Teen Spirit **1/2

Teen Spirit might be a fantastic movie; but, not belonging to the target demographic of teenage girls, I really have no idea and I don’t especially want to know. From my perspective as an irrelevant, middle-aged man, this is a pretty drab attempt at giving a new generation its Flashdance – a cultural touchstone referenced briefly in Teen Spirit. Elle Fanning does nothing to endear herself to this reviewer with her sullen, uncharismatic performance as Violet Valenski, a Polish girl who longs to escape humdrum farm life on the Isle of Wight by winning a singing contest. Supporting player Zlatko Buric is Teen Spirit’s sole saving grace as a washed-up Croatian opera singer and alcoholic, Vlad, who becomes Violet’s voice coach and manager. I suspected the movie was about to become fun and interesting when Vlad takes a shine to Violet’s stubborn mother (Agnieszka Grochowska) and tries to court her; but, alas, this little thread is abandoned in favor of several instantly forgettable Katy Perry tier synthesized musical numbers and brainless teenage drama.

2.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Teen Spirit is:

Anti-Christian. Singing in a choir is boring for Violet, who wants to be the next Gwen Stefani. Her mother gives her a crucifix that belonged to her father, warning that she is unsure whether it brings good or bad luck. Violet, who finally decides to remove it, must come to the conclusion that Jesus is fake news.

Inclusive. Whites, blacks, and mystery meats intermingle freely, and Violet recruits a rock band of odd-looking black youngsters to tour with her.

Disingenuously pro-Slav. In contrast to the villains and prostitutes typically presented by Hollywood as representative Eastern Europeans, Teen Spirit offers Slavs a path to redemption by immigrating to Western Europe and becoming global citizens – in effect, ceasing to be themselves and reproduce their own cultures. Violet does, however, at least appear to stay true to her roots in that the ugly outfit she wears for her climactic performance seems to have been a designer’s botched attempt to glamorize an Adidas tracksuit.

Globalist. The arbitrary choice of the Isle of Wight as a setting appears to have no serious purpose, apart from promoting placelessness, as Teen Spirit might just as well have been set in any other region of the neoliberal West. Like every other such locale, no matter how remote or ancient, it exists as an interchangeable piece of real estate merely waiting to be populated with increasing quantities of diversity. The island ultimately validates its existence by integrating its cultural life with glitzy globohomogeneity. Teen Spirit’s end credits roll to Elle Fanning singing “Wildflowers”, the lyrics of which celebrate lost innocence and cosmopolitan triumphalism: “Every city was our city. Every road was our road.”

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

The Dead Don’t Die ***1/2

Did I only imagine that there was ever a certain profundity lurking behind the absurdity of Jim Jarmusch movies? As a young man, I approached the writer-director’s work with some respect; but, checking in on Jarmusch for the first time since 2005’s Broken Flowers, I just find myself wondering if there was ever a point to all this nonsense apart from propping up globohomo. Bill Murray and the other performers are always fun to watch, but I could never shake the feeling that this is a movie that should have been made fifteen years ago. A self-aware zombie-themed black comedy with a blasé approach to gore and the eerie? Is this non-novelty all that Jarmusch has left in his bag of tricks? At least he seems to be aware of his own obnoxiousness, as evidenced by the grouchy line he gives to Larry Fessenden’s motel owner: “Infernal hipsters with their irony.” Indeed.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Dead Don’t Die is:

Gun-ambivalent. Firearms come in handy in dispatching zombie attackers until the undead finally become too numerous to shoot.

Feminist. In The Dead Don’t Die’s most tiresome cliché, Tilda Swinton plays a flawlessly kickass samurai mortician whose effortless, balletic swordplay makes Uma Thurman in Kill Bill look like the Gimp.

Multiculturalist and pro-miscegenation. “That girl’s part Mexican,” Adam Driver observes approvingly of Selena Gomez. “I have an affinity for Mexicans. They’re like my favorite people. I love Mexico. I’ve been down there twice.” Gomez is one of Fessenden’s “infernal hipsters”, and the exact nature of her relationship with her two traveling companions, a white man and a black man, is never made explicit, though the trio is shown checking into a single motel room with two beds.

Pro-black, as long as the blacks are just the harmless, imaginary creatures that live in Jarmusch’s imagination. RZA appears as a magically benevolent delivery driver, while Jahi Di’Allo Winston plays an environmentally conscious juvenile delinquent.

Green. The zombie outbreak is one of a number of disturbances in the natural order resulting from polar fracking. “A change in the earth’s rotation or its spin rate?” frets Jahi. “That’d be catastrophic for sure. All the cycles of the biosphere would be affected. The natural cycles of sunlight would be disrupted, plants wouldn’t grow, wind patterns would change, and tectonic activity […]”

Irreligious. “Dear Lord in Heaven, help us,” Fessenden cries just before the zombies eat him, no divine help having been forthcoming.

Anti-Trump, featuring Steve Buscemi as the obligatory bigot in the red “Keep America White Again” cap. At “payback time”, vagrant Tom Waits enjoys eating some chicken as he watches zombies attacking the racist Buscemi. Then, after Buscemi comes back as a zombie himself, Bill Murray kills him again, telling him, “You got this comin’.”

Anti-American, but in a boring, nebulous, not particularly intelligent or articulate way. “Centerville, USA,” Tilda Swinton observes sarcastically as she cruises the modest town’s zombie-filled streets: “A real nice place.” Centerville as depicted in The Dead Don’t Die is thus intended to serve as a microcosmic diagnosis of what plagues America. But what, fundamentally, is wrong with Americans in Jim Jarmusch’s assessment? “Remnants of the materialist people,” wise drifter Waits observes of the undead. “I guess they been zombies all along.” Warmed-over remnants of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, is more like it. With everything could have been said about the United States in 2019, Jarmusch zeroes in on … people in flyover country selling their souls for kitchen appliances and new trucks. What year is Jarmusch living in? Ultimately, none of the various thematic concerns come together in a coherent way, and The Dead Don’t Die primarily exists to listlessly entertain and run out the clock on middle-aged liberals and somnambulant stoners.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

Booksmart ***

Booksmart is, on the one hand, an involving study of two brainy teenage girls’ unique friendship, and, on the other, a comedy death-fart that did not make me laugh even once. Directed by Olivia Wilde and penned by Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel, and Katie Silberman – it apparently takes the combined creative resources of four women to put together a screenplay this unfunny – Booksmart is nothing if not a hoarse and harrowing howl of girl-power intransigence into the maelstrom of Trumpian apocalypse. Unsmiling lesbian Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and smug, RBG-venerating Jewish fatty Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are academic all-stars who reach the end of their senior year with a sudden sense of regret at not having done any partying like their cooler peers during their time in high school. With one last night in which to revel before their graduation, Amy and Molly determine to cut loose and go buck wild whatever the cost. No one can fault the ensemble cast for the energetic, fully invested maniac performances on display; one only wishes the script had given the actors something a little more dignified to do with their talents. Booksmart is fast-paced and never exactly boring, but the accidental-finger-up-the-butt hijinks, microphone fellation, and scoldings about the difference between sexual orientation and “gender performance”, etc., failed to turn the engine in my inner gay pride parade float. This is a movie that does not so much attempt to tickle audiences’ funny bone as thrust its hand down its pants Don Lemon style before rubbing its malodorous fingers under the viewer’s nose in a botched, mentally ill attempt at seduction.

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

Multicultural and pro-miscegenation. The almost uniformly brilliant student body of the girls’ Los Angeles high school seems to be comprised entirely of homosexuals and diversity. Molly’s secret crush, as it turns out, is mystery meat jock Nick (Mason Gooding). Hip black teacher Miss Fine (Jessica Williams), meanwhile, has an end-of-year fling with a Mexican student.

Anti-white. “Straight white man, your time is [over],” proclaims a graduation speaker. In one of the more grotesque expressions of the dumb blonde archetype ever to hit the screen, an athletic but spastic girl named Ryan (Victoria Ruesga) appears to be borderline retarded.

Anti-Trump. The girls’ car displays “Resist” and “Warren 2020” stickers. So brave!

Pro-drug. A dose of psychedelic strawberries has the girls hallucinating and finding themselves in the bodies of Barbie-like dolls, precipitating the obligatory exploration of the objectification of women. Talk to the hand, W.C. Fields. This feminist comedy steamroller can’t be stopped!

Gay. “Amy, do you know how many girls are gonna be up your vagina at Columbia next year? Are you aware of it? ‘Cause I’m aware of it,” the heterosexual Molly assures her best friend. “Every time I come to visit you, you’re just gonna be scissoring a different girl.” Putting in what I suppose is intended as an endorsement of gender-neutral bathrooms, male and female students converge on the same facilities where they gossip, draw dicks, and write obscene messages on the walls. In addition, Booksmart truly puts the Globo in Globohomo by giving a shout-out to increasingly gay-friendly Botswana even as Amy laments the fact that she would be murdered in heterofascist Uganda.

Feminist. Molly aspires to be the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg, while Amy rejects male value altogether. “My Body My Choice,” booms a poster on her wall. “Honestly, ‘pushy’ is a compliment,” Molly observes. “You know who else was pushy? Diane Sawyer. Joan of Arc. Queen Noor of Jordan.” Tediously, one of the movie’s running gags is that Molly and Amy will periodically pause to give each other sassy pep talks and tell each other how hot, fabulous, and empowered they are – almost as if neither one is convinced.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

 

A Dog’s Way Home ***1/2

Directed by professional dork Charles Martin Smith (I’ll be goddamned if it hasn’t all been downhill for him artistically since 1986’s heavy metal horror triumph Trick or Treat), A Dog’s Way Home is, as its title would indicate, the epic story of a lovable lost pooch, Bella (voiced by actress Bryce Dallas Howard), trying to find her way home to her beloved master, Lucas (Jonah Hauer-King) – although, probably as a concession to brittle sensibilities, he is never referenced in the screenplay as Bella’s master, but only as her person. At first glance, this might only appear to be a canine’s seemingly harmless adventures through town, country, and rugged Colorado wilderness; but closer inspection reveals this effective children’s tearjerker to basically be Globohomo: The Movie.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that A Dog’s Way Home is:

7. Antiwar. Physical and psychological costs of war are embodied by homeless veteran Axel (Edward James Olmos) as well as attendees of a veterans’ therapy group that includes Lucas’s mother (Ashley Judd), who suffers from depression and finds consolation in Bella’s company.

6. Pro-gay. Bella stays for a while with two gays (Motell Foster and Barry Watson), one black and one white, who serve as poster boys for homosexual parenting, the care they provide to Bella and another dog contrasting instructively with the callousness of grumpy heterosexual Mr. Kurch (Chris Bauer). “That man belongs alone,” Bella observes.

5. Pro-miscegenation. Lucas enjoys a relationship with more-or-less white-presenting mixed-race woman Olivia (Alexandra Shipp).

4. Woke and anti-white. Mean white guys include the aforementioned Mr. Kurch; unscrupulous, animal-hating landlord Gunter Beckenbauer (Brian Markinson); and nerdy, ineffectual dog catcher Chuck (John Cassini). Olivia and Lucas’s mother provide girls with role models as strong, assertive womyn effecting social justice by standing up to insensitive white men – in Olivia’s case, by livestreaming a scene of injustice.

3. Multicultural. Bella was raised by a cat and later adopts a young cougar as her traveling companion, demonstrating how characters from different backgrounds can live peacefully with each other and learn to work together.

2. Anti-gun. Bella witnesses hunters killing a cougar, leaving its cub a defenseless orphan.

1.Pro-immigration. A Dog’s Way Home arrives just in time for the muh-poor-brown-kids-in-concentration-camp-cages melodrama. A Denver city ordinance makes Bella’s breed illegal, so that “a dog can be banned from the city because of how it looks”, to which Olivia objects: “That’s basically racism for dogs!” It is easy, therefore, to find in the movie’s depiction of Animal Control officers stand-ins for totalitarian ICE agents out to net Mexican or Guatemalan kids, lock them up, and make them cry just for the hell of it. Fortunately, Animal Control is unable to enforce local law when Bella finds sanctuary at a veterans’ hospital, which, it is argued, constitutes federal jurisdiction. Sheriff Arpaio BTFO happily ever after. Rather revealingly – but no doubt unintentionally – A Dog’s Way Home also illustrates what illegals ultimately represent to virtue-signaling white progressives – their cute little pets.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of the books Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism and Protocols of the Elders of Zanuck: Psychological Warfare and Filth at the Movies.

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!

Sollers Point ****

American Honey’s McCaul Lombardi stars as Keith, a directionless Baltimore wigger and drug dealer just released from prison and attempting to find his place in the world. At stake in the formless, meandering story is whether the poorly behaved and inarticulate protagonist will settle into the family pattern of working-class tedium and community coexistence or fall back in with the white nationalist gang with which he became affiliated while incarcerated. Keith bowls from one unnecessarily unpleasant situation into another, getting into fights, making a little money, and chasing after various specimens of ghetto tail. Lombardi is an intense performer, and Jim Belushi is likable as his boring but well-meaning dad. What at first appears to be a downbeat and largely pointless character study, however, is revealed to be an accidental comedy once the filmmaker’s ridiculous intentions are taken into consideration.

4 out of 5 stars – in part for the unintentional humor furnished by the director in the DVD extra features. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Sollers Point is:

3. Anti-drug. Diminishing marijuana’s glamor, a thug mentions that his stash had recently been stuffed up his ass. The film also offers a putrid portrait of an aging, heroin-addicted whore hawking her unappetizing wiles on a roadside.

2. Pro-family. Keith’s father does what he can to protect and provide for his wayward son, and other family members are also helpful and affectionate. Keith seems to be troubled by his absence from his niece’s life.

1.Multiculturalist, pro-miscegenation, and anti-white. Baltimore appears in the film as a more or less functional chocolate city marred only by the presence of reckless and immature young white men and trashy white women. Keith’s father, at least, seems to be a good man as evidenced by the fact that he hangs out and plays cards with blacks – so not all white people in the movie are criminals or addicted to dope. “I was really interested in reflecting the diversity of this neighborhood in southeast Baltimore,” soyboy writer-director Matt Porterfield explains in an interview included on the Sollers Point DVD, “but I wanted to sort of focus on the ways in which they shared space rather than the divisions, you know?” The way in which Keith shares space with his black neighbors, however, seems to entail an inferior and deferential role. When Keith’s wigger nationalist acquaintances roll up with hostile intentions, Keith’s black thug neighbors come to his aid by throwing liquor bottles at the white gang’s van; but then they expect him to pick up the broken glass littering the street – which he obediently does. Keith, Porterfield says, has to “figure out who his people are”, and as Porterfield concludes, “his people in the film are white and black” – which may go a long way toward explaining why the character is so lost. Interestingly, the writer-director describes his movie as “a portrayal of a white male in society trying to find his place,” adding that Keith is “not being given any traditional rites of passage.” I burst out laughing, however, when he added that the protagonist is “representative of, you know, a large portion of the population that put our current president in office. […] It’s tapping into a cultural energy that we all kind of want to understand, that put Trump in office.” Which, of course, is 2016 in a nutshell. The Dems should never have underestimated Trump’s appeal to the wigger jungle fever ex-con MAGA drug dealer demographic!

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!

Richard Spencer and Hannibal Bateman: Why Last Jedi Is the Worst Star Wars

Office Christmas Party ****1/2

Jason Bateman plays straight man to a cast of corporate crazies in Office Hanukkah Party, Hollywood’s latest assault on every decent thing left in this maggoty world. The movie does manage to lampoon the self-negating neuroses bred by workplace compliance with inclusivity policies and political correctness, but ultimately embraces the same sort of idiocy, only spicing it up with vice and obscenity in order to make the New World Order seem somehow appealing. Viewed in isolation from any moral considerations or greater societal impact, Office Hanukkah Party is an admittedly fun film buoyed by a talented cast of comedic actors including Jennifer Aniston and T.J. Miller as feuding tech executive siblings Carol and Clay. Kate McKinnon insults Christians everywhere in the role of the rigid but flatulent “Mary”, while Vanessa Bayer and Randall Park reprise their interracial flirtation from the similarly depraved Trainwreck.

4.5 out of 5 stars – and, to be absolutely clear, this rating reflects not the film’s sociological value but its likely appeal to its intended audience of unredeemed degenerates. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Office Hanukkah Party is:

9. Disingenuously anti-corporate, disapproving of impersonal business cultures, profit-prioritizing layoffs, and the like, but fully endorsing the atomized hedonism favored by the neoliberal establishment. (I find a pleasing irony in the fact that the film’s initials, O.C.P., are also those of Omni Consumer Products, the evil military-industrial megacorporation from RoboCop.)

Just look at this sinister foreign face with its corporate sponsor looming in the background. The nice guy nerd from Office Hanukkah Party. pic.twitter.com/6v8DkxHy2M

— R. Chlodwig von K. (@icareviews) June 5, 2017

8. Russophobic, with Russians depicted as gangsters. One of them, a thug named Alexei (Michael Tourek), gets nightsticked for calling a liberated American woman “bitch”.

7. Jewish supremacist. Indicating priorities in the opening moments of the movie, a menorah occupies the center of the frame in a shot of a holiday snack table. Aniston also demonstrates the superior merits of Krav Maga. In a possible insult to Arabs, a foreign-looking fellow is seen literally fucking a camel statue in the back of a truck.

6. Feminist. Carol, in addition to being able to hold her own in a fight against her brother, refers to God as “Her”. “Suck my dick,” a woman tells her male supervisor.

5. Anti-Christian. The entire movie constitutes a denigration of Christians’ celebration of the birth of Christ, as symbolized when Clay sleds down a staircase and demolishes a Nativity scene.

4. Anti-family. Learning that Allison (Bayer) is a single mother, Fred (Park) replies, “That’s great. I was raised by a single mom.” Children are bothers and fit primarily for corruption, as in the end credits image of two women who appear to be snorting cocaine in the presence of a minor. Asked what is most annoying about the internet, Jeremy (Rob Corddry) replies, “Pictures of people’s kids.” A youthful caroler thrusts his middle finger at the protagonist, while the inappropriately named Carol tells another child, “Fuck you” – continuing Hollywood’s use of foul language referencing sex acts with children (cf. Cooties).

3. Pro-gay. “I’m talkin’ ‘bout take your pee-pees out and put ‘em in some booties,” proclaims DJ Calvis (Sam Richardson). Clay, meanwhile, is “straight – except for that one time.” Viewers are also treated to a guy-guy dancefloor kiss and the sight of Jason Bateman simulating fellatio with an ice sculpture. Then, too, there is mention of a “Human Centipede situation in the men’s room.”

2. Pro-miscegenation. Josh (Bateman) finds himself attracted to icy Eurasian cutie Tracey (Munn). Allison, meanwhile, after being grossed out by Fred’s mommy fetish, winds up smooching with Indian nerd Nate (Karan Soni). There is also a briefly glimpsed interracial toilet stall orgy.

1. Pro-drug. Drug humor in Office Christmas Party runs the gamut of cocaine, booze, and the abuse of prescription medications. One employee remarks that it is “boring as shit” that no one gets inebriated before noon. It is only after a bag of cocaine is accidentally dropped into a snow machine that the party really comes alive. Straight-laced black executive Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance, the indispensable negro sonar genius from The Hunt for Red October) gets particularly loose after taking a blast of powder in the face and later declares that this has been “the best night of my life” even after being hospitalized following a brutal fall. Clay, too, snorts a quantity of cocaine and gets into a wreck which serendipitously corrects a previous fracture.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Morgoth’s Review: What Does Adele’s Popularity Say About Modern White Women?

“In 2017 Adele’s brand of power sadness makes Celine Dion’s bittersweet romantic ditties seem incredibly mawkish, sentimental and old fashioned,” says Morgoth’s Review. “Adele’s music depicts an emotional wasteland inhabited by the humped and dumped, the finished via Facebook messenger and text, the cheated on, abused and betrayed wandering the broken heart dystopia of revenge porn and dating sites. It’s the chart topping pop song equivalent to Mad Max 2.”

Source: Morgoth’s Review: What Does Adele’s Popularity Say About Modern White Women?

Doctor Strange ***1/2

Benedict Cumberbatch (BBC’s Sherlock) stars as Marvel’s Sorcerer Supreme in this decent supernatural action-adventure adaptation. A brilliant but arrogant surgeon whose hands are ruined after a car accident, Strange treks to Nepal in the hope of finding a means of recovering his manual dexterity, only to find instead that a world of occult knowledge and power awaits him. Tilda Swinton appears as “The Ancient One” who mentors him. She, along with Strange’s big brother adept Chiwetel Ejiofor and antagonist Mads Mikkelson, does a good job of keeping a straight face while delivering gobs of earnest mystical gobbledygook; but the team of screenwriters has also wisely peppered the script with irreverent observations from Doctor Strange, who, like the viewer, experiences the occult side of reality as a newcomer and serves as his own comic relief. With action choreography and a concept similar to The Matrix, fans of CGI-heavy special effects extravaganzas ought to be satisfied. One does, however, wish that sexy Rachel McAdams (True Detective season 2) had received more screen time as Strange’s love interest.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Doctor Strange is:

4. Anti-gun, with a physician mentioning “a drunk idiot with a gun” as a recipe for bodily injury.

3. Pro-drug. Stan Lee, in a cameo, is seen reading Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and exclaiming, “That is hilarious!” There is, too, a psychedelic sensibility to Doctor Strange’s visuals – Strange, on first experiencing the otherworldly, even wonders aloud if he has been dosed with psilocybin – and sitar flavors the music that plays during the end credits.

2. Multiculturalist. Only after sitting at the feet of black masters and enlightened bald women are white men permitted to save the universe.

1. New Age. As in The Matrix and any number of other martial arts movies, eastern wisdom is sold to impressionable western youths as a means of attaining preternatural fighting prowess and impressive occult powers. Strange is instructed that he must forget everything he thinks he knows – abandon the European achievements of reason and scientific knowledge, in other words – in order to find that which he seeks.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.