The Art of Racing in the Rain ****

Not being an animal lover, I’ve never been much of a dog movie aficionado; but now and then, if I’m feeling up for some furry sentimentality, a properly heart-tugging pooch pick can hit the spot. The Art of Racing in the Rain, pleasantly, is a superior entry in the genre and distinguishes itself with a benign eccentricity. Kevin Costner furnishes the voice of Enzo, who narrates his life with his friend and master, Denny (Milo Ventimiglia), an up-and-coming race car driver and all-around likable and lickable guy. Enzo’s idylls are complicated when Denny falls in love and eventually marries and starts a family; but, even though he now has to share his best friend with these newcomers, Enzo selflessly remains his master’s devoted companion. The old dog increasingly feels a sense of helplessness as tragedy visits Denny’s household; but, though Enzo is mostly a passive observer and not an important player in the human events around him, he does get the chance to give his master a crucial nudge when it counts. With the exceptions of its abundant pee-pee-poo-poo content and Enzo’s brief, off-color remark about the plumpness of a pair of human buttocks, The Art of Racing in the Rain is a shockingly wholesome and politics-free dog-centric family drama, with no drag queens, beleaguered refugee children, or man-made climate change catastrophes to be found.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Art of Racing in the Rain is:

Media-credulous. Enzo views television as a valuable source of information and insight into human behavior.

Class-conscious. Though he never exactly articulates it, Denny’s wealthy father-in-law clearly looks down on Denny’s working-class background and ungentlemanly profession. When the father-in-law attempts to manipulate the justice system to wrest custody of Denny’s daughter away from him, the viewer is left with the impression that the rich use the courts as a venue for class-based lawfare.

New Age, promoting the idea of reincarnation. Enzo hopes to experience his life so deeply that he will imprint its lessons and memories on his soul for his next life as a human. “I know death is not the end,” Enzo insists.

Pro-life and pro-family. “It must be amazing to have a body that can carry an entire creature inside,” remarks Enzo when Denny’s wife becomes pregnant. Later, after the baby is born, he reflects, “I had never encountered a creature quite so beautiful.” Denny is even forgiving of his jerk father-in-law after his ordeal in the courts, the integrity of the family bond being paramount.

Pro-white. Intraracial procreation by healthy, attractive, and intelligent white people constitutes a revolutionary act in America’s twenty-first century. In Denny, The Art of Racing in the Rain presents a positive image of a white father who even evinces a hint of the Faustian when he explains, “if you intentionally make the car do something, you don’t have to predict. You control the outcome. […] When I’m in a race car, I’m the creator of my own destiny. That which you manifest is before you. Create your own conditions and rain is just rain.” Later, Enzo observes that Denny has willed a victory into reality “because he needed one.” At the end of the movie, Denny lives happily ever after – significantly, in Europe. (Interestingly, identitarian sentiment even exerts a nagging but ineffectual pull on Enzo. “I thought about escaping,” he says. “I wanted to push everyone away and run off to live with my ancestors on the high desert plains of Mongolia.” Earlier, Enzo makes the ambiguous confession, “Sometimes I hate what I am.” It is not entirely clear from the context whether he means only that he would prefer to be a man, or whether he indicates resentment about his subservient status. Does he sometimes hate being a dog or only being a domesticated dog?)

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

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

The Second Coming of William Butler Yeats – and, more importantly, Richard Wolstencroft!

Richard Wolstencroft, the Aussie behind the classic underground Boyd Rice vehicle Pearls Before Swine (1999) – a movie that any weirdo reading this should stop and watch right now if they never have before – is back with the second installment of The Second Coming, the first volume of which was finished in 2015. Part of an even grander series that Wolstencroft calls the “March on Rome” trilogy, the two halves of The Second Coming comprise a magickal diptych of miscegenated and mutated gleanings from Crowley, Manson, nuclear physics, social Darwinism, Faustian racialism, and William Butler Yeats, whose poem “The Second Coming” provides the inspiration for a nebulous plot involving a global conspiracy of revolutionary dissidents attempting to usher in a new age of unmediocrity through occult, scientific, degenerate, and quasi-fascistic skullduggery. If such a revolt against the modern world is to be successful, The Second Coming indicates, its principal stumbling block will be the mutual distrust of the various elements necessary to bring the new order into being.

This is essentially a no-budget undertaking – the only money spent seems to have been on travel expenses for the mix of dully mundane and dangerously exotic locations – but what makes The Second Coming a must-see film is the assortment of oddballs Wolstencroft managed to assemble to participate in his production. There are too many to name, but readers may be especially interested to know that proto-Alt-Right hate scene legends Jim Goad and Boyd Rice both have small but perfectly cast and hilarious roles as players in the satanic conspiracy. The phone conversation between the two of them, short as it is, is one of the greatest moments ever stitched together for a movie. A gloriously off-the-wall Kim Fowley, Shaun Partridge, and late Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey also have cameos in The Second Coming, in case the foregoing was not already enough to entice the viewer. In my book, I briefly discuss the potential for the emergence of a white nationalist cinema. Is Wolstencroft’s The Second Coming the realization of this ideal? Well … not exactly. Wolstencroft is too individual a creator and too perverted a reprobate for that. The Second Coming does, however, gesture vaguely in the directions that such a cinema might undertake to explore if it ever emerged from the wilderness of its online chaos. Both volumes of Wolstencroft’s epic can be accessed through Affirmative Right – free to view for a limited time.

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!

 

 

Doctor Strange YouTube Review

Transcript here.

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.

The Water Diviner ***1/2

The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY TWENTY-THREE

The idea with The Water Diviner seems to have been to mix the Merchant Ivory period prestige formula with a few rugged adventure story components and just a dash of New Age inanity, the end result feeling something like The English Patient’s underachieving kid brother. Russell Crowe, who also directs, plays an Australian farmer whose three sons are believed to have died in Churchill’s disastrous Gallipoli sideshow of the First World War. After his wife commits suicide, Crowe becomes obsessed with the fool’s errand of reclaiming his three boys’ remains and so journeys to the recently deceased Ottoman Empire, where, against the backdrop of rising Turkish nationalism, he becomes personally involved with a native widow (Olga Kurylenko) and her son (Dylan Georgiades).

Beginning as a compelling character study, The Water Diviner deteriorates in its middle portion into a misguided romantic drama before finally turning into something of an action movie, so that the tone is a bit inconsistent, the storytelling atmospherically disjointed. Still, notwithstanding the sometimes obnoxious stylistic flourishes like the gratuitous dream-vision whirling dervishes and a flurry of probably symbolic papers being thrown dove-like from a balcony, Crowe’s feature film debut as director is much more good than bad, and its heart is frequently in the right place.

3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Water Diviner is:

3. Irreligious. The local cleric displays no sympathy when Crowe loses his wife and even has the nerve to extort an extravagant donation from him in his grief. Crowe later says he regrets filling his sons’ heads with rhetoric about God and king and country. Turkish women are depicted as feeling stifled by their Islamic culture.

2. Pro-miscegenation. Crowe’s interracial romance with the Turkish widow presents a Coudenhove-Kalergi model for the abolishment of international conflict.

1. Anti-war. Where The Water Diviner succeeds is in depicting both the physical and – more particularly – the psychological carnage of armed conflict. The scene of Crowe’s bullet-riddled sons bleeding to death on the battlefield is highly effective. One wishes, however, that the screenplay had been so bold as to name ZOG champion Winston Churchill as the author of the Gallipoli disaster in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Have shopping to do and want to support icareviews? The author receives a modest commission on Amazon purchases made through this link: http://amzn.to/1N63xWR

Love Is Strange ***1/2

The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY TEN

“Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” wrote poet William Butler Yeats, whose words have never been more true than in twenty-first century America. In a masterful stretch of acting muscles, Hollywood weenies John Lithgow and Alfred Molina play a couple of elderly turd-tappers who tie the knot only to find that this upsets Molina’s employers at Catholic school Saint Grace Academy. Temporarily deprived of an income, the lovebirds have to give up their apartment and find separate lodgings elsewhere. All of this is treated as a terrible tragedy, Love Is Strange coming across from start to finish as some ridiculous last gasp of the moribund West’s preoccupation with First World problems.

The ethnically disinterested (((Ira Sachs))) writes and directs this bold and beautiful cultural event. Writes Gerri Miller of this alien freak at Interfaith Family:

After being together for five years, he married his partner Boris Torres, who is not Jewish, “six months after it became legal in New York State and a week before we had twins. I say that we had a gay shotgun wedding,” Sachs says. They’d met several times through friends and online before they were at the right point for a relationship, “a point where we both liked ourselves.”

Faith has never come between them, and Torres is on board for the pair’s 2½-year-old twins to become b’nai mitzvah. (Their birth mother is Seventh Day Adventist.) “Right now we’re teaching them language and how to use the potty. But I am checking out synagogues,” says Sachs, who grew up attending synagogue and was president of his temple youth group in Memphis, Tennessee.

As an established member of the Jewish community there—his grandmother’s family arrived in the 1850s, and his father’s family came in the early 1900s—he “felt no vulnerability as a Jew.” But he did experience anti-Semitism at the “very traditional old Southern white prep school” he attended in the ’70s. “I was called ‘kike’ and had pennies thrown at me. The violence scared me but the anti-Semitism seemed ridiculous.”

Today, Sachs considers himself a secular Jew. “I know that that comes out of assimilation and I’m intellectually sad to not be more knowledgeable about Judaism,” he says, though he finds Judaism “less exclusionary” than some other religions, “a welcoming fold.”

@Liliya_SB you are right #LoveIsStrange can't be distributed in Russia. I hope for the end of the repression and bigotry of your government

— ira sachs (@irasachs) June 15, 2014

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

5. Multiculturalist and pro-immigration. Molina remarks favorably on the multiethnic makeup of a school’s student body, Love Is Strange being set in the magical milieu of imaginary white liberals who intermix freely with blacks and immigrants. The film features more than one “Russian” transplant, one of them played by a fuzzy-headed Jew (Eric Tabach). One assumes they had to flee for their safety from Putin’s eternally clouded heterofascist Russian Reich.

4. Pro-police. The heroes have two gay cop friends. The reader must understand that, in the eyes of Love Is Strange’s target audience, this represents the most sterling endorsement of New York law enforcement.

3. New Age. Lithgow and Molina have some kind of non-Christian, new-agey “marriage” ceremony. Love Is Strange is peopled entirely by weirdos who go in for stuff like “chromotherapy” and medicinal energy-channeling.

2. Anti-Christian. If only the Catholic Church had not been so bigoted, the two gents might have lived out the remainder of their lives together in happy fulfilment. Even so, the movie makes an unconvincing attempt to present itself as conforming to Christian values. “I still believe in Jesus Christ as my savior,” says Molina.

1. Pro-AIDS. Those enticed by the prospect of seeing not particularly sexy actors Alfred Molina and John Lithgow squish faces are in luck, as Love Is Strange features more than one such moment. They are “an example to be followed,” proclaims Lithgow’s niece Marisa Tomei. The film is at pains to present them as perfectly normal individuals and – more disturbingly – to show that they are trustworthy if left alone with children. “It’s about as family friendly a movie as Miracle on 34th St,” Sachs claimed in a Reddit Ask Me Anything session. In Love Is Strange’s most ludicrous moment, Tomei scolds her son (Charlie Tahan) for talking about fertilizer at the dinner table. “Joey, your uncle’s still eating.” Like some guy whose idea of a sexual pleasure center is his anus is going to get all squeamish about poop talk.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Have shopping to do and want to support icareviews? The author receives a modest commission on Amazon purchases made through this link: http://amzn.to/1Y13eAn 

Apartment Troubles ****

The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY TWO

Written and directed by lead actresses Jess Weixler and Jennifer Prediger, this offbeat black dramedy concerns itself with what happens to artsy ditzes Nicole (Weixler) and Olivia (Prediger) when they run out of the money they need to pay the rent on their New York apartment. Seemingly out of options, the pair flies to L.A. to impose themselves on Nicole’s Aunt Kimberley (Will and Grace regular Megan Mullally), who hosts a reality TV talent show. Full of oddball characters and off-the-wall moments (a favorite is the lactose-intolerant vermicomposting malfunction), Apartment Troubles wafts by in an instant like a gust of fragrant spritz and is impossible not to enjoy. Weixler and Prediger make a cute comedy team and could easily turn their partnership into a charming TV sitcom or film series.

4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Apartment Troubles is:

6. Anti-drug. Pill-popping doofus Will Forte is a danger to himself and others, particularly behind the wheel, with Adderall receiving some bad publicity. Too much wine makes Nicole and Kimberley shameless.

5. Racist! A young African-American gentleman is shown wearing a T-shirt that says “Primitive”.

4. Fag-ambivalent. Kimberley is a predatory lesbian and a drunkard whose advances toward Olivia meet with diplomatic repulsion. Apartment Troubles could be argued to normalize homosexuality, however, with Kimberley presenting an unusually attractive seductress. The casting of a Will and Grace alumnus would seem to corroborate the latter interpretation.

3. Anti-family. Nicole is estranged from her family, who have gone on an unannounced vacation without her. Forte calls his domineering mother a “turkey”. “She’s a powerful lady and she will spank me,” he says. “She will spank me hard. She’s getting older, but she packs it, you know?” He then claims to have been joking when he said this, but he really does seem to believe himself when he confesses, “My mom has really helped me to hit rock bottom.”

2. Anti-cuck. American men, as Apartment Troubles painfully illustrates, have been turned into ineffectual man-children and sexually undesirable weaklings. Familiar character actor Jeffrey Tambor plays the protagonists’ landlord and Nicole’s unlikely ex-boyfriend and recovering beta orbiter. He consults an energy healer for relationship advice. Nicole’s Uncle Robert (Bob Byington) is a lifeless, depressed, and dominated by his lesbian wife. Forte, in another manifestation of the prevailing non-man, unconvincingly proclaims himself the “knight in shining armor” of the two heroines. A foreigner, meanwhile, absurdly accuses American fruit of being “aggressive” because it is too big.

1. Millennial-critical. Whatever the intentions of Weixler and Prediger in crafting this eccentric film, it plays like a sustained act of trolling directed at clueless, useful idiot liberals. Pervading Apartment Troubles and destabilizing its heroines’ lives is the extra-special snowflake mentality according to which the world is obliged to endure the idiosyncratic whimsy that lives in every millennial’s heart. What they must ultimately learn is that they have “that special nothing”; but “We need a benefactor,” they moan, not troubling themselves as to how they would earn such patronage.

Nicole and Olivia are typical women of their generation – overly educated in useless areas of endeavor, underemployed, in arrears, and socially retarded. Olivia’s cat substitutes for a more rewarding human companionship, and one can only agree with Nicole, who tells her, “You need to, like, get a boyfriend or something.” One brief moment has Olivia’s eye caught by a display of books for sale on rape and climatic apocalypse. These are the bogeys that haunt the mind of the liberated woman. A toothbrush is lower on the list of things to remember. So ridiculously committed are the duo to the environment that they make a conscious decision (or economical rationalization?) not to pay their electricity bill. “There’s no law that says you have to blow up mountains and frack,” opines Olivia, who comes across as ridiculous rather than sophisticated.

In place of a more dignified, traditional spirituality, both women go for make-it-up-as-you-go-along new age silliness, with Nicole taking an interest in eastern religions and Olivia leaning on a “teeny tiny therapist” (a small toy she keeps in a bag). Both women, even when supposedly too poor to feed themselves, consider Tarot readings a worthy investment. Like Hillary Clinton, Olivia, too, finds consolation in the eternal wisdom of ZOG lord Eleanor Roosevelt. Olivia’s belief in the power of “signs” does not appear to be justified.

The validity of all thoughts, all opinions, and viewpoints, no matter how stupid, that constitutes the relativistic crazy-quilt fabric of twenty-first century American values, finds expression in the behavior of every character in the film. “I’m an adult,” says Forte, “and I know when it’s safe to go through a fricking red [light]. Sometimes I’ll stop at a green, okay? Oh, my God, I want some candy, but is it too late for candy?” Red light, green light – all is subjective. A theme of Apartment Troubles is the need to grow up, but nothing has been definitively resolved as the story draws to a close, its characters still adrift and having found no rock – nothing that endures – on which to secure themselves.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Have shopping to do and want to support icareviews? The author receives a modest commission on Amazon purchases made through this link: http://amzn.to/1l2NHlk

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel ***1/2

A chick flick truffle to induce salivation in women moviegoers made weak in the knees by tart, cockney-accented romantic comedy or who find the idea of an elderly Englishman dancing in his shower to the beat of “Le Freak” to be irresistibly hilarious, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a slick but superficial offering sure to satisfy its target audience and annoy everybody else. Full of dry wit, spirited performances, and dramatic scenes that allow for a liberal range of hues of geriatric heart-tuggery, this tale of a gaggle of English geezers who retire to live out the remains of their lives in a ramshackle Indian hotel is a more than adequate vehicle for a strong and colorful ensemble cast that includes veterans Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, and British bulldog Maggie Smith, who resembles Michael Caine in drag.

Ideological Content Analysis indicates that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is:

6. Pro-miscegenation and pro-gay. Graham (Wilkinson) has returned to India to see his old Indian lover, Manoj (Rajendra Gupta). As a sensitive gay man, Graham is naturally more desirable to Jean (Wilton) than her heterosexual husband (Nighy). Shameless tramp Madge (Celia Imrie) spends her time trying to meet a rich Indian husband. After a woman mistakenly gets into her bed, Madge, rather than being upset, reflects pleasantly, “That’s the most action I’ve had in weeks” (cf. no. 3).

5. New age. Douglas (Nighy) is impressed with the sense of peace he feels in an Indian temple. Hindi moaning features prominently on the soundtrack. The group disposes of one of its members in a spiritually piquant funeral pyre. The film generally does its best to perpetuate the idea of the East as the place where westerners can most successfully actualize themselves.

4. Anti-marriage/anti-family. Evelyn (Dench), a recently widowed housewife, has been left with debts by her controlling husband, who never communicated with her. The Ainslies (Nighy and Wilton) are both drawn to other people, and their union ends in separation. Hotel proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel) and the woman he loves (Tena Desae) must both oppose their families’ wishes in order to be with each other.

3. Feminist/pro-castration. Evelyn’s mannish haircut is a horror. The viewer is left with the impression that Douglas will become the mincing, tea-serving common law househusband of this former housewife, now a strong and empowered woman in control of her life (cf. no. 6).

2. Globalist. The film depicts business ventures sympathetically and gives a smiling human face to the phenomenon of Third World outsourcing of jobs.

1. Multiculturalist/anti-racist (i.e., pro-yawn). “Old habits die easier than we think” and “we must celebrate the changes.” Britain’s Third World influx, this film would have viewers believe, simply means more skilled professionals to serve the public interest. Wheelchair-bound bigot Muriel (Smith) is at first reluctant to be treated by a minority doctor, objecting to immigrants’ “brown faces and black hearts”, but comes to see the error of her ways in the light of Indian kindness. Sonny makes a show of Indian grace and genius with his florid speech and quotation of Shakespeare. The film opens itself to an accusation of insensitivity, however, when Douglas recommends a temple, but jokingly admonishes visitors to “maybe take a clothespin for your nose.”

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Wild ****

A career highlight showcase for star Reese Witherspoon, this freewheeling emotional odyssey into triumphant you-go-girlism concerns real-life tramp Cheryl Strayed, whose epic hike along the Pacific Crest Trail takes her from “piece of shit” and “hobo” to liberated and self-actualized piece of shit with an Oprah’s Book Club pick. As with all wilderness pictures, from Jeremiah Johnson to Rescue Dawn, there is an innate fascination to the scenes of Strayed’s one-woman struggle with the elements. The interspersed flashbacks to the unpleasant experiences that drive her to make her quest, however, are hit-and-miss, diminishing any sympathy this reviewer is able to muster for her. Laura Dern appears as Strayed’s long-suffering, cancer-ridden mother.

4 out of 5 possible stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Wild is:

6. Drug-ambivalent. Wild sends mixed messages about Cheryl’s life as a heroin addict. Marijuana, however, seems to be a laid-back thing to do. Alcohol appears as a no-no, though, with Cheryl vomiting after some hard stuff. (see also no. 1)

5. Anti-Christian. Foulmouthed Cheryl utters multiple blasphemies.

4. Anti-redneck. The rural white male is a constant menace hovering in the gloaming of Cheryl’s consciousness, leering at her and making unsavory advances.

3. Pro-choice. Cheryl has an abortion.

2. New age, peddling mass market paperback mysticism that might have been cribbed from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The film ends with Witherspoon reciting some philosophical gobbledygook about how nobody knows what leads to what – the scientific method, contrary to this reviewer’s mistaken impression all his life, turning out never to have been invented after all – life being one big mysterious journey, each seeming adversity or disastrous decision constituting a necessary step toward destiny’s fulfillment. People – and, by extension, societies – might as well experiment to their hearts’ content on this starry trek of objectively valueless existence.

1. Feminist. Wild celebrates the junkie-adulteress-intellectual as heroine. One of its many nuggets of womany wisdom is that divorces, unlike marriages, tend to be lasting. Regarding her serial back-alley extramarital humps and heroin habit, Cheryl apologizes to her nice-guy husband (Thomas Sadoski) but later confesses that she harbors no regrets about anything. Adrienne Rich’s poem “Power”, a favorite of the protagonist, furnishes Wild with its theme. Marie Curie’s “wounds”, Rich explains, “came from the same source as her power”. Witherspoon’s body, accordingly, appears with unsightly contusions and cuts throughout the movie, these presumably being the feminist stigmata symbolizing the suffering through which she has attained her “power”. In a parallel characterization, Cheryl’s mother is an abused wife who abandons her alcoholic husband and goes back to school for her education because, she says, she never felt like she was in the driver’s seat of her own life.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

Oprah’s Bucks Club

Katy Perry: Part of Me **

MTV Films’ latest project in the controlled demolition of civilization follows popular candy-coated nut Katy Perry on her California Dreams Tour of 2011, “a year filled with tremendous success and personal heartbreak” for the twinkly star. Along with seemingly interminable adulation from friends and toadies, the viewer is treated to Perry’s bouts of depression as her long-distance relationship with Russell Brand disintegrates. Even so, to be granted entry into the world of Katy Perry is to be plunged into a dazzling phantasmagoria of lollipops, hearts, balloons, confetti, and sexy, garish costumes.

“I feel a real connection to fairy tales, and I think that in some ways I live in a fairytale,” the singer confides, and one quickly sees what she means when confronted with so many sissy prancers ducking, gliding, and kicking around the stage in their candy cane pants. Even freaky Russell Brand, when he meets his lady backstage, looks embarrassed to be seen mixing with this lot of dubious company. Too much hagiography begins to wear on the viewer’s patience, and Perry minus the whorish makeup and the wardrobe is actually rather an uninteresting individual; but Katy Perry: Part of Me does feature some impressive concert cinematography and grotesque visuals aplenty.

2 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Katy Perry: Part of Me is:

10. Pro-miscegenation. Interracial couplings can be glimpsed among her backup dancers.

9. Corporate. Brand sends Katy a text message with a picture of a McDonald’s restaurant and suggests they name their firstborn Ronald.

8. Anti-Christian. Katy’s conservative Pentecostal upbringing, which forbade her to watch The Smurfs or eat Lucky Charms, definitely started to cramp her style as she discovered her inner freak. “I felt like I was never even allowed to even think for myself, and having any kind of feminist live-on-your-own independent spirit is just, ugh, the devil!” (cf. no. 5) Today Perry’s beliefs appear to drift more toward permissive New Age nebulousness: “I really do believe in God[, even if I] probably don’t believe in all the same details that my mom believes, but I have a spiritual relationship with God, and it’s one-on-one, and it’s continually evolving.”

7. Pro-drug. Katy be “sippin’ on gin and juice”.

6. Family-ambivalent. Perry is close with her grandmother, and her parents are generally supportive despite not approving of all of their daughter’s output. She is unprepared, however, to have children of her own.

5. Underachievingly feminist. “I kinda want to be a leader, but, you know, then there’s all those responsibilities.” Still, California girls like Katy are naturally “fine”, “fresh”, and “fierce”.

4. Multiculturalist. The film goes to great lengths to portray Katymania as a messianic and postracial phenomenon and opens with a series of webcam effusions from teen admirers of various races and orientations who say that Perry has shown them that “being weird is okay.”

3. Pro-gay. Perry’s breakout hit, “I Kissed a Girl”, occasions a lesbian smooch from View host Whoopi Goldberg. Among the fans who receive screen time are some Japanese drag queens.

2. Pro-wigger. One must, one supposes, muster something resembling admiration for a songwriter who rhymes “peacock” with “beyatch”. “West coast, represent!”

1. Pro-slut. In addition to her salacious booty-shakery onstage, Perry’s lyrics tend to be of the tawdry “let you put your hands on me in my skintight jeans” and “I wanna see your peacock” variety.

I hope @katyperry does not do the Super Bowl. We need an actual entertainer not a "Wanna be". Bring back @Madonna

— JewishPapi™ (@Aelohim1980) October 11, 2014