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Screamers America

A real sizeable portion of the American citizenry and even the American electorate do not understand or even care what the people in the federal government are doing. So many Americans are lethargic about their freedom that they don’t bother to vote, and some of them really say “If it is all taken away from me tomorrow, OK, whatever.”

Of course we all know these same people who are so laissez- faire about their own fates will scream bloody murder when they do in fact lose everything. This is the down side of all the unbelievable material success and wealth that democratic capitalism has spread so far and wide. People are asleep, unaware and uncaring about what is happening to their fate, to their futures. To them, America just keeps chugging along on autopilot. Doesn’t matter who is in Congress, doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office, doesn’t matter who holds the local magisterial judge position in their township, doesn’t matter how political decisions are made.

A significant portion of our people are stuffing their faces full of processed junk food and living for the moment, absorbed in nonsense like “professional” sports. No country can continue successfully like this, when its people are not watching the road in front of them, but are distracted by shiny crap way off on the side somewhere. And in fact, America is not continuing successfully like this, as we see with high food prices and shortages, high gasoline prices, high mortgage rates, heavy official censorship of undesirable alternative perspectives, etc. And we also see a single political party in partnership with a real portion of the other political party doing everything possible to silence their critics and crush dissent. These political people are taking advantage of the lack of attention the American people are paying to what is being done in the name of the American people. Like how is government power and force being used and badly abused.

Is the IRS unfairly attacking opponents of the Joe Biden crime family? Is the FBI illegally targeting opponents of the Joe Biden crime family and protecting the corrupt Joe Biden crime family? Is the DOJ using official force of arms against innocent Americans to achieve political outcomes that the voters won’t grant them? The answers to these questions are a huge Hell Yes.

And yet I still encounter perfectly smart Americans who actually believe whatever the New York Times writes, whatever the MSNBC and NPR partisan political activists tell them. They are not curious about what is happening around them, what is happening under their feet. When a heavily armed FBI SWAT-type group descends on their neighbor’s home, these incurious people either say “Eh, he must have done something bad.”

Or, even worse, the neighbors say “Oh, he was a religious Republican who peacefully protested in Washington DC on January 6th 2021, so he deserves this heavy treatment.”

A 1995 movie called Screamers captures America’s current cultural landscape perfectly. Unintentionally, mind you. This is an allusion, a comparison, an allegory, intended to paint a picture using actual pictures from a movie so we can better connect dots in people’s heads and help them better understand what is happening to America. Screamers was not so much a political statement as a story about the cost of humans becoming lazy and incurious about what is happening under their feet.

In a way Screamers is probably based on the 1895 HG Wells book The Time Machine, where happy pretty Eloi people dancing in the sunshine with flowers in their hair without a care are occasionally grabbed by the evil Morlocks and dragged underground to a horrible fate. Either one of these stories, Screamers or The Time Machine, fit what is happening right now in America. And what, you ask, is happening in America right now?

America is becoming a violent, lawless police state, and it started right underneath our feet without us knowing it, or seeing it. Oh sure, it started earnestly enough, you know, the federal government staffers fighting foreign terrorism and against evil drug cartels. But then those government employees working so diligently behind the scenes, out of our view, eventually redesigned themselves, redefined their purpose, and they evolved into unrecognizable creatures preying upon us innocent citizens.

FBI, DHS, DOJ, CIA etc employees have become horror creatures drunk on raw, cruel power they derive from controlling what had been hallowed institutions set up to protect the American people. And now these government Morlocks and Screamers are coming for all of us who dare point out that they have become Frankenstein monsters intent on destroying a free America so they can control it. One by one, they pull innocent Americans down into DC dungeons where terrible tortures are happening.

A new movie is out, which I saw, that details exactly how America is becoming a violent, lawless police state run by the worst people. This movie is called … Police State. I highly recommend you see it, not because it will make you feel good, but because you and I definitely need a kick in the ass to get our attention off of the fun and shiny happy things Americans are so used to having endless supplies of. We are not living in the American reality right now, people. We are living in a very scary, dangerous un-reality. If you want to understand how this is happening, go see the movie Police State.

The federal Screamers and the government Morlocks are definitely coming to get you and your kids. Don’t let them succeed.

A pretty face don’t mean a pretty heart. Plenty of federal agents will destroy 100% innocent you just for the pleasure of it

Federal agents coming to help you find your way to a dungeon where they will deprive you of your constitutional AND your human rights

 

 

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?

Movie review: Top Gun: Maverick

Sounding like a nattering nabob of negativism is not my thing, so suffice it to simply say Hollywood is an overflowing sewer of anti-Americanism, anti freedomism, anti rule-of-lawism, anti-religionism (except radical Islam, which the areligious ethnic Jews of Hollywood looooove), anti Constitutionalism etc. Meaning that Hollywood rarely produces anything of value or anything worth seeing any longer, unless you are so desperate to see anything at all on the big screen that you also like clawing out your own eyes afterward so you can un-see the garbage Hollywood poured into them.

Suddenly, enter Top Gun: Maverick, a new re-make update from the fun, cool, and patriotic 1986 military movie Top Gun. People (Hollywood movie “critics”) complain that actor Tom Cruise (center stage in both Top Gun movies) plays pretty much the same masculine stud role in almost all of his movies (Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, The Last Samurai etc), but who else in Hollywood is going to or even can actually act like a real man these days? Radical feminism axe murdered masculinity, and so Hollywood is now filled with lisping, mincing, Valley Girl talking actors born with boy parts down there, but who can not possibly be mistaken for a man’s human shell with a hint of testosterone. And Brad Pitt traded in his masculine stud acting persona for something a lot more drunk, high, and pathetic in real life.

So, fact is, Tom Cruise has the masculine stud role market cornered. He is the only Hollywood male who could play the role of fighter jock Maverick. I think he does it well, and he plays a compelling guy with feewings, too. Actor Tom Cruise has depth and breadth, in addition to acting skill. Thank you, Mister Cruise.

At a time when America is being purposefully failed and destroyed from within in every way, it is refreshing to watch a movie about American freedom’s greatness and motivational patriotic grit. Unique aspects of our nation that we took for granted. Top Gun: Maverick does this very well, as well as delivering on all of the military technological finery one had come to expect from America just 18 months ago. Before the Biden Administration began shoveling our most valuable technology out the door to our enemy China on purpose.

America needs heroes now, and especially military heroes, and no, a guy pretending to be a woman in a military uniform is not a hero. From the time of Ulysses, Samson, and Achilles until just 18 months ago, a military hero has always been a strong man (and occasionally a really impressive and brave woman chopper pilot) who is brave enough to risk his life in combat for the safety of America (or any other nation under risk of failure). Treading on dull military procedural failure at every step, Tom Cruise’s ultimately successful character Maverick gives us that heroic figure here, exceptionally well.

It feels good to believe in a free and robust America again, even if just for two hours and ten minutes. Go see this fantastic movie, which also has a classic early Kawasaki Z-1000 superbike (Mad Max), an original Mustang P51 fighter plane, and some other classic gas guzzlers whose presence once highlighted and then underpinned American greatness. It is worth the price of admission, and your buck sends a message to Hollywood that they will ignore, but which the normal people in America will understand.

10/10 rating here (I liked it even more the second time).

 

Alec Baldwin’s snuff film

Hollywood goof Alec Baldwin just gunned down an innocent person on the mismanaged set of his new movie in the making, “Rust.”

There is all kinds of analysis and hand wringing and wonderment about how this murder ever happened, and who is really responsible for it. Let’s take a look at this issue, and in the end I will present my own take on ‘what probably really happened’.

Some people say that Baldwin is 100% responsible for the murder of Galina Hutchins and the serious injury of Joel Sousa, because he ignored Rule #1 of gun use: Never point a gun at something or someone you do not want to destroy (shoot). And of course it is difficult to argue with this line of reasoning. I agree with it. But others have sought to dilute and undermine this thinking.

Other people, notably the establishment press, are trying to find anyone to throw under the bus to save a bona fide Hollywood actor from being held accountable. Remember how much effort went into protecting Hollywood scumbag Harvey Weinstein? And Weinstein really was a lecherous monster who was feared and loathed by most of Hollywood. So how much more so will the establishment wagons be circled to protect a just regular kind of gay-hating, violent jerk like Baldwin?

For example, the establishment press keep writing that the revolver was a “prop gun.” Ummm no, no it wasn’t. It was a real gun. Obviously. But that doesn’t stop the mainstream media from trying to pretend this away as some sort of non-gun-gun-non-crime.

The establishment press also tries to say that other people were more responsible for the gun and how it was loaded etc etc than Baldwin could be. Again, no, because that danged real gun was used for target practice by many of the actors and set workers in the desert surrounding the movie set. They all knew it was a real gun and that bullets had been shot out of it a lot.

Here is what I think probably really happened: Rust was a snuff film, a la Jeffrey Epstein’s way of just having fun and never being held accountable for it, no matter how evil and wicked.

Recall ol’ Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex slave trafficker whose pedophile island hideaway was frequented by the rich and famous like Bill Gates, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and others. The same Jeffrey Epstein who was strangled with a wire garrote in his prison cell while the cctv cameras were turned off and the guards mysteriously walked away. A guy with a lot of names and knowledge in his head, who had to be shut up before things got public and messy.

This is to say that with incredible wealth and power comes incredible debasement and debauchery. Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein epitomized the more openly grotesque aspects of it, as well as Epstein’s teenage girl sex party guests, and I think the murder of Galina Hutchins was probably a more subtle expression of one untouchable person’s secret desire to do something unimaginably evil, in the open, and then get away with it.

If this is true, and why not, then Alec Baldwin purposefully murdered Galina and then tried to blame it on everyone else. But inwardly he is gleefully laughing — he got away with it! With murder. And no one will ever try to hold him accountable for it. Because bully boy Baldwin is one of the many untouchables in America these days. People who commit pedophilia rape, murder, treason, and simply walk away from the scene of the crime because the entire cultural and political establishment surrounds them and protects them.

It is quite probable that Rust was actually a cheap and slovenly run movie set because it was never meant to actually be a movie. It was probably just an elaborate opportunity for Baldwin to live out one of his many sick fantasies, and never be held to account for it.

Just my theory, anyhow. It certainly is possible, because if we look at all the insane crimes that all the other American elites have gotten away with (and I am not even mentioning innocent young Mary Jo Kopechne, the sweet girl murdered by Democrat senator Ted Kennedy, another untouchable elite), murder in the open was just the next logical thing for one of them to do and then go laugh about behind their closed doors.

Talk about rust, this murder is an example of how America is becoming a diseased, corroded hell hole from all this unaccountable elitism. Like a bunch of Emperor Neros prancing around, hurting people and hurting America, with zero consequences…but unlike the Roman citizenry, we Americans do have the means to take matters under control.

But do we have the will power?

Dune 2021 Movie Review

Setting aside Regal Theaters’ ear-splitting volume emitting from every theater room as well as the one we sat in, and setting aside our thoughts on the 25 minutes of shallow woke commercial bombardment before the 2021 movie Dune even started, we did enjoy the movie, if not the venue.

A cult classic movie, like the 1984 version of Dune, is usually a cult classic for good reasons: Excellent acting, good props and sets, good costumes, and fealty to author Frank Herbert’s vision all make the 1984 Dune movie a timeless classic with a cult following. You can watch it once a year and never grow tired of it.

Yes, to follow the 1984 version, a viewer must already be somewhat familiar with the book Dune and with its general story line to begin with. But it covers and tracks well with a lot of the 1,000-page book’s territory. For example, the 1984 Dune has a highly compelling and truly evil Baron Harkonnen, literally bathing in the blood of his slain enemies and reveling in the blood of a sexually molested slave boy whose heart plug he just pulled in front of his two nephews (one of whom, the actor Sting, evinces morbid fascination and horror turned to sadistic glee all too well).

Fast forward to Dune 2021, and now our evil Baron Harkonnen is merely deeply brooding and kind of distantly menacing. That he is surrounded by black-clad ministers of evil and a brutish thug nephew, and that he bathes in black used motor oil to “heal,” makes him icky and probably really bad. But we see no blood-baths, no sadistic glee as the vulnerable innocents twitch their last under his daintily painted finger nails. He doesn’t even look for Duke Leto’s ducal signet ring as the helpless prostrate mess breathes its last, a boring scene which contrasts poorly with the believable 1984 Baron, whose unfulfilled lust for the Atreides signet ring is foiled and gives way to howls of rage.

The same distance is observed between the Duke Leto Atreides character of 1984 and 2021. One radiates nobility and dead seriousness, while Oscar Isaac acts here exactly like he acts in every movie in which he appears. Which is to say weak. Oscar Isaac is literally the same character in Dune as he was in Star Wars. He emits no gripping leadership, exudes no magnetic charisma at the head of one of the universe’s greatest armies that we admire in the book and in the 1984 movie.

And again, the 2021 movie’s lack of the Sting character, Harkonnen Feyd Rautha, nephew of Baron Harkonnen, removes what was in the book the evil Harkonnen foil to young and good Paul Atreides. As House Atreides represents good, honor, justice, fairness and clean living, House Harkonnen is everything opposite- murder, coercion, violence, cruelty, sadism, greed etc. Throughout the book Dune, and in the 1984 movie, the two nephews (who turn out to actually be related by blood) ever more tightly circle each other, coming closer and closer to an in-person showdown knife fight to the death. All of this foil effect and symbolism is absent the 2021 movie

While the 2021 movie has fantastic special effects that are blended with just enough gritty sand to make them believable, today’s movie lacks the true grit, grime, and desperate feel of the 1984 version.  The 2021 space ships are superior to the almost pathetic hand-drawn ones of 1984. However, in 1984 the freaky-looking mutant spacing guild navigator folds time and space by shooting light beams out his mouth and ass, thereby connecting two distant parts of the universe and moving an entire army across the distance between the two points “without moving.”

We get no such mouth or ass action in 2021, and it is a true loss. Because no matter how good your special effects are, and no matter how much your movie watchers are supposed to innately know that eight thousand years from now weapons and space travel are really high tech, your viewers nonetheless want to see how that high tech moment is attained. That is the point of watching a movie. Having a bunch of spacing guild navigators show up in 1960s NASA astronaut space suits with their visors filled with a pink fume just does not cut it (when the Emperor’s representatives visit Caladan). That scene is oh-so Star Trek and Star Wars, and we who are in 2021 are  supposed to be oh-so-beyond those passe genres.

As much as I expected to be bothered by the woke racial aspect of the 2021 Dune movie, because Hollywood has done such a good job of butchering otherwise ok movies on the altar of PC, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked. In case you missed it, Hollywood now demands that non-white-skinned people appear in all kinds of movies in roles that were originally written by, of, and for white-skinned people. As a result, this ‘woke’ virtue signaling gone super foolish now has unfunny black women trying to play the humorous roles of truly funny Italian and Jewish guys in Ghost Busters IX or whatever. Go woke, go broke making stupid movies appealing to no one but Hollywood insiders.

But here, in this movie, the roles are believable. Even the role of Dr. Liet Kynes, who in the book is a tough guy, and who in the 1984 movie is played very well by a big tough guy, is now switched to a black lady. I think she carries the role off well and believably. And so do the varied multi-racial Fremen, whose skin tones run from crusty white to deeply black. The 1984 movie had some blacks and American Indians in military roles, which was avante gard for its time. Here, the pursuit of heterogeneity is not forced, and it flows. Thank Shai Hulud.

In sum, the 2021 Dune movie is pretty good. I say A for weapons and action acting, B for acting, A for special effects, C+ for script, A for props and sets. My son said they should have simply used the 1984 script verbatim or close to it, and he is right.

It is easy for me to say that it could have been better, and I am but one lone watcher in a sea of watchers. But then again, I am a customer and my opinion is supposed to count with the people selling this movie. After all, Dune is the first movie I have gone to see in a couple years, maybe even three years. That is because Hollywood has turned out endless nonstop trash and junk that is either not entertaining, or not meaningful, or shallowly PC woke preachy and annoying. At this point, I now simply refuse to transfer my hard-earned wealth into the pockets of Hollywood America haters. When a decent movie comes along that promotes family, loyalty, fearless stoicism and fearless warriors, vision for a better future, risk and sacrifice, why then Hollywood can expect a donation from me.

This Dune was part one, and that is one of its main superior aspects over the 1984 movie, which tried to do too much in too short a time. To serve up the book well and just, one must convey it in bites that can be consumed and digested. Such is part one here. I am looking forward to part two, and hopefully more intensity and inward awareness from the protagonist, Paul M’uad Dib Atreides aka Timothee Chalamet.

One call I won’t take

Phony, fraudulent telemarketer calls are super annoying, and like you, I am fed up with them.

Another phony call just arrived, called “Call of the Wild,” a new movie loosely based on a Jack London book by the same name.

Jack London’s stories of tenuous life in the Yukon and Alaskan interiors are the stuff of pre-internet American boyhood. Just like coonskin Davey Crockett hats were all the rage among American boys in the 1950s and 1960s after Fess Parker starred in the same-named TV show, so too did London inspire many young men to get their forestry degree, build a canoe, cut down their grandmother’s favorite apple tree with a hatchet, or move to Alaska. His stories of nail-biting survival and creeping or sudden death in the boreal forests and frigid back country rang true, and a number of movies have been made about them. Some better than others, but all of them pretty good just because the story line is great.

London’s story about a young man caught at sundown in the winter time Alaskan bush, unprepared for the minus-forty-degree night, who gets down to his last match and finally succeeds at lighting a life-saving fire, only to have the snow from the branches above fall and smother the fire, is classic.

This latest iteration involves an unrealistic CGI human-like dog that giddy un-wilderness urbanites will fawn over. It also includes Harrison Ford, a man blessed with poor acting skills who nonetheless has landed a huge list of Hollywood roles and who made a huge pile of money. Play acting and playing dress-up; not exactly brain surgeon level or even bank teller level stuff.

And to be fair, Ford’s best movie roles are those that fit his kind of simple, bland, taciturn persona, like the Jack Ryan character, or Indiana Jones, or the emotion-less Blade Runner cyborg cop. Or those roles that are actually enhanced by his lack of acting skills, like Star Wars‘ Han Solo. Whenever Harrison Ford is tasked with actually acting, his lack of nuance or depth shines through bright and shiny. One suspects that this Call of the Wild will be one such role and performance. Or maybe not, because the 2020 movie poster for it shows Ford looking all serious and taciturn.

Now, because I am a wilderness hunter, fisherman, and trapper, any new movie like Call of the Wild immediately gets my attention. Bad acting or no, evil corrupt anti-America Hollywood or no, CGI human dogs or no, it is a movie I would naturally be inclined to go see. It is about nature and outdoor adventure, my favorite things. However, Harrison Ford finally performed honestly the other day and thereby blew up any chance of me seeing his film, and probably many other people feel the same way.

Last week, Ford appeared on not-funny Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, and blasted Preident Trump, calling him “a son-of-a-bitch.”

Out of nowhere, and for no particular reason. Other than pandering to Hollywood.

What a shame, because at one time Ford was a spokesman for Conservation International, a worthy environment protection organization. His other opinions about so-called climate change and carbon reduction are the usual Hollywood hypocritical hilarity, because Ford is also the guy who flies his own plane on a 400-mile round trip to get a single hamburger to satisfy his craving for fast food. Talk about a carbon footprint, and yet his lecturing never ends.

Now, everyone is entitled to their opinions, and like Ford, I am entitled to mine, too. And my opinion is that I will not support with movie ticket purchases those celebrity Hollywood actors who insult me, my values, my lifestyle, or the people I vote for. So I will not be answering Harrison Ford’s Call of the Wild. Though I might play it on one of the many black market bootleg websites, just so I can take from Ford a tiny bit of what Ford took away from me: A good feeling.

Below is just one video of Harrison Ford actually whining about his wild success, as if it ruined him as some sort of serious artiste. Oh please. Ford is just another out of touch, spoiled rotten Hollywood jerk. Where is comedian Ricky Gervais when we need him most? Every Hollywood actor like Harrison Ford should have to spend a week with Gervais following him or her everywhere they go, commenting on their vapid lives and stupid statements.

Time for a new Dune movie

The 1965 book Dune was to a great extent the basis of most futuristic science fiction books and movies that followed. Star Wars is based on Dune, even beginning on a desert planet where the hero, Luke Skywalker, has been tested and hardened into a ready warrior by the harsh landscape around him, like the Fremen of Dune’s desert planet Arrakis.

“Dune” author Frank Herbert was an eclectic guy, a deep and creative thinker. One might say he was unusual, even by modern terms.

He was against racism but believed in the importance of human genetic improvement through select breeding. Focusing on the importance of tribalism, Herbert nonetheless elevated the self-reliant individual as the highest achievement a person could aim and hope for.

He was for the concretely purposeful use of mind-expanding drugs, such as religious experiences, saw warfare and killing as hardly noticeable inevitabilities in a well-ordered human universe, believed in God and the power of prayer, supported the ongoing evolution of technology, but then elevated the supremacy of human evolution and the human spirit, including personal fighting skills, over that same technology.

If his amalgamation of nearly all current religions on Planet Earth into one or two future strands of religious thought is any indication, Herbert is suggesting that all religions pretty much point us in the same direction, though some are scarier than others.

Herbert was firmly against artificial intelligence and the delegation of human decision making to machines. In Dune, it is the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ that wipes out most computers and all AI, leaving only those computers that could perform the basic elementary functions in lieu of humans, after a close call where AI and its robots nearly took out all humans. On this subject, it could be said that Herbert was prescient and, like many other sci-fi writers, ahead of his time. Even now we childishly rush into AI as if it is just a silly game, when in fact it could quickly kill every human and every other life form on Planet Earth.

In 1984 director David Lynch produced a pretty good movie that captured a lot of the book Dune. No small feat, as most great books result in terrible movies. The David Lynch movie was good because it embraced the book and did not try to dance around it. Its acting was mostly excellent, and some of the scenes are perfectly gritty. But in other ways the 1984 movie is very weak. Its special effects are almost sad, even by the standards of that time. Very 1950s.

A miniseries was attempted years later, and many Dune devotees believed it was a failure in every way. Lacking even the punch of the 1984 movie, it certainly was not what people had hoped for or imagined.

We need a new, updated Dune movie. No, we demand one. A Dune movie that is absolutely true to the book, that has the same quality actors as the 1984 version, and which has updated technology, sets, and special effects. It will have to be long, three hours, to capture the most important scenes and subtle nuances that make the Dune story so powerful.

C’mon, Hollywood, do something good for once. Give us a new Dune movie that is worthy of the name and the book.

Movie review: “White Tiger”

When we think of Russia today and now, our mind might wander off into brutal poisonings of ex-spies across international borders, brutal assassinations of journalists inside Russia, brutal repressions of Chechen independence movements, brutal invasions of South Ossetia, Ukraine, and Georgia (THAT Georgia, not our Georgia), poorly chosen relationships with Iran and Syria, and the current czar riding around bare-chested on a horse with a rifle slung over his back.

Perhaps it was always thus. But if we think and search back a hundred years or more, we will stumble upon buried treasure in the farthest reaches of Russia.

Yes, it is true, Russia was not always just a military force to be reckoned with, it was also a significant cultural center of the very highest magnitude, the very highest achievement. World class music, literature, arts and crafts, poetry, ballet, and so on all were major hallmarks of the Russians.

Not of the oppressed Soviet satellite states, but the actual Russian people themselves.

Rachmaninoff, Dostoyesky, Faberge, and so on, so many great minds contributing in a singularly unique way, native to Russian culture.

Russians had this knack for art that you would not necessarily see if you looked at the simple surface of their culture or landscape. Behind the eightball on technology, Russian writers and poets and musicians bedazzled Westerners with their brilliance and inspiration.

That all started to die in fits and starts after the violent 1917 revolution led by the Democrat Party of that day and place, but nonetheless art persisted until the 1950s, when Soviet socialist control firmly held every thing and every person in its crushing grasp.

To dissent from all that big government with a pink pussy hat or with a snarky hashtag was unthinkable. Not that people wouldn’t try to do it, but the Soviet thought police, much the same as our own politically correct thought police in America today, would catch the thought crime even before it had taken physical form, and, as our own thought police openly wish they could do, WHOOSH, off to a starvation diet in Siberia went that ‘evil’ free thinker.

I am not sure that the Soviets used the words “sexist,” “racist,” homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” and other overdone American generalities meant to crush dialogue and debate, but if they could have used these terms, they would have. Different words then, but the same anti-democracy process then and now.

So for the past seventy years Russia has had an especially harsh Russian winter, art-wise, because of the Soviets and then their control freak successors, whatever Mr. Putin’s political party is named.

To be an artist in that Russian cultural winter was to walk around every day muzzled, daring not to say much less think your own creative thoughts. Too much was at stake.

But somewhere, somehow, that beautiful old Russian voice began to quietly break through the repressive walls. Finding acceptable subjects and means to convey them became a new form of creativity in and of itself.

Nationalism, patriotism, history are all legitimate subjects of artistic creativity, and so Russian artists have adapted. Very, very well. Albeit with throwback Soviet-style imagery, which is lamentable. Gosh, if the Russians could only be our friends…the things we could achieve together.

And so here we now have a truly artistic Russian movie we can all be proud of, in the mould of the old-time Russian artistic capacity. It is called White Tiger and debuted about 18 months ago. I have been wanting to write about it since watching it back then, but as we know, the past 18 months in America have been pretty intense.  Every time I thought I could breathe again, some new issue would pop up. There was more compelling competition for writing space and creativity of my own.

At least this is how I have experienced the past 18 months.

If you are afflicted with a love of liberty, as I am, then you have shared my somewhat anxious condition as the American “deep state,” or Obama holdovers, or career bureaucrats, or whatever you want to call them, have attempted to reverse the outcome of a presidential election they thought they would win and still cannot stomach the thought of losing, by any means necessary. Which means illegal, unethical, immoral, un-American, anti-democratic means.

That all seems to be unwinding now.

And so now, for this moment, I get to bask in the glow of art, thanks to the Russians. And I really mean it, thank you. Seeing this movie took me way back in time to when my own mind was creative and artistic.

Dear Russians, I lift my glass to you: Tvoye zdorovye!

White Tiger is on its face a war movie set in World War Two. It is about Russians versus Germans, good guys versus bad guys, the Eastern European version of cowboys versus Indians. It is also about tanks and heavy armor, about technological superiority versus the grass roots spirit to survive, and history. Lots of history. And lots of action.

At its core, this movie is mythological and Darwinian, with a lot of symbolism, not the least of which is the theme music, an artfully done refrain of Wagner’s pilgrim’s chorus.

If you care to pay careful attention, and walk a mile in a Russian tank tread, you will end up being impressed by this low-budget, high-performance film.

Briefly summed up with no spoilers, the unlikely (and yet so likely…there’s that symbolism thing) Russian hero is reborn, a plausible enough biological fluke consistent with species adapting.

He goes on to learn his enemy’s ways, to anticipate his next moves, and in the end, he goes on a ghostly chase into both past and future, bound up in one of Russia’s most enduring identities: Not German!

And speaking of German, Germany, and World War Two, no better representation of Adolf Hitler has been captured in cinema than the movie’s very last few minutes, where Satan’s boots on the ground has a heartfelt confession with his sponsor, who sits patiently listening in the shadow.

White Tiger.

And as an aperitif, try this Russian music to settle your soul before bed time.