking the assassination of Kirk and lying about who did it), Kimmel is defiant and petulant. People losing their TV and radio shows in the cancel culture war was fine for Kimmel when they had different opinions than he. However, when the shoe is on his foot, and his words fail in the marketplace, suddenly he is aggrieved, and foot stomping, and like a spoiled child demanding demanding demanding.
Never mind that Kimmel was in essence telling leftists that they could murder their political opponents for disagreeing, and that TV personalities would cover for them. Kimmel was violating the basic conditions on which his employer, ABC, had been granted an FCC public broadcast license decades ago. We can debate whether the FCC should even exist, but it does right now, and if one has a broadcast license from the FCC right now, then one must meet its “public benefit” requirement, or let go of it. Kimmel’s lies placed his employer’s FCC license at risk, and so his employer cut him loose and with him the liability.
When we compare and contrast Kirk vs Kimmel, we see two totally opposite men, and totally opposite ways of conducting one’s self in public and in private. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has brought out a lot of good people, and also a lot of troubled people. We now have a tale of two different men, and the two very different peoples surrounding them.
I hope you, dear reader, choose the gentle one. America needs this, not the hate.
Go see latest Mission Impossible movie
You should go see the latest Mission Impossible movie. You will not regret it.
About once per year I get to see a Hollywood movie. Not because of limitations on time, or money, but because 99% of what Hollywood produces is dreck, garbage, stupid, juvenile, destructive amoral nonsense. So sifting through the many no-go movies usually results in one that I will see, per year, and this year I went and saw the latest, and supposedly the last, Mission Impossible movie, starring Tom Cruise.
About Tom Cruise: I like him, because I like the values he showcases and promotes in his movies. His movies have plenty of action, and also pit good vs. evil, honesty vs. dishonesty, tradition vs. popular modernization, etc. Very few of Hollywood’s actors or movies are about good values. Most Hollywood movies are about silly, superficial entertainment, performed by actors who in their private lives lead silly, vacuous, superficial lives full of ridiculous childish drama and bad decisions. They make their money doing dress-up and make-believe. Then these same people are quick to tell working Americans how to live, what to value, and so on. They are disbelievable.
Tom Cruise is the complete opposite of 99% of the Hollywood goofs. He communicates his values and beliefs through his movies, and rare interviews, and leaves us peons (who are also his paying audience) alone the rest of the month.
For example, his movie The Last Samurai is the improbable but beautifully done story of a white dude roundeye who is captured by racist Samurai during the quite real Satsuma Rebellion. It all comes down to Captain Algren (Cruise) talking with Lord Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) around a campfire after escaping a false arrest (please accept my dialogue paraphrase that is close to the actual script):
Algren: “So That’s it. You will now just end it all, by your own hand, because of some supposed failure?”
Katsumoto: “Yes. It is our way of keeping our honor.”
Algren: “Honor? What better way to show honor than to live a life of service and sacrifice, as you have done your whole life?”
Instead of beating us over the head with political speeches on X Twitter, in just a little bit of movie dialogue, Tom Cruise shows us he values tradition, service, sacrifice, and personal honor. For all the people who dislike Cruise’s association with Scientology, why can’t you just accept him for who he actually is, and not what you merely suspect him of thinking? Based on what we see, the guy is A+ material.
His Mission Impossible series never failed to entertain, not the least reason being that Cruise does most of his own incredible stunts. Reportedly, he routinely breaks ribs, fingers, and damages all kinds of other parts of his body doing these stunts. How many other Hollywood actors do any stunts, much less real stunts that are really dangerous?
Ummmmmm… probably none.
And, how many other Hollywood actors bother to stay in great enough physical shape that they could do their own stunts, if they wanted to?
Ummmmmm.. probably a small handful. So I give Tom Cruise all of the credit he deserves for all of the rare stuff he does. He gives his all to his movie audience, which is much more than can be said for most actors who just stand in front of a green screen and pretend to fight an imaginary foe.
This last Mission Impossible ties together all the past ones. Kind of a high-tech version of the Sherlock Holmes movies mixed with James Bond. But also give Tom Cruise real credit for taking a huge risk with his pro-America, physical adventure-loving audience: His movie cast is a racial- and gender-diverse mix of people, who do not simply appear on screen because they have a certain skin color or boobs. Rather, Cruise has selected exemplars of each: The reliable old black guy sidekick is a tech genius, who goes down fighting, and whose genius level tech work saves the world. The lady SEAL looks like the unique lady SEAL would have to look, very muscular and tough. And so on.
Cruise’s movie-wide racial & gender diversity is not painfully unrealistic and crammed down our throats. Rather, it is realistic enough for us not to have to suspend belief. This is exactly the kind of diversity that Cruise’s audience can accept, because we see it to some degree in our every day lives (not that any of us see world-saving superhero acrobatics play out, ever, but rather we see people like us doing exceptional things sometimes).
For example, I found myself alternately painfully gripping the poor Princess of Patience’s thigh, arm, and hand at different points in the underwater scene. Because in my youth I was a Water Safety Instructor, waterfront lifeguard, and very active SCUBA diver, I had experienced quite a few saves as well as close encounters. On one night dive in the Florida Keys in the mid 1980s, I had to tow my exhausted dive partner to the surface and back to the boat, which was marked only by a single underwater strobe light in the pitch blackness. Leaving my spear back on the bottom, and using an adapted rescue maneuver, I fought the same strong current that had caused him to run out of air in his dive tank, and run out of energy to do anything but slowly drown as a limp rag. Eventually I reached the boat just as I too was running out of energy, weighed down as I was by a tank, regulator, wetsuit, buoyancy compensator, and various kit.
It was a very close call that was suddenly brought back to life by watching Tom Cruise’s realistic near-drowning scene in the sunken nuclear submarine. With the jumbled torpedos laying and falling all about. As he is running out of air and time and body heat. Swim, Tom, swim up!
Anyhow, a bunch of Cruise’s acrobatic stunts in this unbelievably entertaining movie have gotten him Guiness Book of World record recognition, as well as Most Dangerous Stunt Ever, Most Ridiculous Stunt Ever, Stupidest But Coolest Stunt Ever, Most Incredible Stunt Ever…especially for a sixty year old white guy.
You gotta go see this movie, even if the rogue computer / rogue Artificial Intelligence plot has played out at least since War Games (1983), Dune (1984, based on the 1960s book), Terminator movies from 1984 to 2019, and many others, where humankind is almost the fatal victim of our own ridiculous curiosity. Mission Impossible is so good that we forget all that and buy deeply into the premise that our AI foe “The Entity” is about to destroy humanity, and so we must engage in or at least tag along on an impossible mission to destroy it and save humanity.
And one more thing about Tom Cruise: If he is actually deeply into Scientology, then it is treating him really well. Everything about the guy looks like success and contented happiness. We hear no stories about poor choices or destructve behavior. Most of Hollywood is a-religious or non-religious, and most of Hollywood’s people are morally relativistic and quite lost on this planet. Their private lives are a complete mess, and very few of them have any sort of moral compass or true north. Scientology may sound weird, but I think all religions and belief systems sound weird to some degree. Even if it is weird, wow, is it ever working for this super successful, happy guy, Tom Cruise….one of the few real working actors left on our entire planet.
The Real Avengers
You can count on your right hand the number of real-life big-time times that the Good Guys have come back from apparent defeat, and gone on to defeat the Bad Guys. Depending upon how you qualify what is big-time, maybe you can count them on two hands. But not too many more than that.
Let’s try: A couple of Biblical-era wins, like King David’s defeat of Saul at the foot of Mount Gilboa, which incidentally looks today the same as the farmland there looked three thousand years ago, and the Maccabees defeating the Seleucid Greeks and their liberal Jewish allies…add these to the signing of the Magna Carta, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the American Civil War, World War II, and now, I think, something of the same magnitude, which is yesterday’s completed appointment of The American Avengers, which is really the crowning achievement of President Donald Trump’s miraculous return to the White House.
We are talking about yesterday’s selection of Dan Bongino as deputy director of the FBI, which is now headed by Kash Patel, today being his first full day in that office. With US Attorney General Pam Bondi already working overtime for the American people, America now has a true American Avengers team that is set to re-set the anti-democracy situation that brought the American republic precariously close to termination in the past few years, and return power and decision making to We, The American People. Radical transparency in government activity is already underway, and what we are seeing is not pretty.
Yes, I recognize that leftists and liberals and partisan Democrats see things differently. To paraphrase our impressive VP, I don’t care, Margaret. The way that leftists and liberals and partisan Democrats see things makes absolutely no sense from any angle.
Every time Donald Trump got closer and closer to winning back the White House over the past year, the more and louder the left bleated that “We are losing our democracy,” while simultaneously censoring, auditing, canceling, de-banking, firing, and jailing their political opponents. Nothing comes close to losing democracy like cutting out your opponent’s tongue and putting him in jail on fake charges, which is what the Democrat Party was doing daily to Americans and to other oppressed peoples around the world, using taxpayer money via the rancid USAID, no less.
Anyhow, with these three proven heroes at the helm of American justice, we should expect to see Biblical-style results. Remember that Democrat Party mantra, No one is above the law. We are probably now going to see a hell of a lot of people who thought they were above the law, and whose evil sins were hidden by a politicized and corrupt mainstream media, finally get held accountable.
A couple times a week over the past month, people with open minds have been shocked but not surprised at the new recordings of federal workers bragging about how many tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars have been siphoned off, stolen, and deliberately mis-spent on purely partisan and zero-benefit policy activities over the past few years, even over the past few months and weeks. James O’Keefe at OMG and O’Keefe’s old Project Veritas both are catching federal employee criminals laughing about their rip-off exploits, on camera.
This morning I listened to a brief interview with a senior US Marshals Service employee, who ran into serious and un-earned Human Resources trouble there because of the deep, deep rot in that important branch of government. His story is just one guy in an agency with probably a hundred such guys, maybe more. Multiply his story across the federal government….Which is to say that whatever shocking financial crimes Elon Musk’s DOGE has daily revealed, there is a LOT LOT more criminal activity just flush throughout the entire federal government. Our government is rife and filled to the gills with criminal activity, and The American Avengers are going to have their hands full bringing all of these bad people to justice.
Be prepared, because I don’t see Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, or Dan Bongino giving up on holding bad people accountable. The next few years are going to be much more exciting than some fake Hollywood action movie, that’s for sure.
Remember how FBI employees put then- Congresswoman now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on the Do-Not-Fly list because she stepped off the Democrat Party plantation?
Kash Patel is the new FBI director, on a mission from God
As soon as Kash Patel was confirmed by the US Senate as the next FBI director, suddenly Democrats were calling to end all of the investigations that had defined Washington DC for the past eight years. Wonder why…
“Conspiracy theories” keep coming true
The phrase “conspiracy theory” was first hatched at the New York Times in 1863 during the height of the American Civil War (between the slave-owning racist Democrats and the anti-slavery pro-freedom Republicans) to describe the actual and very real effort of British aristocrats to undermine and weaken the Union cause.
“Conspiracy theory” then became became a regular leftist epithet after the 1963 JFK assassination, used a great deal by the New York Times especially, to cast mocking doubt on Americans skeptical of the obvious cover-up and ridiculous official narrative surrounding JFK’s murder. Thereafter, simply calling someone a conspiracy theorist was usually sufficient to relegate their concerns to the far fringes of polite society, which prefers its official lies aggressively mixed, not stirred, and shut them up.
Today, this shallow mocking insult, “conspiracy theory,” is a routine crutch in the Democrat Party’s mainstream establishment corporate media. It is used almost daily to cast uncritical doubt on legitimate concerns or incisive questions raised by the Democrat Party’s political opponents.
A quick glance at its definition at Brittannica yields a really laugh-out-loud nonsense attempt to call true life experiences “conspiracy theories”: “On the right, McCarthyism promoted paranoid notions of communist infiltration of American institutions; QAnon, popular among fanatical supporters of U.S. Pres. Donald Trump (2017–21), alleged that prominent Democrats were part of an international cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, cannibals, and child murderers; and replacement theory claimed that prominent Democrats and other elites were attempting to replace America’s white population with nonwhite immigrants.”
For the record, Senator Joe McCarthy was 100% correct about communist infiltration of American institutions, as proven by the near 100% communist takeover of every American institution today, including the media, academia, Hollywood, corporate America, both political parties and especially the Democrat Party, the education, legal, and medical establishments etc etc etc. So no “conspiracy theory” here, just an actual, measurable, visible conspiracy that has been successfully implemented.
And for the record, setting aside Brittannica’s unprofessional and heavily ideological editorializing about “fanatical Trump supporters,” Qanon was a whole bunch of things, and in my observation hardly any of the things listed at Brittannica. It was mostly just this weird belief that a secret group of senior military officers and intel spooks were waging a war against the evil political establishment. Qanon was so ill-defined that it was everything and nothing, depending upon whomever you talked to.
Here at this blog, I said Qanon appeared to be a Chinese psy-op aimed at demoralizing and fracturing American conservatives, which now years later, a lot of conservatives are coming around to believing. Whatever Qanon believers thought it was, it is now evident it was not.
It is also evident now that Jeff Epstein’s island was a destination for many Democrat politicians to engage in pedophile sex with underage girls. No theory about it, the flight logs and outspoken victims’ testimony have confirmed it.
And again for the record, “replacement theory” is not a theory, it is an avowed and heavily promoted policy by elected Democrats and their media mouthpieces. Due to having alienated the American voters with America-Last policies, the Democrat Party must now import new voters to hold onto power.
No one has heaped more brutal mockery on this false claim that citizen replacement is not happening than Dan Bongino. Bongino’s routine playing of the medley of mainstream media talking heads all curiously saying the phrase “demographics is destiny” would be hilarious except that leftists at Brittannica and wikipedia etc keep pretending that they are not saying what they are saying all the time.
The real proof of Democrats using foreign illegal aliens to replace American citizens is that the Democrat Party just last week overwhelmingly voted against the SAVE Act, which would make it illegal for non-citizens to vote in American elections. Joe Biden has said he will veto the SAVE Act if it gets to his desk, and his administration is working with a dozen state governors to create opportunities for illegal aliens to vote in the upcoming 2024 election. Sure looks like Democrats want those illegals to vote for them!
In other words, the so-called replacement theory is not a theory, it is in fact a very real policy goal of the Left, and is the sole cause of our borders being wide open with millions of illegal invaders pouring over. The Democrat Party just wants to cheat, and to spam our elections with millions of illegal ballots and illegal votes, so they can win every election and have complete power. That’s all….
So, today’s so-called conspiracy theory out of Butler, PA, is quite obviously a very real conspiracy:
- Why did the Secret Service so visibly and openly allow Thomas Crooks to stand up with a scoped rifle and get off a bunch of shots at President Trump before shooting Crooks?
- How was Thomas Crooks allowed to crawl up onto a building in plain sight of the audience members (who were yelling at the police and Secret Service staff about it) that should have had Secret Service agents on it, but didn’t?
- Why was basic protection protocol not followed?
- Did the Democrats’ effort to legislatively strip President Trump of his Secret Service protection contribute towards an apparently purposeful reduction of actual Secret Service protection for President Trump?
No theory here. The facts on the ground and on the many videos recorded real-time demonstrate that would-be assassin Thomas Crooks appeared to be working in synch with the Secret Service agents who were present at the Butler PA speech venue. That’s not a theory, it is patently evident.
Funny how all these so-called “conspiracy theories” keep coming true. The facts are right in front of us. Turns out these activities are not theories, but cold facts. Now, the big question is WHY this is so…
“Fall Guy” movie review
I did it, I went and saw a movie at a theater. Notify the media.
Partly out of a commitment to celebrate Mother’s Day in whatever way the Princess of Patience-Mother wanted on her special day, and yes, she wanted to see a movie, and in particular this one. And partly out of an almost morbid fascination with the ever more gruesome demise of Hollywood, its actors, its writers, its physical space (I know it well and have hiked from poopy-needly-trashy West Hollywood up to and through Runyon Canyon and back, many times), its culture, its leaders, etc. In general, Hollywood and its dreck movies, people, and physical space is something I avoid on principle.
But what the heck, for ten bucks I could go see the freak show, and also make my Princess of Patience aka Mother happy.
However, I was pleasantly surprised on this now rare trip to Regal Theaters in Harrisburg. Not only were the theaters clean, the employees friendly and easy, and the fellow movie guests well behaved, the movie itself was actually worth seeing.
“Fall Guy” is one of the rare funny, wholesome, entertaining movies to come out of un-natural disaster Hollywood in a long time. If you want to simply be entertained by a movie, without being hectored, lectured, propagandized, indoctrinated, lied to, talked down to, then Fall Guy is for you.
If my rusty memory serves me now, making entertaining movies was really at the core of Hollywood’s business model. Once upon a time. Like fifty years ago or more. With Hollywood both captured/ owned by China now, and also going broke because its actors, writers, et al are at war with America, it was reassuring to see some evidence of sanity there. Someone made this movie to actually appeal to Americans, and make some money along the way.
Fall Guy is done tongue in cheek, deliberately mocking Hollywood and movies in every way, and in one especially (Spoiler Alert) pleasing way: The movie’s two villains are truly villainous, bad, evil people: The silver tongued movie producer, and the secretly dull witted, incompetent high paid big name actor. Ah ha, we knew it already after listening to Robert DeNiro incoherently blab away about politicians and political and cultural issues he doesn’t understand last week, despite the now annual Oscars debacle. But it is nice to see that some people in Hollywood are willing to admit to their sins, in the form of a movie, if not in person.
Fall Guy is about a stunt man who loves a woman on set. He screws up, they get separated, and they end up back together on another movie set. The movie plot deliberately zigs and zags between serving up touchy feely girl feeling scenes that left my head uncontrollably lolling about like my spine had been snatched away from my neck, and death defying action and fight scenes, outstanding stunt scenes, and physical comedy that had me sitting erect in my seat, alert and happy enough to forget all about the sappy girl stuff that had been putting a wooden stake through my heart just moments before.
It is two hours long, which worked fine for me. An evening out should be worth it.
When we left the theater with the other couple also watching Fall Guy, it was well after midnight. The entire Regal Cinemas Theater building was shut down, the lights were out, no other movies were playing, no staff were visible or heard, and we were completely alone. We had the entire place to ourselves. For a moment I had this instinctive impulse to run amok in there, in personally gratifying ways that are not destructive. But alas, I am almost a responsible old guy, and was reminded of this by Mother, bless her matronly always responsible way, who gently led me by the elbow out the front door and into the dark and rainy night on my sudden discontent.
My heart sank when I heard the theater door lock shut behind me. No more fun for you here, the klatch locking sound said. I don’t recall having experienced that feeling at a movie theater in many years.
Congratulations, Hollywood and Fall Guy makers.
DUNE 2 review
Dune captured my young imagination like no other book- not Tolkien’s trilogy, not Starship Troopers, and like Tolkien’s books and Starship Troopers, Dune shaped just about every subsequent sci-fi book, movie, comic book that followed.
Several attempts have been made to capture Dune’s magic in movie form. Prior to the latest two movies, the best known and best produced was the 1984 version with all-star cast Kyle MacLachlan, Sean Young, Sting, Jose Ferrer, Brad Dourif, Richard Jordan, Patrick Stewart, Jurgen Prochnow, Kenneth McMillan, Sian Phillips, Freddie Jones, Linda Hunt, Jack Nance, and other stellar actors. Look up any of these names and you find a talented lifetime actor with lots of real acting gigs to their credit. And as expected, the 1984 Dune movie was very well acted, much better than the latest versions.
Where the 1984 movie was deficient were some of the special effects, and yet some of its special effects were so good that they are repeated in the latest two Dune movies. Fact is, special effects have really improved since 1984, and of course this is where the 2021+2024 Dune movies shine.
If the 1984 Dune movie struggled to get everything just right and onto the screen in a logical flow, which sometimes left it congested, Dune 2 simply ignores certain critical story elements and throws scenes up on the wall, take them or leave them. There is a lot of character and story development in 1984 Dune that is absent in Dune 2.
One scene I was hoping to see is where Fayd Rautha is confronted by the last three Atreides warriors in his gladiator ring, and one of them is not drugged. That fighter just about kills Fayd in the knife fight. In the book that scene takes time to play out, and one gets the impression that Fayd is too used to mock-fighting drugged opponents who cannot possibly bring their full skills or physical power to bear against him. In Dune 2, Fayd just rolls right over his opponents 1-2-3, and there, it’s done. No suspense, no close calls, no embedded darts being painfully but artfully used as improvised armor against Fayd’s quick blade.
The Mentats are pretty much nowhere to be found in Dune 2, which is odd. Dune makes it clear up front that computers and artificial intelligence were banned from human possession, because the computers tried to kill off all the humans and take over their planets. Which gave rise to the Mentats, human computers whose loyalty is first and foremost to fellow humans. Dune 1984 does an outstanding job showing the central role of the Mentats, whereas Dune 2 has none.
One of the biggest deficiencies in Dune 2 is the final battle between Paul and the Fremen, and the Emperor’s forces. Little of the battlefield set-up is explained in Dune 2, and the action just kind of rolls along. The sand worms show up, but not grandly. Maybe the director expects the audience has prior knowledge of the storyline? Plus there are way too many lasers used in Dune 2, because as we do already know, if a laser hits a personal shield, an atomic explosion happens at both ends, killing both parties. Thus, knives and swords were much more handy. I guess lasers look too cool on the big screen to pass up, even if they are not in keeping with the book.
Or Dune 2 could have incorporated the original “weirding” voice module, the Atreides’ secret weapon that is both super high tech and weirdly organic. Dune 1984 did a great job showing how the weirding module greatly enhanced the Fremen fighting ability, thereby enabling them to take on the fully armed Harkonnens. None of this is in Dune 2, strangely.
The 1984 movie ending is far, far superior to the ending of Dune 2: Paul’s raw power is displayed in his fight with Fayd Rautha, whereas in Dune 2 a lot of stuff just doesn’t make sense. Like how does Fayd stab Paul so many times, and why doesn’t the scene follow the book, which is so good, and why doesn’t Paul cut loose after killing Fayd, crushing him and the stone floor with just his voice, thereby demonstrating his overwhelming physical/mystical messianic power…instead of just kind of standing there looking over his defeated enemies….? Curious minds want to know.
Nothing in Dune 2 shows Paul’s slow discovery and then development of his messianic powers, despite that being the entire purpose of the Dune story. Nine hundred generations of careful breeding and genetic modification were supposed to result in the messiah, who could bend space and time on his own, and in Dune and the 1984 Dune, those responsible for creating Paul are amazed that he actually happened. I am amazed that Dune 2 shows its audience almost none of this important part of the overall story. Paul’s emergence and ascent as the universe’s messianic all-powerful super-being leader is the entire point of Dune. How did it evade the producers of Dune 2?
Dune 2 should have just taken the 1984 film and used every scene, every prop, every script and line, and simply updated the actors and the special effects. Oh well. Opportunity missed.
Well, I paid fourteen bucks to go see a Hollywood movie. First one of 2024 and probably going to be the only Hollywood movie I see this year. Regal Cinemas now has assigned seats, which in theory is a nice thing, and which in the theater itself bore no resemblance to the seating map offered on the computer screen when buying my ticket. I did get to sit up front and enjoy the effect of a full size movie screen, which is a lot of fun. It is a shame the movie was not what I expected, or what it could have been, or should have been.
Nice consolation is that I can watch my 1984 Dune DVD at home, as well as watch the excellent cut scenes on YouTube. Hate to say it, Dune 1984 is in many ways much better than today’s Dune 2, but Dune 2 is worth seeing, if you have any affinity for the Dune story. It’s all fun.
Fayd Rautha (Sting) having fun biting Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) in the 1984 Dune last knife fight
The mugshot heard ’round the world
President Donald J. Trump, the most illegally persecuted man in American history, had a mugshot taken late yesterday. This first-ever-in-American-history moment was associated with yet another fake lawfare prosecution by yet another lawless elected Democrat. This small but symbolic mis-use of the justice system is the loudest shot yet the lawless Democrat Party and their evil RINO partners have taken at the American electoral system, and it has been heard ’round the world.
As if two procedurally faulty and thus phony “impeachments” (the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court did not preside over the second fake impeachment, so that one was even phonier than the first), a host of hoaxes (RussiaGate, UkraineGate, whateva whateva whateva-Gate), seven years of nonstop lies from the mainstream media-Hollywood entertainment industrial complex, censorship by the mainstream media-Big Tech industrial complex, and three other fake and obviously politicized indictments and lawsuits were not sufficient, President Trump was just indicted in Democrat Party bastion Fulton County for having a political discussion with another elected official about an election in which Trump was a candidate.
Basic reasoning tells us you can’t have “election interference” when the election is over, but here we have it, another novel legal theory indictment that seems to run contrary to the basic tenets of all elections held in America, as well as our First Amendment right to free speech. What our reasoning tells us is that this fake indictment is illegally coordinated with the other fake indictments President Trump is subject to, in order to illegally interfere with the 2024 election, in which President Trump is already the clear front-runner against both Republicans and Democrats alike.
Meanwhile, hard evidence of Joe Biden’s longtime treasonous bribery is flooding Congress, and the GOPe running the show can hardly be bothered to talk about it, much less the Democrat Party mainstream media.
As many other people have commented, and as this blog has noted for years before it became common awareness, America is undergoing this illegal Democrat Party revolution because there is zero political opposition. The Republican Party is AWOL in this fight, and most of its members and officials seem to (erroneously) think that if President Trump is hung up on the cross, then no one else will be sacrificed.
What the Republican establishment does not realize is that if this illegal lawfare against President Trump is successful, then it will be implemented everywhere throughout and across America. Every single Republican will be subject to false charges, false arrest, false imprisonment, because the Democrat Party wants complete and absolute total control over every American. And why wouldn’t this be done? The Democrat Party seems to have an innate understanding of the Republican Party as a spineless, weak, feckless, fearful group of girly men and even girlier girls hiding under their beds. Only fools place their hope and trust in the GOPe.
Here in Pennsylvania we have very, very few elected Republicans who say anything about the January 6th political prisoners or about the lawless lawfare against President Trump. I get monthly emails from Republican state senator John DiSanto about things like dog collars, state grants, back-to-school events, and zero about election integrity or galvanizing citizens to protect our election system from further corruption. Nearby congressman Dan Meuser, a longtime GOPe puke, visited the World Economic Forum and fancies himself some sort of overlord, and says nothing about the J6 political prisoners or the lawless lawfare against Trump. My Republican congressman, Scott Perry, is one of the few members of Congress to say anything, to do anything, to fight back against the Democrat Party’s ongoing insurrection against the American People. But ever since the Democrat Party’s FBI thugs mugged Rep. Perry of his cell phone last year, he has been much quieter in his criticism.
We have already said it here a hundred times or maybe a thousand times, but it bears saying again: We, The People have only each other to rely on in the resistance against the Democrat Party revolutionary insurrection against our Constitution and self governance of, by, and for The People. Oh, we also have one important ally: President Donald J. Trump.
I intend to buy every Trump mugshot tee shirt and coffee mug the Trump folks are selling. I will wear them and use them with pride, because this one mugshot picture represents the most innocent man in politics being illegally persecuted for standing up for American citizens’ freedom and fair elections.
Sometimes a mugshot is a badge of honor. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. was, President Trump is being unfairly, illegally, lawlessly persecuted by Southern Democrats
One other thing about the movie Oppenheimer
One other thought about the movie Oppenheimer: Unlike the current political narrative-driven world of politicized science, where complete lies are said to be scientific truth, or at least they are said to have the strength to displace truth, the movie Oppenheimer accurately depicts real scientific competition.
Remember when science was real? Remember when science was analysis, competitive, discussed, debated, respected, valued, and rewarded? Been a while, I know, I know, but it is true that at one time the real scientific method of discovery and progress involved serious disagreement among scientists. But ever since anti-scientific woke PC narratives took over everything being publicly discussed, including real science, science just has not been real, despite the woke bumper stickers proclaiming “Science Is Real.”
That’s the intriguing thing about “science” these days. Actual real proven science about X and Y chromosomes determining a human’s biological sex is not only forbidden in the classroom, but actually saying it as a science teacher will get you immediately fired from your job. And that phony climate change alarmist thing? If you step up as a scientist with real science that demonstrates what a nonsensical hoax and political hatchet job human-caused “climate change” is, you’ll get fired from your job.
Oppenheimer depicts the real scientific method as humans knew it for about a thousand years, up until the brazen lie that “99% of scientists agree that global warming/ climate change is real.” In the movie, we see scientists aggressively debating the then-new nuclear fission science, which was based on the pioneering scientific and mathematical work of Albert Einstein and which resulted in the atom bomb blowing up American military enemies. The movie has scenes of scientists caustically disagreeing with one another, mocking each other, debating one another, until someone provides sufficient proof of their position. And the scientists’ use of tobacco and alcohol to soothe their frazzled nerves is also real history. This is all uncomfortable but very real scientific process.
This historic competitive situation shown in the movie was especially stark between the “old” Einsteinian relativity scientists and the “new” quantum physics scientists. Both theories of how physics works – relativity and quantum – are mutually exclusive of one another, and yet they coexist simultaneously. Both theories have been conclusively proven, despite canceling each other out, and yet scientists continue today to try to figure out how this apparent contradiction can happen.
In a world of lying political propaganda narratives, including modern gender ideology and “climate change,” such scientific debate and dispute and progress are impossible. This is because scientists who disagree with the established political narrative will have their funding taken away, lose their jobs, have their credentials revoked, and will lose their careers, their homes, their families… everything they worked so hard to create and build over years and decades.
All because these real scientists disagree with political activists who want to control us, control our behavior, our choices, our thinking, our conscience, our food, our daily existence.
To me, the political activists here have no credibility. They are just a bunch of mean, sadistic little fascists, trying to brutally shut up real scientists who inconveniently disprove their pet unscientific political narratives.
When someone in the Oppenheimer movie states “That can’t be true,” you just know someone in the next scene is about to show the disbeliever that in fact, it is true. We see Science! From the long established scientific method! So the movie Oppenheimer is useful for at least showing audiences what real scientific debate and progress used to involve, and what it must involve, if we are to have real science about anything.
Oppenheimer reminds us that there is no such thing as “scientific consensus,” which is a made-up faketoid by the climate change alarmism activists to push their political hoax.
For this rare gem of reality from a business sector that constantly deals in deceit and falseness, I award the educational Hollywood movie Oppenheimer a refreshing A+.
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
Hollywood child abusers protest anti-child abuse film
A month ago, at a party celebrating my daughter’s impending marriage to a fine young man, a strange older man approached me. Me, of jovial mood and big hearted happiness upon this wonderful occasion, found myself backing up as the stranger puked up bitter venom and anger at me.
“I heard you are a big Trump guy. Well, he is morally reprehensible, reprehensible, I tell you, and degenerate. Trump is morally bankrupt, corrupt, and has broken every law known to mankind. And I can’t believe you support him.”
Some people, well let’s say it, liberals, have no class, because they live by their feelings, not their thinkings, and so they are like rabid dogs roaming about randomly peeing on and biting the guests at parties where happiness is supposed to reign. This old guy was true to form, and I must say, having myself grown up surrounded by liberals, I have yet to meet one, and I mean one liberal person, who is capable of calmly discussing or debating politics or culture. Their feewings always turn them into stark raving lunatics. And here I was face to face with Exhibit Number Eight Bazillion of that rule.
“Well, I see no evidence to support what you have just said,” said I. “And I am genuinely interested to hear what you have to say that supports your pretty radical statement just now, especially in light of all of the child sex slaves being trafficked across Biden’s open border. Not much more morally degenerate or bankrupt or reprehensible than selling child sex slaves. Right?”
And the man turned around and walked away.
Every now and then at the party that evening I would catch him glaring angrily at me from across the room. And days later, even as I, father of the bride, was giving my doting father of the bride speech at the wedding itself, this foolish old dolt of a well formed liberal dingbat sat and did his best disapproving scowl at me to let me know what he thought.
And so it is now with the Hollywood-Media Industrial Complex reaction to The Sound of Freedom, a movie about stopping child sex slavery. Turns out that all of the evil child molesting Hollywood-Media people really oppose a movie that shines an unfavorable light on their reprehensible, morally bankrupt, degenerate and corrupt child molesting behavior that is not just aided and abetted but actually jet-fueled by child sniffing Joe Biden and his court of freaks enforcing a wide-open southern border.
Who else am I thinking of here…hmmmmm well, let’s start with Jeffrey Epstein and all of his hundreds of close Hollywood chums raping underage girls at his dungeon island in the Bahamas. And the DAs and judges of one single political party across several states, mostly Florida, who went out of their way to enable and to protect Jeffrey Epstein after the fact was known that he was a reprehensible, morally bankrupt, corrupt child rapist.
After that example there is a laundry list as long as my leg of outed pedophile Mainstream Media personalities in England and America. These morally reprehensible people are trying to get normal people to accept the idea of adults having sex with underage children as a normal thing.
Isn’t it interesting that when you type in the words “pedophile” and “pedophilia” on your iPhone, the autocorrect and instant spell check don’t recognize either word? To the evil woke child-hating psychopaths at Apple, Inc. who programmed our iPhones, these two words should be canceled, they must not even exist, because they highlight and draw attention to a significant amount of morally reprehensible crap Hollywood, Corporate Media, and Silicon Valley people actually believe in and want to do, to children.
There is a sick and evil culture in one political party today, and it is infecting everything it touches. Turns out that party’s PR arm – the Hollywood-Media-High Tech Industrial Complex- isn’t just on the job for professional, financial, or even ideological reasons. These people are actually running interference and carrying water for sold-America-to-China Joe Biden and his administration’s dark den of child molesters because of their own personal immoral sickness and evil.
It is why they are all up in arms about this good movie, The Sound of Freedom. Qanon affiliated? What a joke that accusation is, because Qanon is at most just an idea, and one that is pushed more by liberals than anyone else; it’s not even a real group. It is just another liberal-created boogie man.
It is said that all it takes for bad people to prevail is for good people to do nothing….but sit and scowl, wordless and without evidence or cause, at the father of the bride at his daughter’s wedding. I don’t know how we break through to these liberal people. They are enabling and promoting pure evil, they badmouth a good movie for shallow political reasons, and yet they say it is all someone else’s fault when the problems cross our open border and show up in the “conservative” news.
Say, what is normally done with rabid dogs?