I’ve spoken with four Civil War viewers, and the general consensus is that director Alex Garland has over-muddied the narrative of this armed domestic conflict flick, or has otherwise bent over backwards in order to discourage audiences from perceiving too many real-life parallels or culture-war animosities.

Garland’s original idea had been “what if the George Floyd rioters and the January 6th insurrectionists grew into hardcore military armies and engaged in a serious shooting war?”

But then he and A24 apparently got cold feet and decided to muddy the waters in order to avoid lighting incendiary fuses in an election year.

But if you put aside Garland’s incongruous or vaguely described red herrings (the anti-government rebels defined as a Texas-California alliance, an “Antifa massacre”, a suppressed Florida rebellion) and boil out the snow, Civil War seems clear enough to me. You’d have to be in a deep denial pit not to grasp the basics.

The war is basically between (a) rural-minded, diversity-resistant whites…fatigue-wearing MAGA forces loyal to a journalist-despising, Steve Bannon-resembling, martial-law embracing authoritarian President vs. (b) a diversity army (POCs of varying shades with sprinklings of white progressives) that initially seems less heavily-armed and more guerilla-style until the last half-hour when it suddenly transforms into a major, fatigue-and-helmet-wearing military force that storms the White House.

I’ve actually spoken to two viewers who aren’t entirely persuaded that Nick Offerman‘s U.S. President, a blustery, God-invoking bullshitter who has thrown out the Constitution by granting himself a third term, is a Trumpian figure…they’re not? Nor are they entirely certain that the White House assaulters are the diverse anti-fascist “good guys”.

Trust me, Garland makes it quite clear who is who in this thing and yet these fellows are saying “wait, who do they represent again?”

HE is telling you straight and true to dismiss the comment thread smoke-blowers who are arguing that the real-world parallels are too vaguely contoured to mean much. But they do amount to what I’ve stated here…really. Sasha Stone shares this perception.

Yes, Garland has certainly over-muddied the narrative, but at least he’s reversed the ambiguity in one instance — the instantly iconic Jesse Plemons interrogation scene.

Please understand that Civil War doesn’t really kick in until Plemons arrives, but after that point it’s a much more vigorous and accelerated deal with an ending that, as I mentioned Tuesday morning, made me feel so ecstatic I almost experienced a Zero Dark Thirty-ish boner.

I need to see this again ASAP. I’ll probably catch a commercial screening tonight.

An actor of any non-Anglo ethnicity (an Egyptian, say) may be cast as an historical paleface character of English or European descent, but a white actor may never play a character of color under any narrative circumstance.

A slew of negative responses to Steven Zallian‘s brilliant Ripley are highlighted in a recently posted Independent article by Maria Butt.

A fair number of people are experiencing problems, you see, with Robert Elswit‘s exquisite black-and-white cinematography

Gripe #1: “What a crime to make a sexy crime show set in 1960s Italy and not do it in color.” Gripe #2: “I didn’t last the first episode…the cinematography is so annoying.” Gripe #3: “Why on earth is Ripley filmed in black and white? Totally killed it for me, although the dog seems okay with it.” Gripe #4: “Black and white is a good way to keep the budget down but adds nothing.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone says the monochrome aversion “might be a generational thing…we olds remember a different kind of filmmaking than what the youngs are used to.”

I also think it’s due to a simple lack of cinema literacy, but you do have to wonder how these morons can look at Elswit’s exquisite cinematography and not realize what a high-end thing it is…what a sublime treasure each and every shot is?

Just as there is a long list of films that I can watch over and over again, there are also those that I will never again submit to. Near the top of this list is Michael Cimino‘s The Deer Hunter.

I’m not talking about a film I don’t care for. I’m talking about a film that I wouldn’t watch again if someone shoved a snub-nosed .38 into my ribs, or offered me a sizable cash bribe. Would you sit through Star Wars: The Phantom Menace for $20 bills? Would you watch A.I. or Always again? The Cannonball Run II? Sylvester Stallone‘s Cobra?

I’ve stayed away from this simultaneously audacious and godawful film for the last 45 years, and I’m not about to break my streak.

Memories of my first and only viewing in a Manhattan screening room (late November ’78) are branded on my brain tissue. That idiotic Russian Roulette device. Those working-class townspeople singing a wedding song like practiced professionals in a Russian opera. The relentlessly cloying and obnoxious (i.e., overly performed) working-class camaraderie. Those absurdly majestic Northwestern mountain peaks that happen to be in rural Pennsylvania.

And especially Christopher Walken‘s idiotic Russian roulette death…no lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter.

Politically and culturally The Deer Hunter is one of the most full-of-shit films about the American proletariat ever made. The way it simultaneously used and ignored the Vietnam War was sickening.

Posted by Peter Biskind soon after Cimino’s 7.2.16 death: “The politics are execrable, and were widely denounced at the time for turning the war inside out. Clearly, filmmakers who make features ‘based on’ reality take liberties with their material, and the truth vs. art debate is one that will probably go on forever, encompassing films like Triumph of the Will, On the Waterfront, Birth of a Nation, etc., etc. But I think we can make some distinctions.

“First, ironically, although The Deer Hunter is certainly not a documentary, Cimino took great pains to replicate documentary footage his researchers had uncovered. Even the Russian roulette sequences were mean to evoke the famous still photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner at point blank range with a pistol to his head.

“But more to the point, there are so many perversions of the truth in The Deer Hunter, all seemingly intended to make the same ideological point — i.e., the Vietcong were evil Orientals — while the Americans were no more than naive victims. There’s a lot more going on here than mere creative license.

“And finally, if I may be indulged, the film is centrally about male bonding and friendship among Americans, with the war as a backdrop and the Vietnamese reduced to stick figures with guns. In my opinion it’s really disgraceful!”

HE is thumbs–up on Uri Berliner’s 4.9 Free Press essay about how NPR’s entrenched liberal dogma and orthodoxy led to a pattern of eating its own tail when Donald Trump came to power. Most of the article tells the straight dope.

NPR’s ideological and institutional opposition to a flood of aggressive Trump malignancies over the last seven years (2017 until today) has led to the government-funded org preaching to a much smaller choir, Berliner says. Advanced wokeness has resulted in listener trust levels dropping considerably since 2011.

Many of Berliner’s judgments seem unassailable and inarguable. Many but not all.

Berliner is 100% correct in the matter of NPR’s coverage of the nearly four-year-old George Floyd murder and their subsequent obsessive filtering of everything by way of identity and identity politics in particular (all white folks are guilty of overt or unconscious racial bias and are therefore deserving of constant correction, somber self-reflection and shaming while all POCs are blessed and beautiful).

Berliner is also completely correct in stating that NPR suppressed coverage of the Wuhan lab leak theory, which was initially derided as possibly racist but which is now recognized as the most likely explanation of what triggered the pandemic.

But his article also strongly implies that suspected Russiagate collusion was bullshit when the Mueller Report concluded that while there wasn’t sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution, there was a coordinated Russian government-led effort to hurt or compromise Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, and that the Trumpies knew they were benefitting from this and responded with glee.

It also states that the Hunter Biden laptop story and corruption charges were and are a legit news story when in fact it’s always been a ho-hummer. The facts merely expose a pattern of garden-variety influence peddling — unsavory and even odious behavior but small change at the end of the day. This establishment is shocked, shocked to learn that Hunter is a bad-egg son whose sordid activities have rubbed off on his dad to some extent. Sorry but it’s nothing to have a major heart attack over.

These two caveats aside, hive (i.e., the NPR kind) is jive.