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Robert Jordan Plays Revenge Porn From Dusk Till Dawn at the Cotton Club

The bluesman, not the author.

I've heard tons of good about this movie, but from the wrong people and in a very homogeneous message. So, sus.


First, the good, cause there are more uglies than at a pussy hat march.

Jordan does a fine job playing both blue oni / red oni, angel / demon, or whatever colour-coded dichotomy comes to mind. The difference between characters is subtle, let's leave it at that.

Steinfeld does what she does best: she stands there, and is convinced of her own talent. Caton might have a career. Remmick tries hard but does not quite shine. The supporting cast is solid.

The music is an obvious strong point of the movie. No comment, it's well done and well used. Would like to hear that level of effort more often.

Photography is excellent. Reminiscent of Tarantino. In a good way. It sometimes gets ambitious, to its detriment, I think. The changes in aspect ratio are somewhat interesting.

I've briefly read from 'journalists' that the movie was heavily researched. It literally opens by heavily mispronouncing _griots_ (French colonies, so "gree-yo"), and mis-characterizing the filidh, but hey, all white people look the same anyway.


The bad: it's steeped in racial stereotypes. And not the best ones. It briefly represents black Christianity, and promptly contrasts with and glorifies the proto-gangsta rap that served the black community so well until this day. /sarcasm.

On that point, be warned that many black characters talk in heavy vernacular, quite possibly ebonics. So, a creole of West Country English. Not sure if historically accurate. Note that African-American Vernacular English, as a concept, makes about as much sense as Latine-Celtic Vernacular Bantu.
Anyway, I find it hard to understand. So much so, I turned English subtitles on at some point.

Injuns, well, they hunt a vampire without any visible specialized gear, corner it into a small, isolated house, and promptly twerp off when opposed a few harsh words, letting a containable issue flare into a full catastrophe. While being so polite they might as well be Canucks.

Whites, well, here comes the ugly: they're all crackers.

The ugly: the movie is openly racist. Whites are evil. They hold the black man down. They're all MAGA (one can dream). In a bout of common Hollywood revisionism, the movie acts like the KKK / White League / Red Shirts and Jim Crow laws were a majority, and not offshoots of the Democrats. The "it wasn't _real_ communism" crowd.
"Chicago is Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations," they say. Sure. Chicago was also at the beginning of a, to this day, uninterrupted string of Democrat mayors. Hasn't changed since then. Go figure.

I digress, Ryan Kyle Coogler. Gaelic given names, German family name. "Cultural appropriation" much?
Then again, Michael B. Jordan. The B is Swahili, but the rest is Hebrew.

Anyway, white people as vampires. That have to be invited in. And a hive mind. Funny, that.
Especially considering the head sucker is Irish, a people that got an even shorter end of the stick than the Chinese or blacks.

I don't know what the director's political angle was, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to interpret vampirism as socialism. Hive mind, need to be voted in, then drain you and make more of themselves while destroying everything.

As an aside, I'm all for liberty in speech and freedom of association. Which incidentally also entails the freedom to not associate.
Hollywood seems hell-bent of late on establishing the concept of justifiable hatred, often racial. Given the employment and crime statistics of this particular demographic in the last, say, half century, I'm really not certain black people want to entrench that precedent.

Same goes for the strong undertone of separatism.

Again, Kügler does as he wishes, but his kind usually is the first to cry when the same wind blows the other way.


All in all, I'm not impressed with the research, historical or cultural, the imagery lacks subtlety, the social commentary is foreign to the actual world.
The movie is good, but atrociously racist. The kind born of ignorance and ideology that always leads to atrocities.

Rodriguez did it better. Heck, Murphy did it better.

Never reaches the summit

An excellent direct-to-DVD movie (there, I show my age).
As a theatre movie: seriously? Why? Why shoot your whole movie with no depth of field? Why film with a potato?

Also, why does Neeson keep acting in these action flicks? Bloke's past 70 now, and rich as can be. I'll admit he still holds up well for his age, though.
Fan is devastatingly charming, and goes 110% into her role. Morrell is more fun than a barrel of Aussie monkeys.

The storyline is full of holes and less than griping (watched this as a 3-parter, doing something else); exterior shots are nice but could have used professional photography. They're unexpectedly grounded in realism, though; almost part documentary. Or amateur travelogue.


I've watched worse in the 80s. It's still a rather bad movie. But it has a quirky charm.

on par with episode I

So, as Star Wars episodes I-II, it brings shame to the original trilogy, while appearing not so bad compared with subsequent efforts (Rings of Power comes to mind, but thankfully briefly).
Full disclosure, I have not watched the 6 latest SW.

Inexplicable ethnic diversity grows worse, extraneous girl-bosses too.

The elf CGI are atrocious, worse than the oliphant-surfing scene in RotK (I think).
Gandalf looks cool, though. Smaug's alright, although the economics implications of his gold stash are, well, it's fantasy.

Let me not forget Frye: as much as I like the chap, his attempt to portray the evil right-wing capitalistic despot of Laketown is incredibly heavy-handed, and evokes only infamous right-wing dictators such as Stalin, Mao or Pot.
Seriously, Laketown's problem is not free market, it's obviously its socialist utopia, its historic charismatic leader having been overthrown by a garden-variety populist communist.

Visually impressive but regrettably forgettable, my youngest liked it, we bailed out before the end.

Not everything is better reheated

The Hobbit is a children's book, short and self-contained (originally).
It does not contain enough material for a 9-hours trilogy.

This movie massively reuses assets from the LotR movies, not only to reduce costs, but also to score sympathy by association.

By necessity, it adds huge amounts of original material. Original, but lackluster.

What it fails to capture is the epic dimension of the previous movie. One of my gripes at the time was treating the dwarf as a comedic sidekick (because, dwarf tossing).
13 times the dwarves (eat your heart out, Snow White), 13 times the tonal dissonance. It's jarring.

As many movies in the decade since, this one oscillates between heroism and deconstructive, meta-"humour".
The joks are predictable and fall flat, taking with them any aspiration to grandeur.
Because heroism is masculine, and we don't like masculinity, do we.

1 point for wokeness, mostly because irresistible urge to introduce 'original' one-dimensional girl-boss characters, and inexplicable ethnic diversity.

Worse shite has been written around Tolkien (Rings of Power, anyone?), but this is tedious, and made somewhat palatable only because of its forebears.

Troon alert

A black male cast in a female role
Also its obvious they are going to shift it from anti communist to anti white nationalist
Well at least they got a accurate voice actor for the main communist pig

Anti military and men and race mixing propaganda

Tired, try-hard and boring

With the French bloke out, it's all females and their gay best friends.

The Noriko - sorry, Quynh - subplot fares barely better. Leaves some room for secondary character to breathe, which they don't really do. Except Booker. Schoenaerts is clutch.

Lots of sudden cuts in the first part, lots of exotic locales.
This movie felt to me as though it was trying real hard to whip itself into a good mood.
Trying - and failing - to establish a lore. The result is muddled, conflicts with the previous movie, and builds nothing.
In that way, it really does emulate the Highlander movies (although there can be only one).
I suspect Rucka's also trying to draw from Vampire the Masquerade lore, in an attempt to bolster his flagging creativity. Metuselah and stuff.


Thurman has grown old. Unkindly so. Especially compared to Theron, who's only 5 years her junior. And she's less than a decade older than Ngo. She still has that effortless elegance, and that genial charm, but not that unexpected beauty. Still a top notch actress, though.

Theron works hard to carry the movie. She's an excellent actress, but still sluggish in fight scenes. Atomic Blonde worked because the choreography was tactical, not physical. And she was younger.
Layne is still young. Meaning she's either badly coordinated, or just lazy with her training.


As a note, the "walking through the ghosts of the past" scene is just brilliant. A minute of grace in an unispired movie.
The rest is trudging through the motion. Anybody with two brain cells knows what is going to happen. But it comes slowly.


Also, this opus is less aggressively anti-male and anti-white than the previous. Studios must be starting to realize which side of the toast is buttered. Maybe they shouldn't grow too lucid, lest they realize most of them are the walking dead.

All-in-all, not bad, just tepid and directionless. Oh wait, this means bad.
Not sure the third movie this is desperately trying to build up to will be made.

The usual DEI overrepresentation we expect from marvel. Kate is a Mary Sue. She is as good as Hawkeye at everything. I don't care if you are
a trained competition blackbelt or a top competition archer. She is making ridiculous combat high stress shots right at the start and taking on multiple large male assailants by herself and manhandling them. She never has to train she's just amazing. She takes on Kingpin, by herself, in close quarters hand to hand, and WINS!!?? Sure why not. All the men other than Hawkeye are bumbling fools or villains. All the females are good, even the so called 'villains' turn out to be misunderstood or forced into it and had no choice. There is a completely pointless forced random scene arguing about a tote bag just so a female character can say 'my wife gave it to me.' It's not really preachy about any of it but it is present. Besides all the woke I did find it entertaining. The writing is for the most part good, the acting it good, the story is pretty well thought out, the FX are generally well done. Except for the eye rolling stupid pointless larpers. Why would you put that stupid silly nonsense in there? They are terrible!

Just ok

Reminds me a lot of Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is the better movie. The main character wears a rainbow flag pin the entire movie. And she’s not so subtly hinted at being a lesbian. Overall just a dull movie with a few funny elements.

Here we are, born to be yaaasss queens of the universe

The Old Guard is, in its own way, an attempt to spin off the Highlander mythos. It does add some interesting character building to the immortal theme. Although one should probably go to the comic for that. Most were 'simplified' (dropped) for the movie. Like most of the old guard being technologically retarded.

Rucka, the original comic book's writer, is a proud Portlander. Guy has always been something of a lefty, but I still liked some of his stuff. Mostly Queen & Country, not into super-heroes.

He did seem to come down with full-blown TDS in the last decade, and turn complete male feminist to boot. Lovable chap.

So yeah, somewhat woke, although it used to be he wasn't too overt in his writing.

The cast is ethnically diverse, as per the comic, although the opposite would be weird in context. Some race-swapping, though: incidental good guys are suddenly non-white. Dr. Menguele is suddenly female, though, go figure.
Still, what are the odds of an openly gay couple among 4 characters? Also, Rucka's not big on details: homosexuality did exist, but definitely not in its modern form, especially around the Caroline Renaissance.

The Scythians had (probably) female soldiers, but mostly in the form of mounted short bows (possible origin for the Amazons legend), not axe-wielding maniacs. Plus the axe is some sort of weird ass labrys, and not a sagaris. Why a woman of the steppes would carry a Minoan symbol of divinity is beyond me. On par with a Scottish goat-herder swinging a katana. Well, she does have a Greek name and a Norman face, so there.

Rucka's an avid practitioner of historical revisionism anyway.

Unburdened by what has been, indeed.


The movie adaptation does add wokeness. Andromache, very much hetero in the comic - basically a sex fiend - now sports a butch cut and a sapphic sub-plot. Complete with that old feminist dog whistle (bitch whistle?), of witch trials. Which killed many more men than women, but hey, victims, amirite? Also, the women in STEM one.

Theron is, by what few accounts I've seen, a revolting human being, but she does put in the work.
The rest of the cast is on par with her: no glaring shortcomings. Ejiofor is the stand-out, expectedly.

Quite a few good, albeit semi-original ideas, competently set to film, but strong female possibly homosexual boss babes, black female saviour, weak, homosexual and corrupt males, usual anti-historical talking points. It's Hollywood, baby.

F1 is to Formula One racing as Rocky is to Boxing

The Karate kid (the original one) had teenage combatants in "legitimate" competition winning with kicks to the face. F1 is kind of like that. You need to leave the "realism" behind and just enjoy the ride. If things like this happened on a real track, the driver would lose his super license, the team would be fined severely, and the penalty would be DQ. that said, they did a great job with the story. The action was very real. They merged real racing into the movie somehow. I'm still wondering how much was staged, CGI or cleverly edited mix with real race footage. They did get a lot right, such as the implications of cold tires, virtual safety cars, pitting strategy, etc. That's not surprising since this was produced by Lewis Hamilton, the second-oldest driver active. A lot of real drivers, team principals, team owners, etc. were featured. Some had speaking roles. The only thing that may be considered woke is a petite, female, pit crew member on the tire gun. I don't consider that woke for one main reason: she flubbed it and punctured a tire. A woke movie would've had her be the hero somehow. The acting? top notch. From Brad, to the supporting cast, and even to the cameos by F1 people, it was award-worthy.

Lesbians

Almost watched another lesbian degeneracy movie