The Public ***

Try as it might to seem hip and relevant, Emilio Estevez’s hero-librarians vanity project The Public never manages to shake a vague feeling of being something slightly quaint left over from the 1990s. Estevez, in a role perhaps intended to reference the actor’s iconic turn as a cool school library detainee in The Breakfast Club, appears as an idealistic but hardship-weathered employee of the Cincinnati Public Library whose personal and professional ethics are tested when a mob of crazy homeless men occupies the facility and demands to be allowed to use the library as an overnight shelter on a bitterly cold evening. Curiously, writer-director-producer Estevez appears to cling to the outmoded liberal convention of the white savior coming to the aid of downtrodden blacks and browns – in 2019. Star-power casting, with Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin also appearing, make the movie more watchable than it probably deserves to be.

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Public is:

5. Green. Annoying but well-meaning millennial chick Jena Malone rides the bus to work to reduce her carbon footprint, and the presence of a taxidermied polar bear (“Beary White”) in the library serves to remind the viewer of wildlife impacted by melting ice caps.

4. Anti-drug. One subplot involves the search for a missing opioid addict (Nik Pajic). Estevez’s character is also revealed to be a recovered alcoholic who once lived on the streets.

3. Media-critical. A self-promoting local reporter (Gabrielle Union) intentionally misrepresents the protagonist’s stance of solidarity with the homeless, leaving viewers with the impression that he is a madman holding hostages inside the library. Her cameraman (Ki Hong Lee) objects, but is ultimately complicit in the duplicity. Provocatively, the term “fake news” is applied to the mainstream media rather than to independent commentators.

2. Communist. “To each, according to his needs” is very much the moral of the film.

1.Racially confused. The Public represents a partially naïve effort at postracialism while also including distinctively anti-white elements. Against expectation, the film casts black actress Gabrielle Union as the unlikable reporter – showing that blacks can also be bad – but other blacks in the movie appear well-intentioned or victimized, with some depicted as harmlessly insane. Jeffrey Wright, however, appears as a polished and capable black library director. Christian Slater plays a slickly dressed law-and-order prosecutor and mayoral candidate who, though his political party is never mentioned, represents a heartless all-white Republicanism that must eventually give way to a more inclusive vision represented by his compassionate black political opponent.

Oddly, the movie opens with an angry black rapper shouting “Burn the books!” and ranting about tearing down monuments as various unfortunate street people appear queuing up to get into the library and out of the cold. The rap’s apocalyptic vision forecasts what is presumably the fate awaiting reactionary whites who fail to get “woke” and join the fight against inequality. European-American literary heritage in The Public is a universal legacy and an inspiration for all of “the people”, but Europe’s classical civilization is also insulted. The setting of Cincinnati invokes Cincinnatus, the exemplar of selfless public service, but the name “Athena” – evoking the Greek goddess of wisdom – is given to an eccentric old anti-Semite (Dale Hodges) who suspects those around her of belonging to “the Tribe”, while another of the vagrants (Patrick Hume) is nicknamed “Caesar”, with antiquity symbolically displaced, homeless, and reduced to pitiable madness in the context of multicultural modernity. A library book defaced with a swastika, meanwhile, reminds viewers of the persistent threat of white bigotry.

More interesting is the treatment of the preserved polar bear, “Beary White”, which – whether intentionally or otherwise – evokes “polar bear hunting” or the anti-white “knockout game” in a ghettoized urban setting in addition to bolstering the global warming messaging. The film concludes with a shot of the towering, fierce, and triumphant-looking polar bear, which is perhaps intended to symbolize the moral victory of white-liberal-savior-with-soul Emilio Estevez, who redeems himself and his race and hopefully avoids the hunt by self-sacrificingly taking up the cause of impoverished minorities. The irony of such an interpretation is that the life-like bear is merely a feat of accomplished taxidermy and that the once-majestic creature is already dead inside.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Dragged Across Concrete ****1/2

S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk) is back with a solid and satisfyingly rough follow-up to the jaw-dropping Brawl in Cell Block 99, reuniting with Vince Vaughn and teaming him up with Mel Gibson in a literally gut-ripping, downbeat buddy cop brutalizer. Seasoned detective Brett Ridgeman (Gibson) and partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vaughn) are caught on video using excessive force in the apprehension of a Hispanic drug dealer, creating a scandal for their police department, and get suspended without pay by their superior (Don Johnson). Both men need money – Lurasetti because he plans to propose marriage to his girlfriend, and Ridgeman because his daughter is no longer safe in their ghettoized neighborhood and the family needs to get out. At the extent of his tether, Ridgeman hatches a half-baked plan to rip off a heroin dealer that winds up with him and his partner pitted against a gang of formidable paramilitary bank heisters. A career highlight for Gibson equal to his over-the-hill hero roles in Edge of Darkness and Blood Father, and yet another impressive entry in Vaughn’s growing résumé of scary tough guy characters after True Detective and Brawl in Cell Block 99.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dragged Across Concrete is:

8. Anti-drug. Tory Kittles plays ex-con Henry Johns, whose stint in prison illustrates a very possible outcome for a dealer. His mother, a heroin addict, has turned to prostitution. It is also mentioned that the dealer Ridgeman mistreats has been selling drugs to children, undermining any potential audience sympathy for the criminal.

7. Ableist! Lurasetti compares a hearing-impaired woman’s speech to a dolphin’s.

6. Anti-Semitic! Writer-director Zahler, as Soiled Sinema’s Ty E. puts it, is an artist who seems to have “transcended his Jewishness”, which may account for the brief and harmless but stereotype-oozing portrayal of the friendly jeweler Feinbaum, who says his wife has two brothers who are therapists and three sisters who are lawyers.

5. Homophobic! Henry dismisses his “cocksuckin’ father” as “a yesterday who ain’t worth words.” Disapprovingly, Ridgeman fails to see “much of a difference these days” between men and women, and also mocks Lurasetti’s “gay hair shit” disguise.

4. Media-critical. Chief Lieutenant Calvert (Johnson) derides the anti-police bias of “the entertainment industry formally known as ‘the news’”, which “needs villains” and fabricates them if necessary.

3. Natalist, i.e., sexist! Unexpectedly, the movie features a tender (albeit offbeat) portrait of a new mother, Kelly Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), desperately trying to avoid going back to work after using up her maternity leave. The necessity of keeping a job seems cruel and absurd now that she has a baby. Her proper place, she realizes, is at home with her child, and her boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) describes her as a “radiant vision of maternity”. The section of Dragged Across Concrete that follows Kelly is even more affecting on a second viewing.

2. Class-conscious. “My job [in a bank] is so stupid,” Kelly laments. “I go there and I sell chunks of my life for a paycheck so that rich people I’ve never even met can put money in places I’ve never even seen.” Henry’s little brother Ethan, meanwhile, sees big game hunting as “rich white people shit”. There is also the suggestion that those with wealth have the means to elude the law, as Ridgeman at some point in the past allowed the son of businessman Friedrich (Udo Kier) to escape punishment for an unnamed crime in exchange for a future favor from the well-connected father. Ridgeman no longer believes in a meritocratic American dream. “I don’t politick and I don’t change with the times and turns that that shit’s more important than good, honest work,” he tells his partner, determining: “We have the skills and the right to acquire proper compensation” for thankless years of public service.

1.Race-realist – with exceptions. “They’re so cute before they get big,” says Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) – ostensibly with reference to lion cubs, but subtextually referring to the black boys who harass her when she walks home from school. “This fucking neighborhood, it just keeps getting worse and worse,” frets Mrs. Ridgeman (Laurie Holden). “You know I never thought I was a racist before living in this area. I’m about as liberal as any ex-cop could ever be, but now,” she demands, “we really need to move” or else, “someday, you and me,” she tells her husband, “we are in a hospital room with our daughter talking to a rape counselor.”

Ridgeman and his partner are both depicted as casual racists. “I’m not racist,” Lurasetti jokes: “Every Martin Luther King Day I order a cup of dark roast.” In a twenty-first century world in which “digital eyes are everywhere”, however, old-school law-and-order enforcers like Ridgeman and Lurasetti are living on borrowed time. “Like cell phones, and just as annoying, politics are everywhere,” Calvert observes. “Being branded a racist in today’s public forum is like being accused of communism in the fifties. Whether it’s a possibly offensive remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children […] It’s bullshit – but it’s reality.”

Softening Dragged Across Concrete’s racial edge is the presence of Henry, the conspicuous specimen of Africanus cinematicus played by Tory Kittles. This ghetto thug with the soul of a poet is given to saying things like, “Before I consider that kind of vocation, I need to get myself acclimated” and is at all times depicted as being more astute than those around him. His little brother Ethan, too, is portrayed as an underprivileged but bright lad of great potential. The case can be made that Dragged Across Concrete makes examples of its most prominent bigots by punishing them while rewarding Henry in the end. Ridgeman, who has refused to change with the times, is taught the important lesson that he “should have trusted a nigger.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Jane Fonda, Bob Hope, and the Fraud of FTA

“The show the Pentagon couldn’t stop!” Sure …

I have previously discussed the dubious “anti-war” credentials of countercultural figures Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, who played the part of rebellious hippies within the Hollywood elite. No film better encapsulates their fraud or the fabricated nature of the corporate counterculture than Francine Schoenholtz’s ridiculous 1972 documentary FTA, which stands for “Fuck the Army”. The film follows Fonda, Sutherland, and other performers as they tour Japan and the Philippines, performing unfunny comedy routines and hokey protest songs for American servicemen. Schoenholtz’s previous work included a 1966 series of one-hour plays for PBS called Jews and History – and FTA itself and the culture creation it represents comprise a singular Jewish contribution to American military and pop-cultural history.

The film is as much a promotion of subversion as it is a polemic against the war in Vietnam. The poster, boasting its image of a stoned Donald Sutherland, is an undisguised attempt to associate anti-war activism with drug culture, and much of FTA is devoted to glorifying communism, feminism, vulgarity, bad grooming, and loutish black militancy, with the U.S. characterized as a racist society perpetrating genocide against both the Vietnamese and American blacks. FTA’s pose of revolutionism notwithstanding, is the audience really expected to believe that this troupe of anti-American undesirables would have been allowed anywhere near U.S. military bases overseas unless the production had at least the tacit approval of powerful persons within the American government? Would U.S. Army and Navy personnel be permitted to participate in the production of a film if it authentically sought, as FTA pretends, to goad soldiers into turning their guns against their leaders? It was during the week of the film’s premiere in July of 1972 that Fonda, just to present the anti-war movement in the worst possible light, notoriously visited Hanoi and posed for a photo with a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

Producing and completing post-production on FTA was Igo Kantor, who tells the story of his involvement in the project in an interview he granted for the DVD release of the stupid woman vigilante movie Alley Cat (1984). He remembers that “Technicolor came to me and they said they would like to do a show on Jane Fonda going with a group of people, the FTA group, musical group, all over the Pacific Rim, all of Vietnam, all those countries, and do a show about the counter [to] the Bob Hope Christmas shows,” which were being produced by NBC, then owned by the defense contractor RCA. “The Bob Hope Christmas shows were dignifying the war movement because he was performing for the troops all over, every Christmas he’d go to one of these towns where the war took place and he would have shows – and I was the editor on the Bob Hope Christmas shows for six years. […] But then Technicolor said Jane Fonda would like to do a show to counteract that. Instead of heroining the war, let’s be pro-peace,” Kantor recounts, smiling sardonically.

That RCA would produce television programming “dignifying the war movement” is hardly surprising; but that Technicolor, a subsidiary of the defense contractor Thomson-CSF, would approach Kantor to produce a radical “pro-peace” hippie extravaganza, even hiring the same editor, is more interesting. “So she [i.e., Jane Fonda] went [to Vietnam] and the amazing thing is, here I was working in this building on Highland Avenue [in Los Angeles] and Jane Fonda, I gave her an office upstairs, and she and Don Sutherland were together at that time […] and Bob Hope had an office downstairs, and Bob Hope knew about this and he says, ‘Igo, what’s going on here, what, you’re working on my show, which is pro-war, and you’re working another show that’s anti-war?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I will not mix the footages. They’ll not be the same show, don’t worry about it.’ And sometimes,” Kantor remembers, bemused, “they used to go up and down the stairs and throw darts at each other. Bob Hope and Jane Fonda were, my God, crazy.” So, by Kantor’s own admission, the entertainment industry’s representative pro-war and anti-war exemplars were literally working out of the same building and frolicking on the stairs and enjoying hijinks – but that was surely just a coincidence – right?

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

The Death of Superman ***

Will this animated adaptation of DC’s 1992 “death” of Superman storyline please those old enough to have read it when it first appeared? Considering that grown men still sufficiently juvenile to persist in taking an interest in comic book characters must have rather low standards for keeping themselves entertained, one assumes that it probably will. In between automobile-chucking super-brawls, personal drama involving the Man of Steel’s tense relationship with Lois Lane keeps this feature-length production from becoming overly monotonous – but, as with most superhero sagas, the ethnic subtext remains the most intriguing aspect.

3 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Death of Superman is:

5. Anti-Russian. Lex Luthor mentions having enjoyed a “private performance by the Bolshoi”, connecting Russia with supervillainy in audiences’ minds.

4. Anti-gun. A police officer’s passing reference to assault weapons highlights the danger to law and order posed by private firearm ownership.

3. Feminist. Strong, sarcastic, frowning women abound.

2. Black-supremacist, with blacks disproportionately represented in prestigious and powerful positions. The mayor of Metropolis is black, as are the two top scientists at S.T.A.R. Labs.

1.Judeo-globalist and anti-white. Superman, whose creation was a Jewish response to the Nazi concept of the Aryan superman and whose Justice League receives funding from the one-worldist United Nations, represents a confident Jewish self-concept, with Kal-El (interpreted by some as meaning “Voice of God” in Hebrew) being a Kryptonian (i.e., a crypto-Jew) who conceals his power behind the nerdy façade of the WASPy-sounding “Clark Kent”. Significantly, “Kent” occupies a position of influence in the media through his job at the globalism-evoking Daily Planet (although DC obfuscates Jewish control of the media which in this series is “White” via the newspaper’s editor-in-chief Perry). Kent/Superman is an effective arbiter of truth and justice as long as kryptonite is not utilized against him – i.e., as long as his enemies do not confront him with his secret Jewishness. Lex Luthor – whose name echoes history’s second-most-notorious critic of Jewry – almost seems to be explicitly criticizing Jewish influence when he decries “obsequious cretins who worship aliens, believing them to be the agents of justice. But I have seen the alien’s true face,” he explains. “I understand his threat.” Luthor’s subtextual anti-Semitism is then emphasized when he employs the German word “ubermensch”. It is moral exemplar Superman, however, who selflessly saves his archenemy when Doomsday comes.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Wonder Wheel ****1/2

I have mixed feelings about Allan Konigsberg. Revelations about his sexual proclivities as well as my own awakening to the director’s participation in a massive tribal project of hostile culture distortion make it impossible for me to like “Woody Allen” the way I did when I was younger; but it would be dishonest of me to pretend that his body of work did not influence my intellectual development. Coming from a blue-collar Midwestern background, Konigsberg’s stories of New York sophisticates were exotic and illuminating. His movies made me want to become a literate person so that I could be witty and impress complicated women. And – as much as I dislike to concede it – he has continued to produce worthwhile entertainment well into his decrepit years.

Wonder Wheel is no exception, and offers exactly what those familiar with the writer-director’s filmography have come to expect. Its tawdry tale of two shiksas – older, married woman Kate Winslet and naïve stepdaughter Juno Temple – who both fall for sophisticated and handsome Jewish aspiring playwright Justin Timberlake contains a great deal of Hebraic wish-fulfillment, particularly with Jim Belushi portraying the boorish and slovenly goy alternative. Set in the bustling Coney Island of the 1950s, Wonder Wheel is both a rather painful melodrama and a comfortable nostalgia piece, evoking fondness both for America’s past and for Konigsberg’s, so that the whole experience seems like old times.

4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Wonder Wheel is worth seeing if viewers can do so without putting any money into the filmmaker’s probably candy-filled pockets. Also:

4. Anti-drug. Looming over Ginny (Winslet) and Humpty (Belushi) throughout is the specter of alcoholism which threatens to reassert itself over their wills in times of stress. Ginny embarrasses herself in a drunken state at the end of the film.

3. Borderline pedophiliac. Juno Temple, like previous Konigsberg muses Mariel Hemingway and Christina Ricci, evinces a childlike presence despite her experience. The word “Toys” is visible in a shop window in a scene in which Mickey (Timberlake) picks up Carolina (Temple) to give her a ride, slyly emphasizing her youth.

2. Anti-family, anti-marriage. “Don’t ever have kids,” Ginny advises. Marriage, too, is “scary”. Ginny is only “going through the motions of lovemaking” while she has “so much to give” to a smart and beautiful Jewish boy. Ginny also insinuates that Humpty has incestuous inclinations toward his daughter when she accuses him, “You treat her like a girlfriend.”

1.Anti-white. Carolina rejects the “dull, colorless, boring [i.e., WASPish] guys” her father would have preferred she marry. Instead, she falls in love with a tribesman. There is a sort of malicious glee in Konigsberg’s decision to name the head of the household “Humpty”, presenting the American father of yesteryear as a gruff and abusive but fragile figure destined to fall and never to be restored to his previous station. Humpty distrusts the influence of movies and radio – i.e., the Jewish-dominated mass media – on his family, calls psychology a “phony head doctor” racket, and is probably therefore suspect in Konigsberg’s imagination as a potential anti-Semite. Ginny’s son (Jack Gore), meanwhile, is a little pyromaniac – symbolic of the potential of every goy boy to grow up to perpetrate the world’s next Holocaust. Sadly, waitress Carolina must endure the indignity of serving “redneck clowns” in her clam house – representing the ever-present threat posed by rustic deplorables infiltrating and crudely stinking up the nice, respectable, kosher stronghold of New York City.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ****

Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is reluctantly recruited by ex-girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) to rescue as many species of dinosaurs as they can from Isla Nublar before the island’s volcano erupts. The enterprise is being bankrolled by a mysterious philanthropist (Rafe Spall) – but is his offer what it appears to be? Most importantly, can the unfossilized and feral creatures be contained after they are transported to safety? Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom delivers the mayhem fans are expecting and more, with the volcano’s explosion providing the perfect pretext to fill the screen with giant reptiles of every variety as they scurry and stomp for their lives.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is:

[WARNING SPOILERS]

4. Feminist and pro-miscegenation. Representing the Coalition of the Fringes are a tattooed Latina man-hater (Daniella Pineda) and a nebbishy mulatto computer whiz (Justice Smith).

3. Anti-white, anti-gun, and animal-rights-militant. Ted Levine appears as a “great white [sic] hunter” whose hobby of assembling necklaces from the teeth of endangered species earns him a dinosaur jaw’s worth of trouble. Guns, in addition to being unreliable, are problematic in the possession of trigger-happy white men in particular.

2. Disingenuously antiwar but actually anti-Slav and neoconservative. The dinosaur rescue operation turns out to be a nefarious military-industrial plot – what? social justice hijacked for capitalist plunder? I’m shocked! – and the movie climaxes at an auction at which arms procurers from around the world bid on weaponizable reptiles. Present at the auction are representatives from Russia, Slovenia, and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. “Too many red lines have been crossed,” as well – ostensibly with regard to Frankenstein genetic science, but probably also in reference to Syria.

1.Racist! Bookending the film are testimonies from learned elder of science Jeff Goldblum, who warns that humanity, by saving the dinosaurs, is risking its own extinction. Underlying the film is the West’s anxiety about the acceptance of “refugee” populations from the Third World. The dinosaurs, as savage, prehistoric animals – rather like Africans, the film seems to imply – are objects of both amazement and civilizational trepidation. Indicative of the mingled fear and excitement experienced by mentally ill social justice warriors in the presence of rapefugees is an unsettling scene in which a dark-colored dinosaur creeps into a little girl’s room and hovers over her in her bed, extending a claw to caress her. This same child’s decision at the end of the film to release the dinosaurs into the modern world can be read either as a parody or a celebration of naïve Europeans’ – and particularly women’s – childishness and erotic retardation in ushering in their own racial and cultural annihilation. She makes her momentous choice after discovering that she is a clone and not the person she thinks she is – which is to say, after having her sense of identity undermined.

Alternatively, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom can be read as an allegory about the danger inherent in providing succor to Jews. After rescuing the dinosaur-Jews from the volcano-Holocaust, western man is faced with the problem of how to survive with these troublesome creatures in his midst – an interpretation bolstered by an attempt to exterminate the dinosaurs with cyanide gas at the end of the film and which, furthermore, would put a somewhat different and perhaps self-revelatory spin on the aforementioned scene of the giant lizard in the little girl’s bedroom.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Lock Up as Stealth Holocaust Propaganda

One of my favorite Sylvester Stallone movies from my childhood is 1989’s Lock Up, a satisfying prison flick that stars Sly as Frank Leone, a model convict with six months to go and what appears to be a bright future ahead of him – until he is unexpectedly transferred in the middle of the night to a hellish correctional institution run by the sadistic Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland), who harbors a long-festering vendetta against Leone. “This is hell, and I’m going to give you the guided tour,” he promises. Full of memorable bits like a cockroach race, a barbell assassination, and a brutal slow-motion football montage, not to mention a sentimental piano theme that I’ve never forgotten, Lock Up also delivers the adrenaline in its inevitable escape and comeuppance sequence.

Following orders.

Sutherland is perfect as the mannered antagonist, and Drumgoole is easily one of the greatest bad guy monikers ever, putting me in mind of the canistered zombie who kicks off Return of the Living Dead (1985) – and Drumgoole is a zombie of sorts, at least in a figurative sense, as he reanimates for the viewer the corpse of the evil Nazi villain stock character. Viewers only hoping for a fun Sylvester Stallone vehicle and harmless action fix instead find themselves the captive audience for a dose of Hollywood Holocaust propaganda when Drumgoole has Leone sealed into a glass chamber for delousing with Zyklon gas! Naturally, Drumgoole leaves Leone struggling to hold his breath way longer than is necessary, and Stallone’s partial Jewish family background makes the moment that much more piquant. Reinforcing the notion that there is something Nazi-like about the prison staff is Tom Sizemore’s character Dallas’s nickname for one of the guards – “Col. Klink” – a reference to the WW2 POW camp sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Then, too, there is the racial makeup of the guards, with whites like Manly (Jordan Lund) being among the meanest and most stereotypically fascistic and blacks like Braden (William Allen Young) revealed to have compassion in their still-beating hearts. There is an undeniable thematic overlap between the prison and Shoah film and fictional genres, with prison movies as far back as Brute Force (1947) serving as social commentaries on the dangers of authoritarianism and with entries like the Holocaust (1978) miniseries, various salacious Nazisploitation movies of the seventies, and Escape from Sobibor (1987) combining elements of both genres – and Lock Up implicitly acknowledges this connection, so that it could be classified with Soylent Green (1973), for example, as a crypto-Holocaust movie.

Three writers, including Die Hard (1988) bard Jeb Stuart and some nobody named Richard Smith, are credited with Lock Up’s screenplay – but somehow I have to suspect that it is the third name, Henry Rosenbaum, that accounts for the Zyklon delousing scene. The film was directed by John Flynn, whose other credits include the obscure made-in-Israel thriller The Jerusalem File (1972), vigilante movies Rolling Thunder (1977) and Defiance (1980), and the top-notch Steven Seagal revenger Out for Justice (1991). Rocky (1976) composer Bill Conti, meanwhile, contributes the score to what adds up to an audience-pleasingly macho but sensitive send-off for the eighties, Stallone’s most successful decade – even if the gassing scene does give it just a whiff of a fishy-smelling air of high camp for those racially conscious viewers in the audience.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

JFK, RFK, John Frankenheimer and the Mystery of Sirhan Sirhan

The following material is excerpted from my [out-of-print] book, Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.

Sirhan Sirhan, the man who has been characterized as both the first “Palestinian terrorist” as well as the quintessential “Manchurian Candidate”, was described after his alleged assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 as having been “motivated by Kennedy’s support for Israel.” Sirhan is supposed to have written in a notebook, “Kennedy must die by June 5^th” (i.e., the anniversary of the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967)¹. Sirhan retracted his initial admission of guilt in the crime, claiming to have been “hypno-programmed” by the assassination’s plotters. Indeed, more than one researcher has suggested that Los Angeles sex therapist and hypnosis expert William J. Bryan did the programming. “Bryan, a self-proclaimed eccentric character, once boasted to two of his favorite prostitutes that he, in fact, had hypnotized Sirhan and had worked on ‘top secret’ CIA projects,” writes Forgotten Terrorist author Mel Ayton. “Bryan’s most famous hypnotic subject was the notorious Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, whose name appeared in Sirhan’s notebooks.”²

Bryan served as a technical advisor on John Frankenheimer’s film The Manchurian Candidate (1962)³, which is about a brainwashed assassin. Frankenheimer had been a successful television director in 1960 when he declined an offer to work for the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign. (According to Frankenheimer, United Artists executive Arthur Krim had aspirations to become the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and was reluctant to green-light The Manchurian Candidate for fear it would upset Kennedy; Krim is supposed to have relented, however, after learning that JFK was a fan of Condon’s novel⁴.) Frankenheimer, who said he “felt guilty” after the Kennedy assassination for not having done the work for his campaign, proceeded to insinuate himself with the Robert F. Kennedy camp: “when his [i.e., JFK’s] brother declared his candidacy in ’68, I immediately called Pierre Salinger and said, ‘Pierre, I want to be part of this.’” “I never left him,” Frankenheimer recalled. “I was there with him for 102 days.”⁵

John Frankenheimer

“Bobby became best friends with me,” the director claimed. “He was staying with me in Malibu, and I drove him to the Ambassador Hotel where he was shot.”⁶ Frankenheimer further related a strange circumstance of this “defining moment” of his life to interviewer Alex Simon. “You were supposed to be up on the dais with him at the Ambassador, weren’t you?” Simon asked. “Yes, then at the last moment, it was decided that having a film director up on stage with him wasn’t the image they wanted, so we had [Kennedy’s labor advisor,] a friend named Paul Schrade, who was about my size and complexion, take my place,” Frankenheimer recounted. “And he was one of the three people shot in the kitchen.”⁷ Schrade, who survived, has maintained ever since that day that Sirhan only served to create a distraction and that the shots that killed RFK were fired from behind the candidate’s back⁸.

Ed Sanders, in his biography of Sharon Tate, relates that Sirhan Sirhan, the alleged assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, was reported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to have been “attending parties on behalf of the Satanist English cult [the Process Church], including one at Sharon Tate’s place.” Sanders points to a possible motivation for the Tate murder that had absolutely nothing to do with some Mansonian (or Bugliosian) notion of an apocalyptic “Helter Skelter” war:

INS criminal investigator Richard Smith’s report stated that an LA law enforcement agency had a female informant who averred that the English Satanist group had commissioned Manson to kill Sharon Tate. […] The reason for the contract […] was “something that she unfortunately overheard that she was not supposed to overhear either in regards to Sirhan Sirhan or about Sirhan Sirhan.”⁹

Sirhan Sirhan

Tate’s acting coach at the time was an Israeli, Zev Lahav, who went by the name “Laurence Merrick” and had been sent to the U.S. to promote Zionist interests¹⁰. Lahav, with partner Robert Hendrickson, produced a documentary, Manson (1973), about the Family, which included interviews conducted both before and after the Tate-LaBianca murders. Members of the Manson Family had come to visit the set of Lahav’s previous film, Black Angels, in 1969 – an eerie circumstance considering the race war plotline’s resemblance to the “Helter Skelter” scenario later attributed to Manson by Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, who participated in the making of Lahav’s Manson documentary. Another of Lahav’s films of 1969, interesting in view of his Tate-Manson connections, is Guess What Happened to Count Dracula?, which is concerned with occult ritualism and mind control (and even features a minor character named Sharon) and was filmed at the Magic Castle, which, as Scott Michaels points out in the documentary Six Degrees of Helter Skelter (2009), sits a few dozen yards from the Franklin Garden Apartments where Charles Manson shot Bernard Crowe over a bad drug deal – also very near the Franklin Avenue apartments from which Manson ran a prostitution ring called 3-Star Enterprises.

Frankenheimer, over the course of his career, would direct a number of movies with explicitly Jewish and anti-Nazi themes: The Train (1964), The Fixer (1968), Black Sunday (1977), The Holcroft Covenant (1985), and Dead Bang (1989). Black Sunday, in particular, depicts the Israelis as allies against Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the assassination of RFK, as Ayton puts it, “might be the first act of the tragedy that culminated in 9/11”¹¹.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

1. Troy, Gil. “Understanding RFK’s Assassination as Palestinian Terror”. The Jerusalem Post (June 5, 2013): http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=364591
2. Ayton, Mel. The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, pp. 6-7.
3. Vaughn, Robert. A Fortunate Life. New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008, pp. 260-261.
4. “Dialogue on Film: John Frankenheimer”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 96.
5. Simon, Alex. “John Frankenheimer: Renaissance Auteur”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, pp. 149-151.
6. Hart, Hugh. “Frankenheimer Knew Period’s Main Players”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 213.
7. Simon, Alex. “John Frankenheimer: Renaissance Auteur”, in Armstrong, Stephen B., Ed. John Frankenheimer: Interviews, Essays, and Profiles. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2013, p. 151.
8. Post, Paul. “Schrade Still Seeks Justice for RFK: Senator Was Assassinated 47 Years Ago, June 5, 1968”. Saratogian (June 5, 2015): http://www.saratogian.com/article/ST/20150605/NEWS/150609842
9. Sanders, Ed. Sharon Tate: A Life. Boston, MA: Da Capo Press, 2015, p. 266.
10. K., Rainer Chlodwig von. “Israel, Manson, and Vampirism: The Freaky Life of Laurence Merrick”. Ideological Content Analysis (May 4, 2017): https://icareviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/04/israel-manson-and-vampirism-the-freaky-life-of-laurence-merrick/
11. Ayton, Mel. The Forgotten Terrorist: Sirhan Sirhan and the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, p. 11.

Shot Caller ****

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The grim crime drama Shot Caller completes a trilogy from director Ric Roman Waugh that began with 2008’s Felon and continued with 2013’s Snitch. The story follows in nonlinear fashion the metamorphosis of an investor (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who, after a drunk driving accident, is sentenced to prison, where assumes a new identity as “Money”, a hardened and brutal criminal. Money’s conflicting loyalties to his country, himself, his family, and his Aryan prison gang are tested when after release he is tasked with illegally selling a cache of AK-47s from Afghanistan. Location shooting and intensely invested performances in all of the roles – with particularly high marks going to Coster-Waldau and Lake Bell, who plays his wife – imbue Shot Caller with an uncomfortable authenticity and hoist it over the top as a must-see prison movie. Welcome echoes of Breaking Bad are audible, too, in the elements of drugs, white nationalist thugs, Albuquerque locations, and the central character’s transformation from straight-laced dork to crime lord.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Shot Caller is:

[WARNING: POTENTIAL SPOILERS]

4. Anti-drug. Drinking and driving destroys Money’s life and kills one of his friends. The balloon-up-the-ass mule transport method of selling dope in prison also works wonders at deglamorizing the subject.

3. Anti-war. Casualties are referenced, and there is also the sense that military service facilitates a veteran’s transition into gang life, with the war being brought home in more ways than one. Shot Caller is careful, too, never to glorify its violence, always depicting it as abrupt and unpleasant.

2. Anti-racist. With suspected Israeli agent Haim Saban producing, it should come as little surprise that Shot Caller, whatever its authenticity, joins the ranks of films like Green Room (2015) and Imperium (2016) in seeking to keep an outmoded and negative incarnation of white nationalism foremost in audiences’ minds. While Money’s respectful relations with black investigator Kutcher (Omari Hardwick) demonstrate the possibility of interracial cooperation, the racial orientation of prison gangs is revealed to be based on self-interest rather than on genuine love of one’s own people, with whites and blacks alike victimize their own in the course of the film. There is a probably unintentional humor and irony in the fact that the white gang member, Shotgun, who turns out to be a police informant is played by Jewish actor Jon Bernthal.

1.Race-realist. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Shot Caller is perfectly honest about the racially self-segregating nature of prison populations as microcosms of human behavior in all multiethnic societies. “It doesn’t matter what yard you go on; it will be segregated by race, period,” the movie’s director concedes in his audio commentary. “That’s a fact.” Shot Caller’s world is one in which a man decides to join the ranks of either the warriors or the victims – and only the latter stand alone.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!

Brad’s Status ***1/2

(((Ben Stiller))) plays Brad Sloan, a disenchanted white [sic] liberal who feels “real pain” at the thought that he, as an idealist running a charity-oriented NGO, seems to have accomplished so little in life as compared with his college buddies who have gone on to become wealthy entrepreneurs. “The world hated me, and the feeling was mutual,” the protagonist helplessly kvetches. This and his talented musician son’s process of selecting a university plunges Sloan into a midlife crisis that brings him into confrontation with his own progressive ideals. (((Austin Abrams))) appears as the son, Troy, who just wants to get through the ordeal without being endlessly humiliated by his father’s displays of insecurity. Brad’s Status is nothing special, but may be fun for Stiller fans.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Brad’s Status is HIV+ and that the film is:

8. Anti-gun. Brad’s wife expresses her anxiety about mass shootings.

7. Drug-ambivalent. A little blond boy is shown snorting cocaine. (cf. Office Christmas Party) He is described as a “spoiled little monster”, but the moment is supposed to be humorous.

6. Pro-gay. Brad is upset at not having been invited to an old college friend’s gay wedding.

5. SJW-ambivalent. The apprehension that children today may become “entitled and pretentious” is accompanied by a vignette of a little girl chastising her father for being “so cisgender”. (cf. no. 1)

4. Pro-miscegenation. Brad’s vision of his son’s future successes includes a black love interest. His wealthy friend Billy (Jemaine Clement) is shown cavorting on a beach with two Polynesian women. A later fantasy sequence echoes this moment when Troy is seen frolicking with a pair of Asian girls (one East and one South).

3. Class-conscious. “You don’t get rich like that by being an eagle scout.”

2. Pro-family. “Isn’t it crazy,” Brad muses to his wife (Jenna Fischer), “how we made this kid and he’s this brilliant, amazing person?”

1.Anti-white. The movie’s representative hedge fund manager is not too surprisingly not a Jew, but a legally embattled white man (Luke Wilson) with the quintessentially WASPy surname Hatfield. “You’re a white kid from the suburbs without a sob story and you’re not even a legacy,” Brad admonishes his son about his chances of getting into Harvard. “We’re the underdogs here.” White viewers may be inclined to sympathize with what Brad is saying, but one suspects that the screenwriter’s intent is to make the character seem unreasonably self-pitying. Indian coed Ananya (Shazi Raja) later scoffs at his “white privilege” and “male privilege” problems. To her, his petty concerns evoke “the history of colonialism […] and the oppression of women and the fucking-up of the environment.” In a seeming endorsement of this character’s perspective, the movie concludes with Brad being moved by her performance of a violin solo from Dvorak’s “Humoresque”. The entitled white guy, by being obliged to shut up and listen to minority brilliance, is moved to a tearful emotion.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies – the DEFINITIVE Alt-Right statement on Hollywood!